THE UTILITY AND EFFICACY OF HUMAN MATERIALISM AS AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH STRATEGY FOR THE ANALYSIS OF SOCIOCULTURAL, ECONOMIC, AND POLITICAL HISTORY By BURTON JAMES BROWN A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2010 1 © 2010 Burton James Brown 2 To Professor Paul Magnarella for staying with me long enough to see this dissertation completed. 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, I need to thank Paul Magnarella for his patience, encouragement, mentorship and for the model, Human Materialism. Without Paul’s unending help I would have never finished this long process. I also would like to thank Robert Carneiro for his unfailing friendship and all the private lessons in the history and theory of anthropology over the last 16 years. I very much need to thank Elizabeth A. “Buzzy” Guillette for being willing to jump in late in the game and co-chair my dissertation committee. I thank Pedro Malavet for remembering who I was after so long and still being willing to be my outside member. I also thank Lonn Lanza-Kaduce for being a great boss in the Criminology Department and for his membership on my committee. I also need to thank Lance Gravlee for also being willing to join the committee late and for being helpful and eager to do so. I would also like to thank my brother for accompanying me on numerous agonizing trips to the Florida Keys for field work. I owe a very special thanks to my day boss Susan Stewart for allowing me to finish my dissertation while I was supposed to be working. I also owe a special thanks to Jennifer Todd for some early typing help as well as other support and assistance along the way. And finally, my gratitude to Marvin Harris for his friendship and allowing me the honor of being the last research assistant he would have in his half century in anthropology. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 4 LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................ 7 ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... 8 CHAPTER 1 HUMAN MATERIALISM AND ANTHROPOLOGY .................................................. 11 Introduction ............................................................................................................. 11 Why Human Materialism? ....................................................................................... 15 Epistemological Issues ..................................................................................... 17 What is a Paradigm? ........................................................................................ 18 The Central Theoretical Struggle of Cultural Anthropology .............................. 20 The Plan of the Dissertation ............................................................................. 25 A Note Concerning Personal Method ............................................................... 27 2 AN OVERVIEW OF THE RESEARCH STRATEGY HUMAN MATERIALISM ........ 28 Introduction ............................................................................................................. 28 A Brief History of Materialist Theories of Culture .................................................... 28 Historical Materialism ....................................................................................... 29 Dialectical Materialism ...................................................................................... 31 Materialist Theories of Leslie White and Julian Steward .................................. 32 Cultural Materialism .......................................................................................... 34 Human Materialism and Teleology ......................................................................... 39 Human Materialism and the Universal Model of Sociocultural Systems ........... 40 Infrastructure and its Subcomponents .............................................................. 40 The Social Structure ......................................................................................... 41 The Superstructure ........................................................................................... 41 Some New Thinking in the Application of Human Materialist Analysis ............. 43 Front Loaded and Back Loaded Ideological Systems ...................................... 45 Case Study: Saudi Arabia’s Ikhwan Movement ................................................ 46 Human Materialist Analysis of the Case ........................................................... 49 Case Study: Nicaragua versus the United States ............................................. 56 Human Materialist Analysis of the Case ........................................................... 60 3 JACOB HOUSMAN AND INDIAN KEY ................................................................... 67 Analysis .................................................................................................................. 72 4 HUMAN MATERIALISM AND NINETEENTH CENTURY SIOUX LAW .................. 78 5 Introduction ............................................................................................................. 78 Names and Divisions ........................................................................................ 79 Linguistic Distinctions ....................................................................................... 80 Early History ..................................................................................................... 80 A Human Materialist Analysis of Sioux Law ............................................................ 82 Sioux Formal Law and the Canadian Dakota ................................................... 87 The Plains Sioux .............................................................................................. 88 Akicita: The Sioux Police .................................................................................. 90 5 THE SEARCH FOR A THEORY OF TERRORISM ................................................ 95 Introduction ............................................................................................................. 95 Phase One: Early Law Enforcement Period ............................................................ 97 Phase Two: Definitions, Literature Review and Early Applications ......................... 99 Academic Definitions ...................................................................................... 102 Government Definitions .................................................................................. 104 Band, Tribe, Chiefdom, and State and Other Evolutionary Concepts ............. 110 Circumscription theory ............................................................................. 113 The principle of competitive exclusion ..................................................... 114 Resource concentration ........................................................................... 115 Aggression theory and revolution theory .................................................. 117 Warfare theory ......................................................................................... 121 The rise of modern Israel ......................................................................... 124 Analysis .......................................................................................................... 127 Phase Three: Theory Making and Cultural Materialism .................................. 128 The Basic Propositions ................................................................................... 129 The Basque Separatists ................................................................................. 130 Analysis .......................................................................................................... 132 The Case of the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka ..................................................... 133 Analysis .......................................................................................................... 135 Phase Four: Human Materialism and the Search for a Theory of Terrorism .. 138 Defining What Terrorism is and What it Is Not ................................................ 139 Setting out a Basic Theory ............................................................................. 141 6 CONCLUSIONS ................................................................................................... 146 REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................ 156 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................... 162 6 LIST OF TABLES Table page 2-1 Comparison of the Human and Cultural Materialism Models .............................. 42 2-2 Component Arrangement of the Ikhwan Case Study .......................................... 55 2-3 Component Arrangement of the Nicaragua Case Study ..................................... 66 3-1 Component Summary of the Indian Key Case Study ......................................... 77 4-1 Component Summary of the Sioux Law Case Study .......................................... 94 7 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the