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Topic: Cultural materialism

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	DISCIPLINES & SUBDISCIPLINES - CULTURAL MATERIALISM
		Cultural Materialism is a scientific research strategy that prioritizes material, behavioral and etic processes in the explanation of the evolution of human socio-cultural systems.
		Cultural materialists are concerned with causality in socio-cultural systems and believe it may be sought through the study of the material constraints that human societies are subjected.
		Cultural materialism does not see all cultural change as resulting from dialectical contradictions, but argues that cultural evolution results from the gradual accumulation of useful traits through a process of trial and error.
	www.indiana.edu /~wanthro/theory_pages/Materialism.htm (1312 words)

	Spartanburg SC \| GoUpstate.com \| Spartanburg Herald-Journal
		Leslie White and Julian Steward and their theories of cultural evolution and cultural ecology were instrumental in the reemergence of evolutionist theories of culture in the 20th century and Harris took inspiration from them in formulating cultural materialism.
		Cultural materialism is a scientific research strategy and as such utilizes the scientific method.
		Cultural materialism asserts that sociocultural phenomena usually do not emerge at random, through the interplay of ideas, or because of particular social structures, but rather probabilistically result from pressures in the relationships between a population, its economy, its technology, and its environment.
	www.goupstate.com /apps/pbcs.dll/section?category=NEWS&template=wiki&text=cultural_materialism (1525 words)

	Materialism
		Materialism can refer either to the simple preoccupation with the material world, as opposed to intellectual or spiritual concepts, or to the theory that physical matter is all there is. This theory is far more than a simple focus on material possessions.
		Materialism as a philosophy is held by those who maintain that existence is explainable solely in material terms, with no accounting of spirit or consciousness.
		Materialism, at its simpler level, involves the focus on material "things" as opposed to that which is spiritual or intellectual in nature.
	www.allaboutphilosophy.org /materialism.htm (613 words)

	American Materialism
		To White, "culture evolves as the amount of energy harnessed per captia per year is increased, or as the efficiency of the instrumental means of putting the energy to work is increased" (Bohannan and Glazer 1988:340).
		Materialism, in anthropology, is methodologically and theoretically opposed to Idealism.
		That is to say, a particular culture in a given envirnoment maybe less complex, both technologically and socially, in the general evolutionary scheme; however, this particular culture may, at the same time, be the best adapted (i.e., most efficient at harnessing energy) to their environment.
	www.as.ua.edu /ant/Faculty/murphy/material.htm (1834 words)

	New Historicist & Cultural Materialist Theory
		CULTURAL MATERIALISM: originated with the English critic Raymond Williams, who sought to describe a form of critical activity in the Marxist tradition that remains a materialism but avoids the trap of attempting to understand all cultural activities as mere effects of the economic base.
		There are (at least) two ways of using the word "culture." The analytic one is used in the social sciences and especially anthropology: it seeks to describe the whole system of significations by which a society or a section of it understands itself and its relations with the world.
		Cultural Materialism draws upon the analytic sense of "culture," and it includes work on the cultures of subordinate and marginalized, non-hegemonic groups (like schoolchildren and women and gays and people of color and skinheads, etc.), and on cultural forms (like television, popular music, and fiction, etc.).
	www.calvertonschool.org /Waldspurger/pages/new.htm (946 words)

	Cultural Materialism (Marvin Harris) - book review
		At the centre of cultural materialist epistemology is the distinction between the emic and the etic (roughly that between mental processes and symbolic structures on the one hand and observable physical and behavioural phenomena on the other) and a concern that the study of the latter take epistemological precedence over the former.
		This is not unique to cultural materialism, however, and the latter's distinguishing feature is a division of culture into infrastructure (ecological and biological constraints, modes of production), structure (kinship, politics) and superstructure (religion, art), coupled with a belief that this ordering reflects the dominant direction of causality.
		The critique of the doctrinaire and idealist elements of dialectical materialism is to be applauded.
	dannyreviews.com /h/Cultural_Materialism.html (1597 words)

	Marvin Harris' Cultural Materialism
		Cultural materialism is an ecological- evolutionary systems theory that attempts to account for the origin, maintenance and change of sociocultural systems.
		The foundation of Harris' theory of Cultural Materialism is that a society's mode of production (technology and work patterns, especially in regard to food) and mode of reproduction (population level and growth) in interaction with the natural environment has profound effects on sociocultural stability and change.
		MARVIN HARRIS, 74, provocative mainstream anthropologist who promoted "cultural materialism," the idea that human social life forms in response to practical problems; in Gainesville, Fla. Among his theories: Aztec cannibals were protein-deprived; warfare was a way of curbing populations when protein became scarce; and a necktie signaled that a man was above physical labor.
	www.faculty.rsu.edu /~felwell/Theorists/Harris/Index.htm (1312 words)

	Homepage of Khaled Hakami
		Cultural materialism focuses on how the emics of thought and the behavior of a native population are the results of etic processes (i.e., observable phenomenon).
		Cultural materialism focuses on the etics of thought and the etics of behavior of a native population to explain culture change.
		That is to say, a particular culture in a given environment maybe less complex, both technologically and socially, in the general evolutionary scheme; however, this particular culture may, at the same time, be the best adapted (i.e., most efficient at harnessing energy) to their environment.
	homepage.univie.ac.at /khaled.hakami (9199 words)

	Recent Trends in Anthropological Thought
		The emergence of cultural ecology as an area within anthropology is formally associated with the publication of Julian Steward's "Theory of Culture Change" in 1955.
		Cultural Materialism is a scientific research strategy that accords priority to the material, behaviour and etic processes in the explanation of the evolution of human socio-cultural systems.
		Stimulated by the Cultural Materialism of Marvin Harris, and retaining the basic conception of Infrastructure, Structure and Superstructure, Magnarella insists they stand for different set of contents and relationships in Human Materialism (1993: 4).
	pksingh_ranchi.tripod.com /id6.html (1471 words)

	Freccero: Renaissance/Cultural/Studies: Pre- and Post-
		Cultural Studies with a capital "c" has come to the United States as a discipline in and of itself already, primarily from the United Kingdom, specifically the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham during the years that Stuart Hall, a Black British Marxist sociologist was there.
		It aims precisely to delegitimize the notion of "high culture," the notion that is that there is a hierarchy of cultural forms (low to high) and that only high art merits canonization, notions to which a field as "elite" as Renaissance Studies has in fact devoted itself.
		In any case, early modern cultural materialism came to be associated primarily with English departments and with English Renaissance literature in part because of the hegemony enjoyed by the New Historicism in English departments in the 1980s.
	web.gc.cuny.edu /renaissancestudies/Cultstudies/freccero.htm (1598 words)

	williams (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-29)
		While he is largely responsible for that branch of cultural studies known as cultural materialism, his work is also central to cultural studies in both England and the United States.
		Cultural studies, a wider application, uses the theories and methods of literary criticism to probe the depths of culture both through literary study and through the study of other "texts" of society.
		Through this criticism the ethos of cultural studies aspires to be both independent and representative; in its opposition to the social mainstream it is critical, but in speaking for that mainstream it is cultural.
	athena.english.vt.edu /~amjones/eagleton/williams.htm (669 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-29)
		Cultural Materialism identifies three universal components in all societies: infrastructure, structure, and superstructure, as shown in Figure 1 below.
		Harris’ Cultural Materialism approach was based on his belief that anthropology is a science.
		A famous example of Harris’ Cultural Materialism approach is the analysis of sacred cows in India.
	www.mnsu.edu /emuseum/cultural/anthropology/Harris.html (411 words)

	SSRN-The Self-Organization of the Cultural Subsystem of Modern Society by Christian Fuchs
		Cultural development is based on a dialectic of enculturation and deculturation, continuity and variation.
		Fundamental cultural change is the result of class struggles that aim at the accumulation of economic, political, and cultural capital.
		Cultural development is related to the whole capital structure and the related whole ways of struggle of modern society.
	papers.ssrn.com /Sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=504262 (469 words)

	Marxist Feminism/Materialist Feminism
		Materialism was also used as "a flag," to situate Socialist Feminism within feminist thought and within the left; materialist feminism, Vogel argues, cannot therefore be reduced to a trend in cultural studies, as some literary critics would prefer.
		Discourse and knowledge have materiality in their effects; one of the material effects of discourse is the construction of the subject but this subject is traversed by differences grounded in hierarchies of inequality which are not local or contingent but historical and systemic, such as patriarchy and capitalism.
		Materialism (i.e., the Marxist method), she argued, is the only theory of history that views oppression as the most fundamental reality; this is why women and all oppressed groups need it to examine their situation: "to start from oppression defines a materialist approach...
	www.colorado.edu /Sociology/gimenez/work/rphil.html (4852 words)

	Essay Express, Term papers, Pg.3, 071029
		The paper explains that one of the most persuasive theories in its analysis and relationship with empirical understanding is the theory of cultural materialism.
		The paper attempts to dissect cultural materialism to give a broader contextual understanding of why this theory is the most plausible explanation for current socio-cultural events and environments.
		Materialism directly contradicts dualistic theories which claim that body and mind are distinct entity and also directly attacks philosophical idealism which denies the existence of matter.
	www.termpapers.essayexpress.com /lib/essay/0_3.html (2569 words)

	Cultural Materialism
		In the contemporary political context, idealism and eclecticism serve to obscure the very existence of ruling classes, thus shifting the blame for poverty, exploitation, and environmental degradation from the exploiters to the exploited.
		Cultural materialism opposes cultural idealism and eclecticism because these strategies, through their distorted and ineffectual analyses, prevent people from understanding the causes of war, poverty and exploitation.
		Cultural materialism holds that the elimination of exploitation will never be achieved in a society which subverts the empirical and operational integrity of social science for reasons of political expediency.
	www.cultural-materialism.org (2741 words)

	Studying Societies and Cultures - Blackwell Online
		It explores cultural materialism's epistemology and its relation to rational choice theory, Darwinian social science, and population pressures.
		The chapters explore cultural materialism's epistemology and its relation to rational choice theory, Darwinian social science, and population pressures.
		Cultural materialism, scientific anthropology, epistemology, and "narrative ethnographies of the particular" by H. Sidky
	bookshop.blackwell.co.uk /jsp/welcome.jsp?source=rss&isbn=1594512876 (692 words)

	glbtq >> social sciences >> Cultural Studies
		Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the forms, practices and experiences of contemporary cultural life.
		Indeed, many of the key figures in the early development of cultural studies were committed Marxists and one of their central objectives was to show how the culture of everyday life functions as a site of hegemony, the reproduction and naturalization of social power structures.
		Unlike traditional approaches where the audiences of mass culture are regularly assumed to be abstract collectives that passively imbibe the meanings of cultural commodities, cultural studies insists on both the diversity and agency of cultural consumers.
	www.glbtq.com /social-sciences/cultural_studies.html (657 words)

	Culture and Capitalism
		This course provides a rigorous introduction to theories of cultural materialism and how they could be employed in the everyday management of design.
		Students will gain a strong background in forms of cultural analysis that have become increasingly important in design and gain access to tools necessary to evaluate the strengths and weakness of materialist approaches to culture.
		Next, we will trace the influence of cultural materialism on anthropology in the late 1960s and the development of English, Australian and American cultural studies from the late 1950s through the present.
	www.stanford.edu /~jlabov/Culture_Materialism_Design.html (1193 words)

	Highbeam Encyclopedia - Search Results for materialism
		materialism In sociology and related disciplines, the word materialism has three quite distinct meanings which are, however, to some extent interconnected, and very commonly confused with each other.
		In theory dialectical materialism is meant to provide both a general world view and a specific method for the investigation of scientific...
		In the philosophy of mind, one form of materialism, sometimes called central-state materialism, asserts that states of the mind are identical to states of the human brain.
	www.encyclopedia.com /SearchResults.aspx?Q=materialism (684 words)

	Karl Marx
		In anthropological theory the main political and scientific developments of materialism sometimes are distinguished respectively as dialectical materialism and cultural materialism.
		Cultural evolutionism has been invigorated by the cultural-materialist attempt to understand culture, and culture change, as reflecting the actual conditions--demographic, environmental, and technological--in which people, as creatures, struggle to survive and reproduce:
		Cultural materialism holds that innovations are unlikely to be propagated and amplified if they are functionally incompatible with the existing modes of production and reproduction--more unlikely than in the reverse situation (that is, when there is an initial political and ideological resistance but none in the modes of production and reproduction).
	www2.truman.edu /~rgraber/cultev/marx.html (588 words)

	harris
		Thus cultural materialism shares with other scientific strategies an epistemology which seeks to restrict fields of inquiry to events, entities, and relationships that are knowable by means of explicit, logico-empirical, inductive-deductive, quantifiable public procedures or "operations" subject to replication by independent observers.
		Cultural materialists are committed to the idea that "etic behavioral modes of production and reproduction probabilistically determine the etic behavioral domestic and political economy, which in turn probabilistically determine the behavioral and mentic emic superstructure." (56).
		In a sense, he is a better man than his commitment to science and to cultural materialism, and his fierce morals lend his intellectual systems their attraction.
	www.lehigh.edu /~cmp8/worksinprogress/summary/harris.html (1181 words)

	Undergraduate Guide to Critical Theory
		Cultural Materialism is primarily concerned with issues of class, economics, and commodification.
		New Historicism is also more specifically concerned with questions of power and culture (especially the messy commingling of the social and the cultural or of the supposedly autonomous self and the cultural/ political institutions that in fact produce that self).
		Cultural Materialists are interested in the points of rupture in the grand narratives of Western historians, i.e.
	omni.cc.purdue.edu /~felluga/theoryframes.html (3960 words)

	Realism and cultural materialism
		"Culture is used in the service of the status quo," says Marx; however, according to Pickett, it is not so much culture that is used in the service of the status quo, but rather the genre, and subsequent economy, of culture.
		If one examines cultural materialism, one is faced with a choice: either reject Sontagist camp or conclude that sexual identity has intrinsic meaning, but only if neotextual patriarchial theory is invalid; otherwise, Baudrillard's model of realism is one of "predialectic rationalism", and therefore intrinsically dead.
		Marx uses the term 'cultural materialism' to denote the absurdity, and thus the fatal flaw, of dialectic sexuality.
	blacky2poe.w.interia.pl /debordistsituat/realismandcultu.html (1369 words)

	Culture is ordinary: Raymond Williams and cultural materialism
		Cultural materialism was always, for Williams, a Marxist theory - an elaboration of historical materialism.
		The implications for cultural work are vast: imagine relating Howard Barker's plots to the contemporary demographics of theatre-going, or setting the rise of Zoe Ball in the context of the economics of the BBC.
		Cultural studies - a discipline whose existence owes much to Williams - has scratched the surface of this approach to the arts, but following it through is a daunting prospect.
	www.users.zetnet.co.uk /amroth/scritti/williams.htm (2175 words)

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