Cultural Materialism

Cultural materialism is a research orientation in anthropology that the American anthropologist Marvin Harris introduced in his 1968 book The Rise of Anthropological Theory, and later defended at length in his 1979 book Cultural Materialism. Harris held that social change depends on three levels of a society, which he called its infrastructure, its structure and its superstructure. The approach drew on the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as modified by Karl August Wittfogel, yet it is set apart from both Marxist dialectical materialism and philosophical materialism. Harris also took from Thomas Malthus the idea that reproduction matters as much as production, and from the nineteenth century evolutionists Herbert Spencer, Edward Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan, and from Leslie White and Julian Steward, the idea that cultures change over time.