Cultural Materialism
Cultural Materialism
Anthropological theory first presented by Marvin Harris in 1968, which relates cultural aspects such as religion, beliefs, and traditions to physical and material conditions of life, whether geographical, environmental, or demographic. Harris’ research methods relied on a scientific approach as opposed to the less demonstrable claims of structuralism or postmodernism. Cultural Materialism has been applied to a wide range of cultural phenomena such as the presence of male supremacy in many societies as well as the Jewish prohibition on eating pork.