Critique number one: Marvin Harris
This will be the first in a series of posts about Napoleon Chagnon’s
critics. It will begin with a review the arguments of Marvin Harris, a
long-time member of the Columbia University faculty who died in 2001.
Harris described his approach as cultural materialism, clearly
influenced by Karl Marx.
Harris is best known for “Cannibals and Kings: the Origins of Culture”,
a book written in 1978 that explains human history as a struggle to
achieve nourishment, including the Aztec’s whose ritual sacrifices were
interpreted as a means to a better diet! Many anthropologists regarded
this approach as one-sided, including Marshall Sahlins who was Harris’s
peer and also influenced by Marxism. In a November 23, 1978 review in
the New York Review of Books, Sahlins faulted Harris for being overly
deterministic:
Applied to the explanation of Aztec cannibalism or Hindu taboos,
Harris’s utilitarianism incorporates the meanings other people give
their lives within the kind of material rationalizations we give to our own.
Sartre appropriately called a similar intellectual procedure “terror,”
for its inflexible refusal to discriminate, its goal of “total
assimilation at the least possible effort.” Sartre was referring to the
“vulgar Marxism” which could only see in an act of politics or a poem of
Valéry’s some version of “bourgeois idealism.” Everything in the social
superstructure could be reduced to its economic function.
Given this context, it should come as no surprise that Harris’s main
beef with Chagnon was over whether the Yanomami were as well-fed as he
claimed. If warfare was understood as the need to gain control over
scarce meat protein in the rainforest, then the whole business about
gene diffusion became less convincing.
read full article:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/08/03/yanomami-science-wars-part-five
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