Bio: (1927-2001). Marvin Harris served in the US Air Force from 1945 till 1947. After military service, he enrolled in anthropology studies at Columbia University, where the anthropology department was still heavily influenced by Franz Boas. Harris adopted Boas' views on race and the division of anthropology into four fields of study, but throughout his career, he was very forceful in his criticism of his historical particularism and idiographic approach. At Columbia University, Harris received his doctorate in 1953 on the subject of urban planning in the mountainous regions of eastern Brazil. In the same year, he started teaching at Columbia University and remained there until 1980. During his career, he conducted field research in Brazil, Mozambique, India, and the USA.

He stayed in Brazil during research for his doctoral dissertation, which he conducted in the city of Minas Veljas in the state of Bahia. Apart from the doctoral dissertation, the research on racism and race relations in Brazil also resulted in the chapter "Race Relations in Minas Velhas: A Community in the mountain region of Central Brazil" in the book Race and Class in Rural Brazil (Wagley, 1952), the article "A typology of Latin American subcultures" (1955), as well as the book Town and Country in Brazil (1956). Race and racism, as an anthropological field of research, were the main preoccupation in the first period of Harris's career, he expanded his research on racial relations to the entire American continent, and thus new works with this theme were created: the book Minorities in the New World: Six Case Studies (1958) co-authored with Charles Wegley (who was his doctoral dissertation mentor), the article "Race relations in the United States: Research and auspices" (1962), the chapter "Race" in the book The Measure of Mankind (1963), article co-authored with Philip Kotak "The Structural Significance of Brazilian Racial Categories" (1963) and the book Patterns of Race in the Americas (1964).

In his works on race and racial relations, Harris showed how different racial categories developed in different countries on the American continent, and thus the principle he called "hypo-origin" works in the USA, according to which a child with an Afro-American and Euro-American are always assigned a minority category, while in Brazil this principle does not apply, as racial classification is based is always based on individual phenotype and social perception. In the book Patterns of Race in the Americas, Harris directly opposes the Brazilian scholar Gilberto Frey's theory that the difference between Portuguese and Anglo-American mentalities conditioned different racial categories in these two countries, and using for the first time the methods of cultural materialism, through the difference between material conditions that existed in the US and Brazil during and after slavery, explains the differences between racial relations and categories in Brazil and the US.

Harris conducted his second ethnographic research in 1955 and 1956 in Mozambique, where he investigated the acculturation of the Ba Tonga people. During his stay in Mozambique, due to the hardships and forced labor experienced by the local population, Harris became interested in politics and began actively advocating the independence of this colony from Portugal. Although he did not complete his research in Mozambique, these unfinished findings resulted in several articles and book chapters published in 1958 and 1959.

The first work of Marvin Harris concerning the evolutionary perspective is the article "Adaptation in Biological and Cultural Science" published in 1960. From then until the end of his career, Harris developed the evolutionary perspective in many of his works, incorporating it into his macro theoretical paradigm- cultural materialism. In 1964 Harris published the book The Nature of Cultural Things in which he presents the epistemological foundations of cultural materialism. Harris continues the epistemological-theoretical construction of cultural materialism in the book The Rise of Anthropological Theory (1968), today a classic work, in which he presents an extensive but critical history of anthropological theory from the position of cultural materialism. The third and final part of this trilogy is the book Culture, Man, Nature (1971). In this book, Harris uses the term "cultural materialism" for the first time to name his scientific strategy. It describes the evolutionary history of human biology and culture, from the Paleolithic to the Industrial Age.

Harris further developed cultural materialism in the books Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches: The Riddles of Culture (1974), Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures (1977), and Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture (1979). In the book Cultural Materialism, for the first time, he presents in detail the epistemological and theoretical foundations of cultural materialism, as well as a detailed critique of rival approaches in anthropology: sociobiology and biological reductionism, dialectical materialism, structuralism, structural Marxism, psychologism, etc.

Harris moved to the University of Florida in 1980, where he remained until his retirement in 2000. During this period, he published several books that all become anthropological classics. in America Now: The Anthropology of a Changing Culture (1981), Harris, using the methods of cultural materialism, investigates the changes that have taken place in the USA since the 1960s: the increase in employment of women, public declaration of homosexuality, increase in crime, rise of new cults, failure of welfare programs, the decline of the dollar, etc. Other books from this period are Cultural Anthropology (1983), Death, Sex, and Fertility: Population Regulation in Preindustrial and Developing Societies (1987), Our Kind: Who We Are, Where We Came From (1989), Where We Are Going, Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times (1999). Harris unfortunately died in 2001, due to complications that occurred after the surgery he underwent.

        Epistemological Foundations of Cultural Materialism

Harris's cultural materialism has two major sources, on the one hand, is the evolutionary anthropology of authors such as Herbert Spencer, Edward Taylor, Henry L. Morgan, Leslie White, Julian Stewart, Marshall Sahlins, and Elman Service; on the other hand, the historical materialism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had a great influence. Salins and Service developed an evolutionary typology of socio-cultural levels of integration: group, tribe, chiefdom, and state. Marvin Harris adopted this typology (in later work Harris used the term “village” instead of “tribe”) and it has enormous significance for theories and explanations of cultural materialism.

At the beginning of the book Cultural Materialism, Marvin Harris tries to show how his paradigm relates to the philosophy of science and the structure of scientific theory. He believes that most scientific theories in all sciences contain a combination of inductive and deductive approaches, which Harris accepts as the most fruitful scientific approach. Karl Popper introduced into epistemology the difference between the verification of hypotheses and their falsification. Considering that if a hypothesis can be falsified, then it has scientific validity, otherwise it is a tautology that cannot be disproved. On the other hand, Thomas Kuhn believed that normal scientific processes do not function on the principle of falsification, but take place on the level of paradigms - a set of laws, theories, applications, and methods shared by a group of scientists in a certain period. Harris believes that Imre Lakatos found a solution to the conflict between Popper's and Kuhn's approaches to science. Lakatos believes that one cannot claim that an isolated scientific theory is unscientific, as that can be said only about a series of related theories. Harris believes that the history of science consists of a struggle between conflicting research paradigms. The scientific validity of each paradigm is evaluated by the validity of the theories that arise within its framework, which ultimately leads to scientific progress.

                The Distinction between Etic and Emic Perspective

In the book Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior (1954), anthropological linguist Kenneth Pike introduced into anthropology the distinction between the etic and emic perspectives of studying human behavior. The terms etic and emic are taken from the suffixes of the terms phonetics and phonemics, which denote different approaches to the study of linguistic behavior. Based on the parallel with language, Pike tried to apply this distinction between subjectively perceived and objectively perceived behavior to the entire culture. The emic approach to the study of culture gives importance to the individual himself and his understanding and explanation of his own behavior, while the etic approach emphasizes placing the observer as the only person invited to judge the structure, causes, and consequences of the individual's observed behavior.

While Kenneth Pike emphasized the emic approach in his works, Harris emphasizes the advantage of the etic approach. Harris sees Pike as a cultural idealist who believes that the aim of the social sciences is to describe and analyze emic systems. In order to explain emic systems, Pike wants to determine the smallest cultural units that make sense in a certain culture, by analogy with morphemes, and he calls these smallest emic units "behavioremes". A series of behaviorems constitutes a behavioral stream that Pike wants to investigate in the same way that phonemics investigates languages. For Pike, the etic approach serves only to monitor behavior and should ultimately lead to an emic understanding of behavior. In the book The Nature of Cultural Things, Harris for the first time introduces into science the proposal to study the behavioral flow from an etic perspective.

In the research strategy of cultural materialism, the etic approach serves to reveal etic structures. Harris cites two types of reasons why emic bias can lead to poor scientific results. The first reason is that the person giving us a statement about their behavior or attitudes may knowingly or unknowingly give wrong information. An example of this situation is when people actually eat some food that they say is forbidden to eat, and they don't eat it. Another type of cause follows from the difference in the linguistic and conceptual-categorical apparatus that exists between two languages or between scientists and ordinary people. Since Harris is interested in the objective material conditions that influence the development of culture, he sets himself the goal of explaining the variables and mechanisms that influence the development of cultures, not only their interpretation, so using an etic approach provides him with a better analysis of the relationship between these variables and mechanisms and the actual behavior of an individual.

By studying food taboos in different societies, Harris shows that they are based on the ecological-technological reality in which a certain culture develops, while the emic explanations of the members of those cultures either try to explain the taboos as based on religion/magic or as rational behavior, therefore that certain food is bad or dirty to eat. The emic approach provides us with an insight into people's consciousness and their symbolic universe, but it cannot give us an answer as to how and why the development of a specific form of behavior or opinion developed, this can only be achieved through an etic approach.

Harris introduces a distinction between the mental and behavioral components of the emic and etic approaches. using a real-life example that Harris encountered during his research on the sacred cow taboo in India. In his research in the northern parts of India, Harris found that although people claimed to treat calves of both sexes equally, which they really believed, in practice, there was a disproportion in the number of male and female calves, as there were more female calves. This difference is due to material circumstances because female cows were used as a source of milk, while there was no great need for oxen to pull the plow. Such economic-technological-ecological circumstances caused the need for a different number of male and female calves, which also caused differences in behavior, but there was no change in the religious and moral attitude towards the life of each calf.

In concrete behavioral processes, however, there is rarely a complete opposition between etic and emic descriptions of events. People in practice can often be confused about their thoughts and behavior, which creates difficulties in arriving at emic knowledge. However, sometimes psychologists interpret any difference between what the subject says and what he actually does as some kind of hidden motive or psychological state, which Harris thinks is wrong. "Clearly anthropologists should use the etic approach to mental life sparingly and should not attempt to override every emic explanation with an etic alternative" (Harris, 2001: 40). When discussing cross-cultural emic patterns Harris notes that the mere occurrence of an emic pattern in a larger number, or in all cultures does not elevate this emic pattern to the level of an etic fact, which he explains with the example of belief in souls; just because almost all cultures believe in the existence of souls does not mean that soul(s) actually exist.

              Theoretical Foundations of Cultural Materialism

Cultural materialism takes over many theoretical propositions that were developed within the theories of cultural evolution and historical materialism. What is new is the attempt to create a theoretical paradigm that will clearly and precisely structure earlier theoretical achievements into a meaningful and coherent whole. For Harris, the starting point for the study of socio-cultural systems is the understanding of human biology itself. Our physiology, anatomy, neurology, and innate bio-psychological drives understood from an evolutionary perspective form the basis of any culture or society. However, this does not mean that people's behavior is determined by their biology or genes.

Harris views humans as a species that has reached a high level of independence between the biologically inherited system of information - primarily genes - and human cultural patterns. Sociocultural systems and patterns cannot be completely independent, because people are not only beings endowed with great intellect and the ability of inventive behavior, they are still biological beings that must satisfy basic biological needs. In accordance with these premises, Harris creates the basic theoretical hypotheses of cultural materialism:1) the universality of the tripartite scheme of domains or levels of all socio-cultural systems, and 2) infrastructural determinism.

                        Three Levels of Socio-cultural Systems

Harris views societies and cultures as complex and intertwined systems that are best defined as socio-cultural systems. Socio-cultural systems have three levels: infrastructure, structure, and superstructure. This scheme owes a lot to historical materialism, however, the concrete content of all three levels is also different from the simple structure-superstructure (base-superstructure) scheme. Infrastructure is the first and most important level of study of socio-cultural systems. The infrastructure consists of technology, production, and reproductive activities related to solving basic human needs - food, water, shelter, protection from diseases and dangers, as well as biological reproduction. The natural habitat has the greatest influence on the infrastructure because it represents a limiting factor, but also a factor that gives possible directions for the development of socio-cultural systems.

The infrastructure consists of two subsystems that are studied using the etic behavioral approach - the form of production and the form of reproduction. The form of production consists of: Technology and practices of production for survival, especially the production of food and other forms of energy, in interaction with the specific ecological environment. The form of reproduction is "Technology and practices employed for expanding, limiting or maintaining population size" (Harris, 2001a: 52). The tabular representation of the infrastructure is shown in Table 1. The first column refers to the form of production, the second to the form of reproduction, and the third contains the mental and emic components of the superstructure related to the infrastructure.

Table 1. Infrastructural level. Developed from: (Harris, 2001а: 52-53).

The structure consists of two subsystems that are primarily viewed from an etic-behavioral perspective: the domestic economy and the political economy. The domestic economy is: "The organization of reproduction and basic production, exchange, and consumption within camps, houses, apartments, or other domestic settings" (Harris, 2001a: 52). Political economy is defined as: "The organization of reproduction, production, exchange and consumption within and between bands, villages, chiefdoms, states and empires" (Harris, 2001a: 53). Both economies have mental and emic aspects of superstructure related to it, and all three dimensions are shown in Table 2.

Table 2. The level of structure. Developed from: (Harris, 2001: 52-53).

Harris accepts the importance that language and symbolic processes have on the formation and functioning of the human psyche. Through language and symbolic processes, superstructural patterns are formed. The superstructure consists of the symbolic level of socio-cultural systems: art, religion and magic, etic and moral values, rituals, etc. Behavioral aspects of the superstructure are: 1) art, music, dance, literature, and marketing; 2) rituals; 3) sports, games, and hobbies and 4) science. Apart from the behavioral aspect of the superstructure, it also consists of emic and mental dimensions. The aspects of this dimension that relate to the infrastructure and superstructure have already been shown, while some relate to the behavioral part of the superstructure are: 1) symbols; 2) myths; 3) aesthetic standards and philosophy; 4) epistemology; 5) ideology; 6) magic, religion, and taboos.

                             Infrastructural Determinism

Infrastructure is the basis of the entire reproduction of socio-cultural systems and affects other spheres, that is, it probabilistically determines the structure, which further probabilistically defines the superstructure. This means that patterns in structure and superstructure that are not enabled by infrastructure cannot be developed (or at least maintained). Infrastructural determinism provides priority in the formulation and testing of theories and hypotheses. Cultural materialism uses infrastructural variables as the most important factors for the scientific explanation of socio-cultural systems. If the infrastructural variables cannot provide a satisfactory scientific explanation, then the variables of the behavioral structure are analyzed, and if these variables do not provide a suitable solution, the analysis of the variables of the behavioral superstructure is used. Only in the case when it turns out that the use of all other variables does not provide a solution, the analysis of the mental and emic superstructure is approached. Infrastructural determinism means rejecting both biological programming of human behavior and structuralist presuppositions about the existence of pan-human thinking patterns that influence some things to be "good for thinking".

Harris does not define precisely the impact that group or class action can have on changes in infrastructure or structure. Analyzing Harris's works, one could conclude that the form of political economy in a socio-cultural system will always be determined by infrastructure, that is, that political victory is always achieved by the faction that benefits most from infrastructural determinism.

 Anthropology of Food in the Perspective of Cultural Materialism

One of Harris' most significant areas of study is human eating patterns. He began to deal with this topic already in 1965 with the text "The Myth of the Sacred Cow", and continued in his most famous book Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches, Riddles of Culture. Harris continues to address human dietary patterns in Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Culture in which he addresses the relationship between protein intake and warfare to obtain human flesh for consumption. Harris continues to deal with the anthropology of food in a work published in 1985 entitled The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig, reissued in 1998 as Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture. In this book, he tries to establish the anthropology of food as an independent anthropological discipline; and in 1987 he co-edited the book Food and Evolution: Towards a Theory of Human Food Habits, in which a large number of anthropologists contributed to various areas of anthropology of food.

From the beginning of his work in the anthropology of food, Marvin Harris tried to unravel the apparent illogicalities and irrationalities in the eating patterns of people in different cultures. From the very beginning, he refused to believe that dietary patterns arose by chance or that they arose as a consequence of religious-magical taboos or obligations. Harris managed to find a rational explanation based on a materialistic approach to each food pattern in different cultures, which is primarily based on the study of climate, flora and fauna, food production systems (gathering and hunting or agriculture), and other real circumstances in which some society and culture develops.

Harris has not systematically presented his entire theoretical approach to the anthropology of food in any one work. In terms of scope, this theoretical approach belongs to what is called "middle range theory" in the social sciences. This middle range theory is composed of several smaller theories and hypotheses and is an integral part of Harris's broader paradigm of cultural materialism. The anthropology of food is most directly related to infrastructure because it concerns the satisfaction of one of the most important biological needs, the need for food. Infrastructure-structure relationships influence eating patterns, while superstructure is responsible for rationalizing eating patterns, using moral and/or religious symbolism.

Harris's basic assumption is that all humans have essentially the same biological need for nutrients, and that, except for those populations that lack milk resistance as adults, all populations have the same biological ability to consume food.

The next hypothesis is that some innate biopsychological preferences and aversions are innate to all people, but also that these needs and aversions can be mediated by culture. The need to eat meat is one of those universal needs inherent in the vast majority of cultures. All people need protein in their daily diet to be healthy. Proteins consist of amino acids, of which there are 22. Of these twenty-two amino acids, the human body can synthesize 12, while the other ten, called essential amino acids, must be consumed by humans through food. Harris believes that since plants are not a good enough source of essential amino acids, for the vast majority of the planet's population, animals must be the source of these amino acids. This is the main reason that true vegetarianism is extremely rare. People invest a lot of effort in obtaining meat and milk, and meat is generally more valued as food than plant-based food. However, unlike meat, which is equally appealing in almost all cultures, culture can influence people's innate aversion to bitter things to change into a preference and a need to ingest some bitter foods.

The next theory is the theory of dietary taboos. When there is ambivalence about the usefulness of a food source, that is, when the relationship between the harmfulness and the usefulness of food is not clear, then taboos arise. This means that if there is a great biological need to use an animal as a food source, but at the same time for the functioning of the infrastructure this animal has a greater benefit being alive, that animal will be prohibited. In fact, the more useful this animal is alive, the stricter the prohibition will be. "The strongest taboo is the one that admits no exceptions. The greater the temptation to violate the taboo, the stronger it has to be'' (Harris, 1998: 221). Harris also believes that a species will be hated depending on the residual usefulness or harmfulness of that species for human consumption.

Political economy is also essential to understanding Harris's anthropology of food. Since control over the production and consumption of food has been a source of power and wealth since the advent of agriculture, preferences, and taboos present in one society will have different utility for different segments of the population. The production, advertising, and consumption of food and beverages in the developed countries of  Europe and America provide the best example of how dietary patterns are put at the service of corporate profits, while more than a third of the population suffers from obesity.

Another theory that forms the basis of Harris's anthropology of food is the "optimal foraging theory", which is equally applicable to humans and other animals that are carnivores or omnivores. No omnivore, including humans, eats everything it comes across that is edible. Those species that have the best ratio of caloric gain in relation to the time needed to find them will certainly be included in the diet, while those species whose hunting or gathering reduces the average caloric gain per unit of time spent searching for food will be avoided. Species that reduce total caloric gain will not be included in the diet, regardless of how abundant they are. This theory also has a dynamic aspect, as it predicts that as the most valued species become less and less available, they will give way to species that were second-guessed or previously avoided.

The last hypothesis of Harris's anthropology of food concerns the research practice, and it states that, in all societies, the data that respondents give about themselves will differ from the actual facts. In the case of food, this hypothesis is reflected in the discrepancy between respondents' statements about the desirability, undesirability, or prohibition of a certain food source, with actual dietary patterns.

Each of these hypotheses or theories is usually not sufficient on its own to explain specific dietary patterns, but only through their mutual combination or in combination with other factors - climate, flora and fauna, soil, the basic method of food production (hunting and gathering or agriculture), we can, in full, explain some pattern of eating.

                                       Abominable Pig

For hundreds of millions of Muslims and Jews, today and in the past, the ban on eating pork, as well as the ban on coming into contact with a pig, is a religious commandment that is obeyed without question. Since the pig is very efficient at converting the food it ingests into body mass, there have been many attempts to rationalize this prohibition. The most common explanation is that the pig is a dirty animal that transmits infections. In a natural state, on the contrary, a pig does not show a tendency to roll in its own feces, or to eat them, just as trichinosis, a disease often transmitted by pigs, is no more dangerous to humans than those diseases transmitted by other animals, which are allowed for Jews or Muslims to consume.

The solution to the problem of the abominable pig is that the pig as an animal does not correspond to the climatic and ecological conditions in which the Jews lived at the time of Yahweh's revelation to Moses, and the same applies to the Arab population at the time of Muhammad's mission. Pigs are similar to humans in many biological features, but their ability to sweat is much worse - they sweat 30 times less per the same skin area. Therefore, in hot and dry regions, such as the territories of today's Egypt, Israel, Syria, and Lebanon three thousand years ago, the pig's inability to reduce its body temperature by sweating greatly reduced its chances of survival. The pig is best grown in areas with forests and shady river valleys. Due to the inability to sweat, pigs resort to rolling in liquid, preferably clean water, but if they are denied access to clean water, pigs roll in mud or even their own feces. If they are unable to regulate their body temperature by rolling in the liquid, the pigs die when they are exposed to the sun at temperatures above 37 degrees Celsius.

Pigs also poorly process food that has a lot of cellulose, food that is most suitable for ruminants - goats, sheep, and cattle. Pigs do best when they are fed fruits, tubers, and grains, and are therefore in direct competition with humans in their diet. The pig is also a poor source of milk, and cannot be used as a draft animal or to produce wool for clothing. These climatic, ecological, and biological circumstances were decisive for the prohibition of eating pigs to become so important because raising pigs for ancient Jews or medieval Arabs would have led to much greater problems than benefits, and raising goats, sheep, and cattle had multiple advantages for them. Precisely because the pig is such a good source of protein and fat, it had to be banned in order to ensure the long-term survival of these societies.

                       The Myth of the Sacred Cow in India

The federal constitution of India prohibits the killing of cows belonging to the species Bos Indicus. Millions of sick, old, and starving cows roam the streets and fields of India without owners and supervision. This calls into question the rationality of the ban on eating cow meat. Hinduism associates cows with the deities Shiva and Krishna. Hindus respect cows and decorate them during religious holidays, they consider that every part of the cow, as well as every product of it, is sacred. They see the cow as a mother because it gives milk and butter. In the Hindu scheme of transmigration of the soul, the cow is just below human beings.

However, it was not like that in the distant past. In the oldest sacred text of Hinduism, "Rig Vedi", written about three and a half thousand years ago, the main duty of the Brahmin caste was the ritual slaughter of cows for ceremonial feasts when the cow's meat was distributed to everyone as a symbol of wealth and power. With the increase in population, the reduction of forests, and the conversion of more and more pastures into arable fields, the semi-nomadic way of life increasingly gave way to intensive farming and dairying. "More people can be fed by limiting meat eating and by concentrating on dairying, growing wheat, millet, lentils and peas and other plant foods" (Harris, 1998: 52).

Animals are very inefficient in converting food into body mass and protein, but taking milk reduces these losses to a significant extent. Cows are six times more efficient at converting protein from their own diet into protein in milk than they are into protein in meat. Since raising cows for meat became more and more expensive with the increase in population density, cows stopped being raised for meat and were used only as a source of milk and a source of power for pulling the plow. In the sixth century BC, new religions appeared, Buddhism and Jainism, which forbade animal sacrifices, and Marvin Harris associates their appearance with mass starvation and ecological devastation. By the fifth century AD, the influence of these two religions in India had declined, and Hinduism has been the dominant religion in India ever since. Hinduism by that time had already rejected animal sacrifices and advocated the principle of non-killing - ahimsa. Milk became the main ritual food of the Brahmin caste.

The rationality of the ban on eating cow's meat is still justified today. Cows are used as the main means of propulsion for driving the plough, and in terms of efficiency on the terrain existing in most of India, it exceeds tractors, cow dung is the main source of fertilizer. Since there is a shortage of wood, coal, gas, or liquid fuels, cow dung is also the main cooking fuel in India. India is the world's largest producer of milk. All this shows us how important cows are to Indian society and the economy. The religious ban on eating cow meat was a cultural adaptation that served to justify in the minds of the people a seemingly irrational practice, but a practice that allowed India to develop and survive. Cows were simply too useful to be raised as a meat source.

       The Emergence of Agriculture, the State, and Capitalism

Cultural materialism explains the cultural characteristics of both hunter-gatherer groups and modern capitalist states. The analysis of socio-cultural characteristics of hunter-gatherer groups applied by cultural materialism is very much based on the work of Steward, Sahlins, Service, and other anthropologists. Hunter-gatherer groups consist of 25 to 50 members, and the basic infrastructural peculiarity is the absence of control over food production. Hunting and gathering depend on the presence of wild species of animals and plants, but due to the necessity of protein intake, larger animal species are the main variable. Larger animal species are very susceptible to overhunting, and even innovations in hunting technology do not contribute to the solution of this problem in the long run. This ecological condition of survival contributes to a very low population density, about two people per ten square kilometers. In addition, group membership is variable, most often due to seasonal and environmental variations. Independent families, which form the only permanent structure, have greater security of survival in conditions of free movement from camp to camp.

Families are connected by kinship and descent, and there is economic and political equality between them. The form of production affects the form of reproduction. The prohibition of incest between brothers and sisters, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons reflects negative selection against those groups that practiced incest. Such groups had reduced mobility, and fewer partners to exchange with or to make an alliance for war. As in the case of food taboos:,,The investment in the incest taboos with so much guilt, anxiety and symbolism reflects deep confusion and ambivalence concerning cost/benefit of incest; hence the need to impose unquestionable "sacred" social rules that cut through that ambivalence and prevent each new generation from repeating the trials and errors of past generations" (Harris, 2001a: 81). The only division of labor among hunter-gatherers, apart from age (the youngest and oldest members generally do not work), is based on gender. Harris believes that due to the lack of data on Paleolithic forms of reproduction, it is difficult to conclude the relationship between gender roles during that period. In modern hunter-gatherers, women mostly collect food, while men hunt. Due to frequent pregnancies and taking care of children, women stay closer to the camps, as well as because of their average lower strength and speed, they are less suitable for hunting which requires following the prey for a longer period.

Harris hypothesizes that women played a greater role in hunting large animals during the Pleistocene when such animals were abundant. By using a diet with more carbohydrates and less protein and prolonged lactation, women were able to extend periods of postnatal ovulation, which could result in longer intervals between childbearing. Since large animals were generally hunted by forcing the animals to fall into a hole or precipice, women could have a very active role in the hunt. Since there were enough prey animals for everyone, warfare between groups would be rare, so there was no raising of men for warfare, and thus their higher status. Women were not used as a reward for male prowess in battle, there was a demographic balance between men and women, and serial monogamy was common for both sexes.

The Neolithic transition from hunting and gathering to animal husbandry and agriculture represents the most important change in the way of survival of the human species, at least in the period from the beginning of the use of stone tools and weapons more than two million years ago, until the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century. Harris believes that the explanation for the development of agriculture cannot be found in the diffusion of innovations from a single center, nor in some increase in inventiveness. He rejects the assumption that the origin of agriculture did not occur due to ignorance of how plants reproduce. Modern hunter-gatherers often act systematically to increase the yields of wild plants. According to Harris, global climate changes around 13,000 years ago, as well as the disappearance of the Pleistocene megafauna caused some groups of hunter-gatherers to change the cost/benefit ratio of hunting and gathering in relation to agriculture and animal husbandry.

Evidence of this change is that in all centers of early agriculture, the diet expanded to include small mammals, reptiles, birds, shellfish, and insects. At the same time, lower protein intakes led to a decrease in the effectiveness of lactation methods in delaying birth. The increase in the number of young children has led to less mobility and a greater prevalence of abortion and infanticide. A different explanation is given by anthropologist Mark Cohen, who believes that the main motive for the transition to agriculture is the disappearance of uninhabited geographical areas; the human species no longer had anywhere to spread, so it had to increase food production per unit area. Harris disagrees with this view and believes that many influences attracted and repelled hunter-gatherers from adopting an agricultural way of life. He believes that the most important motive for accepting agriculture was the possibility of intensifying agricultural production through the use of child labor. Child labor can be very useful in gathering fruits, herding animals, and collecting dung.

The transition from the band level to the village level in socio-cultural evolution did not require the development of agriculture. Geographical areas that made it possible to feed a large number of people per unit area with the help of fishing were areas where the development of a village level of integration that did not require agriculture to occurr. However, these areas are very rare. Village societies most often arise with the beginning of agriculture. However, structural and superstructural variations between agricultural villages were large and depended on the species or breeds domesticated, the pattern of crop collection, as well as whether crop water was obtained by rain or river flooding, whether intensive or extensive irrigation was used, and whether short or long fallow periods was used what mechanisms were used to maintain the nitrogen balance in the country. In those villages that did not raise livestock, it was necessary to leave the land to fallow. This type of agriculture was most often in the form of slash-and-burn agriculture. Such villages usually have less than two hundred inhabitants and a population density not much higher than that of hunter-gatherers. Hunting was still the main source of animal protein and fat for such villages.

Those villages that lived in areas where it was possible to intensify yields were the first where appeared individuals whose main social role was to direct the process of yield intensification. These people are called "big men" in anthropological theory. The big men had three roles: the intensification of production, the redistribution of produced and exchanged goods, and the use of prestige and wealth to organize military or trade campaigns. The big men constantly strive to stand out among the villagers and to encourage them to increase production. The people who accept to be part of the big man's support group had to give him a share of their surplus. At the end of the process of collecting surpluses, most often for some ritual celebration, big men distributed the surpluses in their group, and they themselves, most often, have the least. Big men must constantly prove themselves, and the title itself, in cases where it formally exists, is not permanent, but passes to new individuals, as soon as they prove themselves better than the previous big man. Big men also do not have political power, that is, they cannot force people to listen and follow them by threat or force.

When the big men managed to achieve more permanent support, and when there was a parallel increase in the yield and population of the villages as well as an increase in warfare, they received official titles and positions. This position continued to have the functions of intensification, redistribution, and warfare, but due to its durability, it gained more and more power and eventually led to the position being recognized as a legitimate power - authority. This new form represents the rule of the chief, and in terms of political economy the chiefs use their function of intensifier and redistributor to their advantage, the tribute given to the chief is obligatory, and they themselves and those closest to them get the most after redistribution. When the tribute given by the subjects begins to take the form of taxation, the rule of the chiefs approaches the stage of the state.

Whether the transition from chiefdom to the state will occur is largely determined by demographic, technological, economic, and ecological conditions in each individual case. Limiting factors like lack of arable land, space, water, lack of availability of animals and plants for domesticated, and suboptimal climate will block the growth in the size and complexity of redistributive networks and thus prevent the creation of clear distinction in rank and power. In order to achieve an asymmetric distribution relationship on a large scale, chiefs must control the critical flow of protein and calories from producers to them. Yam and cassava are not good sources of protein and calories, while cereals and corn are better sources of them. The absence of large ruminants and pigs suitable for domestication on the American continent caused a different evolutionary course there. More developed chieftainships have a complex hierarchization of related clans.

The evolutionary sequence of band-village-chiefdom-state is not directly related to the type of food production but to the possibility of its intensification. The ecological conditions most favorable for the intensification of food production are those based on cereals and ruminants, and such conditions existed in the Middle East, Southern Europe, northern China, and northern India. All the qualitative features of the state already existed at the level of the developed chiefdom, such as the intensification of production, the use of force to ensure the obedience of subjects, territorial expansion, and even the existence of slaves. However, the emergence of the first states from chiefdoms did not occur directly. "most advanced chiefdoms probably did not evolve directly into states. The incipient stratification on which they were based gave rise to political instability, factional disputes, insurrections, fissioning and migrations that recurrently dampened the elite sector’s ability to command goods and services and to monopolize police-military functions" (Harris, 2001: 101).  

Harris singles out a few prerequisites for the creation of a state. The first condition is the existence of an energy base that allows the ruling class to maintain a permanent police-military apparatus, which requires the existence of either grain-based agriculture or rain-fed agriculture, which includes both grains and animals. The second condition was introduced by the anthropologist Robert Carneiro and it refers to the existence of ecological encirclement, when the area around the territory of the chief's rule is surrounded by an area much worse for agriculture (it can also be about isolation due to mountains or seas and oceans). In that case, the subordinate producers would not benefit by escaping from the territory of the chiefdom, because those neighboring areas do not provide better living conditions. This geographical and ecological isolation is called "ecotone". The following paragraph by Harris best explains the transition from developed chiefdoms to states.

"The consolidation of class-structured life probably required relatively little direct physical confrontation... To the extent that elite classes rendered useful services like organizing the construction of waterworks, defending the masses against enemy troops, and predicting floods and seasons, they could expect the peasant masses to make tax contributions without too much fuss or even with considerable enthusiasm. This explains why the early pristine states invested so heavily in the construction of monumental statues, altars, temples, pyramids, and other religious structures. Although these were costly enterprises, they more than paid for themselves by helping to convince the peasants that the elites were benevolently trying to control the supernatural and natural forces upon which human health and well-being were said to be dependent… It is always cheaper to produce obedience through mystification than through police-military coercion” (Harris, 2001a: 102).

Once the border of the state is crossed, there is a positive feedback loop, so the greater power of the ruling class allows for an increase in production and population, which allows for war to be waged on a much higher level and for the expansion of territory, and there is also enthusiasm and mystification of the people, which allows for the growth of power. All chiefdoms in the area are faced with two choices: either form their own states or become part of such an expanding state.

Geographical and ecological conditions continue to operate even when the border of the country is crossed. Those states that arose from the intensification of agriculture based on the flooding of large rivers, such as the Nile, the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Indus, the Ganges, the Yangtze Yang, and the like, will take the form of what Karl Wittfogel called "hydraulic states". Another type of early state arose not in the area of southern Europe. The third type of state arose in Central and South America, where due to the lack of draft animals, and therefore the wheel, the development of mechanical inventions slowed down.

The states that arose in the valleys of large rivers were specific because the intensification of agricultural production depended on irrigation and river flooding, irrigation could be controlled by building and maintaining canals, while river flooding could be predicted by creating precise calendars. To maintain a large system of canals, a large centralization of decision-making was required, which led to an increase in the political power of the elite. Since the agro-management elite controlled access to the irrigation systems, they were able to remove all those who refused to submit to them. This relationship between technology and environment allowed Egypt, India, Mesopotamia, and China to have fundamentally similar political economies.

"Each had a highly centralized class of bureaucrats and hereditary despotic overlords who claimed heavenly mandates or were said to be gods in themselves. Excellent networks of government-maintained roadways, rivers, and canals liked every hamlet and village to provincial and national administrative centers. Each village had at least one important person who served as a link between the village and the central administration. Political lines of force ran in one direction only: from top to bottom. While peasants might sometimes own their land, as in China, the bureaucracy tended to regard private property as a gift of the state. Production priorities were set by state tax policies and by regular call-ups of village men and women for work on state-sponsored projects. The “state was stronger than society.” Its right to collect taxes, confiscate materials, and conscript labor was virtually unlimited. It carried out systematic censuses village by village to determine the available labor power and tax revenue base” (Harris, 1991: 235-236).

In these countries, there was the development of religions and philosophies that called for justice, mercy, and peaceful relations, and on the other hand, demanded submission to the authorities. However, rulers often had to resort to brutal force to punish disobedient subjects. Dynastic changes were accompanied by the decline in the quality of irrigation systems and the associated increase in the dissatisfaction of the subjects. The new dynasties renewed their hydraulic base and the power based on it. The special infrastructural peculiarities of hydraulic states conditioned the specific system of oriental despotisms, and in India and China, this form of production influenced structural and superstructural features until the twentieth century.

The type of states that developed in Europe is responsible for the development of capitalism. North of the Alps, the Gauls, Franks, Teutons, and Britons during the Bronze Age began to create increasingly complex chiefdoms that by the fifth century BC had crossed the threshold of the state. These states were secondary states created under the influence of the Mediterranean states. These states of the Gauls, Franks, and other peoples north of the Alps consisted of three hereditary castes: warrior aristocracy, clergy - druids who were in charge of rituals and calendars, and ordinary peasants who lived on small farms or as pastoralists. At the top of the power was a hereditary or semi-hereditary king who belonged to the ruling tribe, and had subordinate chiefs under him. Harris notes that most scholars classify the political formations that arose in Central Europe in the Bronze Age as chiefdoms, but he believes that they constitute true states. The rulers and their warrior chiefs tended to portray themselves as egalitarian distributors, while on the other hand, they had a monopoly on the means of force: chariots, horses, weapons, and swords.

These states were small and weakly connected, and splits and dynastic changes often occurred. Agriculture was done at the local level, and exchange was weak. Most of the population was illiterate. A similar situation remained when many of these territories fell under the rule of Rome. When the Western Roman Empire fell in the fifth century, these areas did not fall into the "Dark Ages" but continued to function on the principle of local agriculture within feudal kingdoms. But this feudal order was not the same as before the rule of Rome. The population grew and became completely sedentary. Feudalism was more rigid and formal, and serfs were assigned permanently to the new aristocracy.

In Europe in the Middle Ages, unlike hydraulic empires, there was no bureaucracy, no centralized collection of taxes and labor. The basic units were independent, self-sustaining manors with rain-fed agriculture. Because medieval rulers could not deny their subjects water or the conveniences brought about by projects requiring massive labor, the feudal aristocracy could achieve political independence, as it needed no help from the central government to rule independently. At the beginning of the sixth century AD, the population density north of the Alps was very low, but due to the greater accessibility of steel axes and saws, more and more forest areas were cleared and areas for agriculture were created. The invention of the horseshoe increased the importance of the horse as a draft animal, and the new plow made it possible to cultivate the land much better. A new crop rotation system was developed. All this enabled a huge increase in the population in these areas.

The feudal lords participated in trade and encouraged the development of cities and the crafts and trade that were carried out in them. At the beginning of the second millennium, the population increased, agriculture improved, and cities and trade flourished throughout Europe. Harris believes that it took 500 years for cities and markets to overturn the feudal order because serfs and free peasants were able to maintain a relatively high standard of living from agriculture during that time. As the population grew and the efficiency fell, the feudal lords began to look for an additional source of income in raising sheep for wool, which further limited the area of arable land, reduced peasant holdings, and drove the majority of the peasant population into complete poverty. The plague that struck Europe in the fourteenth century contributed to a period of intense political and economic turmoil. There were massive peasant revolts, messianic movements, the extermination of Jews, dissension in the Catholic Church, and the organization of the Inquisition. The consequence of reaching the ecological maximum of the population under the feudal system is the development of technology, science, capitalism, colonialism, and finally parliamentary democracy.

In the fifteenth century, China still had a technological advantage over Europe, but the demographic-ecological pressure that existed in Europe allowed the rise of industrial production and capitalism. The gradual emergence of bourgeois parliamentary democracies represented a rare example of an increase in freedom when one looks at 6 thousand years of gradual but increasing loss of freedom throughout history. Harris believes that the "Great Leap Forward" in technology and economics was made possible because ambitious individuals were freed from political, moral, and social constraints to enrich themselves. Ambitious individuals could accumulate great wealth without worrying about having their power taken from them or having to share it with relatives or friends. In the conditions of losing the ecological basis for increasing profits, these ambitious entrepreneurs emphasized the introduction of energy-saving machines. Although these machines require higher capital investments, they reduce the unit cost of the product.

Harris's Critique of Biological Reductionism in Anthropology and Other Social Sciences

In the book Cultural Materialism, Marvin Harris discusses the bio-psychological constants that form the basis of sociobiology and believes that "The danger in postulating pan-human bio-psychological drives and predispositions is that one is tempted to reduce all sociocultural similarities to an imaginary genetic ‘biogram’… whereas most similarities as well as differences are due to sociocultural evolutionary processes” (Harris, 2001: 62). Harris proposes a very limited list of bio-psychological selective principles that form the instinctive basis of human nature:

1. "People have to eat and will generally opt for diets that offer more rather than fewer calories and proteins and other nutrients.

2. People cannot be totally inactive, but when confronted with a given problem, they carry it by expending less rather than more energy.

3. Humans are highly sexed and generally find reinforcing pleasure from sexual intercourse - more often from heterosexual relations.

4. People need love and affection in order to feel secure and happy, and, other things being equal, they will act to increase the love and affection which others give them” (Harris, 2001a: 63).

Harris believes that this list is justified because similar bio-psychological predispositions exist in most primates. However, although this list is very short, and is not specific to the human species, Harris believes that the adequacy of the list itself must be judged based on the adequacy of the theories that arise with its help. This is an essential argument in compiling any list of human biograms or discussions of the universal structure of human nature. Although Harris himself sometimes supplements this list (for example with the hypothesis that people have an innate aversion to the consumption of bitter substances) he does not attach equal explanatory importance to each of these bio-psychological principles.

Culture acts as a mediating mechanism for each of these principles. For example, when studying the use of insects as food, Harris introduces the hypothesis that eating insects played a large role in the evolutionary development of primates and humans. Based on the sociobiological methodology, we could hypothesize that insectivory is part of the human biogram. However, once adopted the cultural aversion to eating insects and similar animals will act as an extremely powerful limiting factor on human nutrition even under conditions of complete starvation. It is possible to find exceptions to each of these bio-psychological principles, but Harris believes that these exceptions do not negate their explanatory potential. The behavior of individuals in accordance with bio-psychological principles can lead to results that lead to ecological exhaustion.

The neo-Darwinian perspective views the evolution of animal social patterns as a product of the preservation and propagation of genes, but, as Harris believes, even in the simplest organisms, behavior is not solely determined genetically, and there is always a difference between behavioral genotype and behavioral phenotype. Harris accepts the concept of "inclusive fitness" when explaining the development of genetically expensive social behavior and believes that this concept enabled the explanation of the evolution of all genetically controlled variations in animal behavior in accordance with the principles of natural selection. Thus he understands the temptation of sociobiologists to apply the principles of natural selection to the explanation of human behavior but believes that natural selection simply cannot explain variation in human societies.

The basic flaw of sociobiology and other forms of biological reductionism, according to Harris, is the fact that genotypes can never explain all the differences that exist in the phenotype. A species' behavioral repertoire always contains learned responses, and these responses grow with the complexity of the species' nervous system. Behavior and genetics, in classical evolutionary theory, form a positive feedback loop. Harris cites the example of a wasp accidentally catching a caterpillar instead of a fly, making the first step toward the evolution of a wasp with an instinct to eat caterpillars. In species with a greater learning capacity, socially conditioned learning represents a radically new process by which learned responses that benefit the organism can be preserved and spread within society. In infrahuman species, behavioral innovation almost always leads to genetic change.

With the development of full cultural, symbolic, and linguistic capacities in modern humans (which according to Harris occurred only in the species Homo Sapiens Sapiens about 45 thousand years ago) "cultural repertoire can change and evolve entirely independently of feedbacks involving natural selection - that is, entirely independently of the reproductive success of the individuals responsible for innovating and propagating them” (Harris, 2001a: 122). Harris believes that the development of culture is not the result of a sudden reorganization of the human mind, but a secondary product of the evolution of neural complexity that exists in a rudimentary form in many vertebrates.

Human culture, on the other hand, is truly a complete novelty, and thus there is enormous potential for cultural evolution that is not limited by biology. Feedback between acquired behavior and genetic coupling in human ancestors in the Pliocene and Pleistocene led to a genetic predisposition for manual dexterity, as well as the development of the ability to speak. However, these processes had a paradoxical consequence: "In effect, by enhancing the capacity and efficiency of human learning functions, natural selection itself greatly reduced the significance of genetic feedback for the preservation and propagation of behavioral innovations. By progressively severing hominid cultural repertoire from the genetic coding, natural selection conferred an enormous adaptive advantage on Homo sapiens—namely, the advantage of being able to acquire and modify a vast range of useful behavior far more rapidly than is possible when genes maintain or regain control over each behavioral innovation" (Harris, 2001a: 123).

As proof of the separation of culture and genes, Harris gives the example that even the simplest human societies have tens of thousands of cultural patterns that cannot be found in any other society. On the other hand, a member of any population on the planet can adopt any form of world cultural inventory. Harris argues that sociobiologists, while not denying that most human social behavior is learned, use two principles to explain human cultures, both of which are wrong. The first principle consists in searching for cultural universals and explaining them through genetically programmed human nature, while the second principle explains cultural variations through a genetically programmed “scale” of alternatives that are turned on and off through environmental "switches" that come from the social or ecological environment.

As for the first principle, that is, the universal human nature or biogram, the basic difference between cultural materialism and sociobiology is methodological - cultural materialism tends to use the smallest possible number of human biopsychological drives in explaining human cultures, while sociobiologists' research goal is to explain every cultural universal through genetically inherited instincts. Harris then goes on to critically analyze Wilson's list of genetically controlled forms of behavior in humans. The list contains a total of thirteen forms of behavior, five of which we share with primates, while eight are unique to humans. Harris analyzes each of the individual behaviors and proves that they are not even ethnographically universal and that through the process of socialization, it is very easy to condition people to adopt different forms of behavior. Finally, Harris turns to the analysis of language. Harris essentially accepts Noam Chomsky's theory of the existence of a genetic basis for linguistic structures. He accuses sociobiologists of overlooking linguistic structures as the only essential cultural universal that is based on genetics.

Harris, however, does not see the evolution of the instinct to form linguistic structures as a limiting factor in independent cultural evolution. On the contrary, he believes that the evolution of the linguistic instinct, the neural networking that enables communication about an infinite number of classes of events, has enabled enormous variation in the human social and cultural repertoire, which is in no way genetically predisposed. As the biggest problem of the second principle of sociobiology, biological scaling, Harris sees that most cultural peculiarities cannot be explained by a genetic "Swiss army knife", which contains a suitable repertoire of diverse forms of behavior, because the biggest cultural differences between human sociocultural systems arise in the last ten thousand years, that is a period completely insufficiently long enough to develop genetically predisposed responses to specific environmental conditions. The complexity in the economic and political behavior of people in modern society is so different from the patterns of behavior in simple egalitarian groups, which represented the only form of human association until ten thousand years ago, that it is impossible to explain it by any biologically inherited scaling.

Main works

Town and Country in Brazil (1956);

Minorities in the New World: Six Case Studies (1958);

Patterns of Race in the Americas (1964);

The Nature of Cultural Things (1964);

The Rise of Anthropological Theory (1968);

War: The Anthropology of Armed Conflict and Aggression (1968);

Town and Country in Brazil (1969);

Culture, Man, and Nature: An Introduction to General Anthropology (1971);

Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture (1974);

Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures (1977);

Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture (1979, second edition 2001a);

America Now: Why Nothing Works (1981);

Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture (1985); 

Death, Sex, and Fertility: Population Regulation in Preindustrial and Developing Societies (1987);

Food and Evolution: Towards a Theory of Human Food Habits (1987);

Emics and Etics: The Insider/Outsider Debate (1990);

Our Kind, Who We Are, Where We Came From and Where We are Going (1990)

Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times (1999).