Cultural Materialism Essay example -- essays research papers

When it comes to anthropological theory the combination of several established ship canal of thought often result in a all revolutionary and independent way of thinking. Cultural Materialism is one of these children theories that resulted from a approach together of social evolutionary theory, cultural ecology and Marxist physicalism (Barfield). The goal of cultural materialism is to explain politics, economics, ideology and symbolic aspects of a culture with relation to the needs of that society. From a cultural materialist point of cyclorama society is indisputably shaped by the factors of production and reproduction. From this all other facets of society, much(prenominal) as government and religion, must be beneficial to that societys ability to satisfy the minimum requirements to sustain themselves (Harris 1996). An example of this would be the craft and continued use of industry because it increased the ability to produce require materials and food. One important aspect of the cultural materialistic approach is that it operates completely from the etic perspective. Marvin Harris, one of the founders of cultural materialism, believed that a holistic approach is vital to powerful analyzing culture and believed that the emic approach failed at providing a wide enough scope. Harris seek to employ the scientific method and incorporated it into his theory. The result of this is that cultural materialism focuses only on events that are observable and quantifiable and replicable (Harris 1979). Cultu...