The Behavior Analyst 2007, 30, 37–47 No. 1 (Spring) Cultural Materialism and Behavior Analysis: An Introduction to Harris Brian D. Kangas University of Florida The year 2007 marks the 80th anniversary of the birth of Marvin Harris (1927–2001). Although relations between Harris’ cultural materialism and Skinner’s radical behaviorism have been promulgated by several in the behavior-analytic community (e.g., Glenn, 1988; Malagodi & Jackson, 1989; Vargas, 1985), Harris himself never published an exclusive and comprehensive work on the relations between the two epistemologies. However, on May 23rd, 1986, he gave an invited address on this topic at the 12th annual conference of the Association for Behavior Analysis in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, entitled Cultural Materialism and Behavior Analysis: Common Problems and Radical Solutions. What follows is the publication of a transcribed audio recording of the invited address that Harris gave to Sigrid Glenn shortly after the conference. The identity of the scribe is unknown, but it has been printed as it was written, with the addendum of embedded references where appropriate. It is offered both as what should prove to be a useful asset for the students of behavior who are interested in the studyofcultural contingencies, practices, and epistemologies, and in commemoration of this 80th anniversary. Key words: cultural materialism, radical behaviorism, behavior analysis Cultural Materialism and Behavior Analysis: Common Problems and Radical Solutions Marvin Harris University of Florida Cultural materialism is a research in rejection of mind as a cause of paradigm which shares many episte- individual human behavior, radical mological and theoretical principles behaviorism is not radically behav- with radical behaviorism. Like radi- iorist enough for a confrontation cal behaviorism, it stresses environ- with idealists’ anthropological para- ment over heredity, in opposition to digm, in spite of the fact that cultural biological reductionist paradigms. idealists identify mind as the locus of And like radical behaviorism, it sociocultural reality and causality. stands in opposition to psychological The cause of this disparity lies in paradigms such as cognitivism, which the radical behaviorist’s neglect of the stress mind as the cause of behavior. systemic properties of cultural phe- It is not clear, however, to what nomena and a consequent failure to extent cultural materialism and rad- identify the selective core of the ical behaviorism have a comparable sociocultural systems and how that position vis-a`-vis the anthropological selection takes place. analogue of cognitivism, which I call In the history of the development cultural idealism, for reasons that will of paradigmatic attempts to solve the become clear later on. question of sociocultural causality, In fact, it is my contention that cultural materialism has confronted while cultural materialism and radi- and continues to confront a set of cal behaviorism have a common basis long-established, common-sense but erroneous and unproductive beliefs Reprints may be obtained from Brian D. about human culture that are similar Kangas, Department of Psychology, Univer- sity of Florida, P.O. Box 112250, Gainesville, to those which confronted and con- Florida 32611-2250 (e-mail: [email protected]). tinue to confront the development of 37 38 MARVIN HARRIS radical behaviorism. Behaviorists gous to differential reproductive suc- have had to struggle against the belief cess on the biological level, common- that organisms, especially humans, ly known as natural selection, and possess faculties called mind and will to operant conditioning on the psy- whose exercise makes their behavior chological level, one must first have largely unpredictable. While cultural a clear formulation of what culture idealists generally also have recourse is and how we know what it is. to will, intention, goals, and other From a cultural materialist perspec- mentalist notions about the causes of tive, culture is the aggregate of behavior, it must have been recog- classes, with classes underlined, of so- nized that at least in the short run, cially conditioned, operant responses, human behavior is largely predict- which are associated with a particular able. This follows from their com- human group and which tend to be mitment to the study of a cultural replicated within and across genera- level of phenomena. For example, tions. The reason for laying stress on most cultural idealists would have no the word classes is twofold: On the trouble with the idea of predicting one hand, many individuals may that children born in a certain cate- exhibit the same class of behavior, gory of South India households will and the class itself often continues to grow up to speak Malayalam, eat exist even after many of the individ- with their fingers, and take their uals who exhibit the characteristic meals seated cross-legged on the behavior have died. Human cultures floor, just as they would have no are a distinctive, emergent evolution- difficulty with the prediction that ary phenomenon. However, there are children in U.S. households would many rudimentary examples of cul- grow up to speak English, eat with tural inventory among primates and metal or plastic utensils, and take among primitive protohumans which their meals while seated on a chair. enable us to reconstruct the pathway Indeed, it is the predictable replica- that led to the fully evolved cultural tion of such behavior through the systems that have characterized hu- practice known as enculturation man groups for at least the last which has given rise to the cultural 4,000 years. field of inquiry. But cultural idealists Classes of culturally condition- have typical psychological, cogniti- ed operants are conventionally iden- vist views concerning how encultura- tified by terms such as hunting, tion takes place—that is, they have collecting, warfare, feuding, polygy- attributed enculturation to intention- nous household, bride wealth, uxor- al, willful instruction or instinctual ilocality, reciprocal exchange, feast- imitation of one person or one ing, headhunting, cannibalism, chief- generation by another. doms, feudal states, capitalist firms, The fulcrum of cultural idealists’ and multinational corporations—and resistance to the development of so forth. These components, conven- a science of culture lies elsewhere. tionally called traits, customs, tradi- Specifically, it lies in the problem tions, institutions, and so forth, do of why the acculturated behavioral not exist in isolation from each other. repertoires of different human groups Rather, they present preconditions are different in some respects and for each others’ characteristic activi- similar in others. Or more precisely, ties and consequences. For example, it lies in the problem of how to no feasting without hunting, no explain the divergent, convergent, hunting without hunters, no hunters and parallel evolution of sociocultur- without spears, and so forth. More- al systems. over, much empirical data indicate In order to specify the cultural that most if not all of the classes of selection principle that is analo- culturally conditioned operant re- CULTURAL MATERIALISM AND BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS 39 sponse chains are related to each of selection by consequences. In the other in the sense that changes in most general terms, new behavioral one are frequently followed by repertoires arise as operants in the changes in others. Thus, intrinsic to behavior of individuals. Some of the emergence of a cultural level of these get propagated within and phenomena is the arrangement of transmitted across generations, and cultural components in subsystems they are selected for. Other operants characteristic of particular societies, do not get propagated, or transmit- that is, sociocultural systems. ted. They are extinguished or selected Let me emphasize that the necessi- against. ty for dealing with these classes of Note that the existence of selection individual responses and sociocultur- for or against particular classes of al systems as a level of phenomena operants implies that not all reinfor- with a distinct set of selection pro- cing contingencies are equally de- cesses and lawful regularities arises terminative of cultural repertoires. not from any special emergent es- In other words, the issue is not simply sences peculiar to human cultural life, between an operant and uncondi- such as mind, will, intention, con- tioned behavior, but between one sciousness, symbolic thought, or even operant and another operant, each verbal behavior, as the majority of of which is controlled by reinforcing my anthropological colleagues con- contingencies. The only way the tend, but rather from the quantitative selection of one operant over another enormity of the numbers of individ- can be accounted for in cultural uals and responses that underwrite evolution without invoking mentalist that abstraction and classification of and teleological hypotheses is if their sociocultural components and all relative efficacy in achieving a partic- systems. When we speak, for exam- ular effect is different. Thus we are ple, of the nuclear family as a compo- led, step by step, to the depiction of nent of U.S. culture, we are grouping cultural selection as a process that together, averaging, or abstracting selects alternative operants with re- from behavioral repertoires of mil- spect to particular effects or func- lions of specific individuals, dead as tions. well as alive, who characteristically What kind