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Marvin Harris' Cultural Materialism' Kenneth E JOURNAL OF THE EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF BEHAVIOR 1985, 439 279-287 NUMBER 2 (MARCH) BEHA VIORAL ANTHROPOLOGY: A REVIEW OF MARVIN HARRIS' CULTURAL MATERIALISM' KENNETH E. LLOYD DRAKE UNIVERSITY Once upon a time men and women followed, B.C., some alternatives to raising all the chased, or guided herds of Pleistocene Mega- children must have been practiced. fauna (woolly mammoth, cave bear, giant elk) In such a transportable society, groups were across the grasslands south of the glaciers ill-defined. Individual pairs or families joined in the northern hemisphere. Band members of or left a band of, say, 25 to 50 persons at dif- both sexes and many age groups followed ferent places, at different seasons, during wounded prey, scavenged carcasses, and changes in hunting success, or during intra- stalked young animals. The continual move- group quarrels. Having separated from its ment (perhaps 1200 miles per year between parent population, a divergent group could campsites) required to follow the infrahuman enjoy a standard ofliving equal to the one they herds was incompatible with having large had left. numbers of children to carry about. The high The human bands ate not only meat but protein, low carbohydrate meat diet of the many different kinds of plants and seeds as bands, combined with frequent nursing (Lee, well. They also tracked ripening seeds, some- 1979), probably contributed to long periods of times harvesting part of a crop, sometimes lactation and to later onset of menstruation, diverting melt waters to irrigate particular both ofwhich delay ovulation and decrease the fields, sometimes transplanting mature spec- number of children each woman is likely to imens to different areas, sometimes actually produce in a lifetime. This birth control pro- planting seeds before leaving an area (Cultural cedure combined with a nonviolent form of in- Materialism, p. 86). Band member also kept in- fanticide based on neglect may have main- frahuman pets. Long before sedentary agri- tained a stable human population of perhaps culture came into fashion, humans had en- 100,000,000 persons (Harris, 1977, p. 155; gaged in the component repertoires that to- hereafter cited as Cannibals and Kings) for gether constitute the behavior we call farming. perhaps three million years (Harris, 1979, pp. This behavior appeared in the Indus, the 67-68; hereafter cited as Cultural Matrialism). Yellow, and the Mekong River valleys, the The potential human breeding population Mexican Highlands, and coastal Peru as well over this time could have numbered 600 x 10 as the more familiar Tigris and Euphrates to the 21st power (Cannibals and Kings, pp. River valleys. Agriculture was not the sudden 16-17). Because the human population did not invention of some creative genius acting out of begin to increase significantly until about 3000 intuition, but a shaping and combining of the existing repertoires of very large numbers of people. 1 Harris, M. (1979). Cultural materialism: The struggle Other areas of human interest probably de- for a science of culture. New York: Random House. xii + 381 pp., including bibliography and index. veloped similarly. The arts did not await the I thank Louis A. Marano for critically reading an emergence of a leisure class. Instead, artistic earlier draft of this paper. My review has benefited band members decorated the walls of caves greatly from discussions for which Marvin Harris has where they lived during certain seasons of the generously made himself available. Reprint requests year (Ucko & Rosenfeld, 1967). Antlers re- should be addressed to the author, Department of Psychology, Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa covered from their fire pits contain carvings of 50311. star constellations by fledgling astronomers. 279 280 KENNETH E. LLOYD Human interest in features of the sky, such as ± 2000 years ago-just about the time of the the moon and stars (ubiquitous conditional disappearance of the Pleistocene Mega- and/or discriminative stimuli) predated by far fauna- as the temperate belts of the earth the development of agriculture, where its use- warmed and dried (Cannibals and Kings, pp. fulness is obvious. Foreknowledge of moon 69-82). With diminished herds, the benefits of cycles could, however, predict favorable hunt- planting seeds exceeded the benefits of hunt- ing and fishing, not to mention one of prelit- ing. Some smaller infrahuman mammals (es- erate peoples' greatest fascinations, the pecially goats and sheep) hung around the out- menstrual cycle. skirts of tended fields where eating stubble came to be less costly for the goat than wide In most band and village societies before the foraging on terrain that was becoming more evolution of the state, the average human desertlike. The convenience of stationary enjoyed economic and political freedoms sources of milk and meat to the humans out- which only a privileged minority enjoy to- weighed the cost of the grain that kept the day. Men decided for themselves how long goats and cows nearby. As more land came to they would work on a particular day, what be planted, harvests increased. The seeds from they would work at - if they would work at the grain, unlike the meat from the great all. Women, too, despite their subordina- herds, could be stored and eaten later without tion to men, generally set up their own daily lost nutritive value. schedules and paced themselves on an in- These several variables - the depletion of dividual basis.... If the cultures of the great herds, the slow settling down to modern band and village peoples can be sedentary agriculture, the domestication of relied upon to reveal the past, work got cloven-hooved species, a grain-storage tech- done this way for tens ofthousands ofyears. nology, the maintenance of fixed areas of With the rise of the state all of this was land - and not the biting of an Eden garden swept away .... ordinary men seeking to apple - produced the downfall of humans. use nature's bounty had to get someone The intensification of agricultural production else's permission and had to pay for it with relieved the increasing population pressures taxes, tribute, or extra labor.... For the only temporarily. Although hunters can im- first time there appeared on earth kings, prove their hunting skills, they cannot increase dictators, high priests, emperors, prime their prey in the same sense that a farmer can ministers, lawyers, and jailers, along with intensify his production of domestic grain and dungeons, jails, penitentiaries, and concen- goats. Individuals who could increase produc- tration camps. Under the tutelage of the tion to match the increased reproduction be- state, human beings learned for the first came valuable to the survival of social groups. time how to bow, grovel, kneel, and kow- tow. In many ways the rise of the state was Anthropologists refer to the intensifiers of the descent of the world from freedom to agricultural production as 'big men.' . slavery. (Cannibals and Kings, pp. 69-70) Under certain ecological conditions, and in the presence of warfare, these food man- By the end of the Pleistocene, world popula- agers could have gradually set themselves tion was increasing. Splinter groups did not above their followers and become the orig- fare as well as parent groups; strife, feuding, inal nucleus of the ruling classes of the first and small-scale wars of territoriality occurred. states. (Cannibals and Kings, pp. 70-71) All of this increased dramatically as an agri- cultural mode of production began, because A Big Man who controlled the granary there was less good farm land than foraging could support a protective army. This need for land and because people now had some fixed soldiers increased further the value of male resources to protect. The previously estab- over female infants. As redistribution became lished agricultural behavior became more fre- customary, centers for redistribution -tombs, quent in the several river valleys some 12,000 monuments, pyramids, henges, temples-came REVIEW OF CULTURAL MATERIALISM 281 into existence. Over many generations slow and Skinner offer explanations of non- shifts in redistribution practices occurred: laboratory behavior that include a suggested from giving grain followed by a feast to giving history of behavior-environment interactions money as tax followed by a feast; from re- and a system of principles describing how distributing food immediately at a feast to behavior is affected by classes of environmen- promises of much greater redistributions in a tal events. Harris and Skinner differ in their forthcoming life after death. identifications of the kinds ofbehavior deemed What I find most remarkable about the worthy of analysis. Behavior analysts try to evolution ofpristine states is that it occurred identify the fundamental principles of the as the result of an unconscious process: The behavior of individual organisms. The par- participants in this enormous transforma- ticular topography of the behavior or the kind tion seem not to have known what they of organism that emits it is secondary. Harris were creating. By imperceptible shifts in the is interested in behavior that becomes charac- one generation teristic of a social group. Having identified redistributive balance from such behavior, he then attempts an analysis in to the next, the human species bound itself terms of benefits and costs, much as Skinner over into a form of social life in which the does with reinforcers and punishers. This many debased themselves on behalf of the seems a compatible division of labor between exaltation of the few. (Cannibals and Kings, social and behavioral sciences. pp. 81-82) So far anthropologists in general have over- looked the relevance of behavior analysis to SOURCES anthropology. Simple parsimony would rec- The preceding scenario is a paraphrased ommend it over its competitors (e.g., Piagetan version of an innovative theoretical position in conservation in Cole & Scribner, 1974).
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