C O N R A D P H I L L I P K O T T A KUniversity of Michigan
Marvin Harris, one of the most prominent contributors to20th-century anthropological theory, died on October 25,2001, in Gainesville, Florida. He taught at Columbia Uni-versity from 1953 until 1980, serving as chair of the De-partment of Anthropology from 1963 to 1966. From 1980until his retirement in 2000, he was graduate research pro-fessor of Anthropology at the University of Florida.
Harris was born on August 18, 1927, in Brooklyn, NewYork, where he grew up. He attended the Erasmus HallHigh School and then entered Columbia College. His firstexposure to anthropology came as an undergraduate there,in an introductory course taught by Charles Wagley. Thecourse spanned two semesters—physical anthropologyand archaeology the first semester, cultural anthropologyand linguistics the second. According to Harris, the basicoutline of this course could be traced back to Franz Boas.The essentials of Boas's original course, Harris liked to say,influenced later generations of Columbia anthropologistsand the four-field textbooks they eventually wrote (in-cluding his own). Although he became a severe critic ofBoas's idiographic approach and historical particularism,Harris was a staunch defender of Boas's vision of four-field
anthropology, and of the Boasian stance on race, lan-guage, and culture.
Harris went on to graduate work in anthropology atColumbia, earning his Ph.D. in 1953. Like others in his co-hort, he was trained in four-field anthropology, takingcourses and passing graduate-level exams in all the sub-fields. During his teaching years at Columbia, his col-leagues included Harold Conklin, Morton Fried, JosephGreenberg, Margaret Mead, Harold Shapiro, Ralph Soleckiand Wagley. Throughout his career, Harris addressed largequestions in and across the subfields; he admired those,like Greenberg, who did the same.
Harris is best known as the originator of cultural ma-terialism, a theoretical paradigm and research strategyaimed at providing causal explanations for differences andsimilarities in cultural behavior. Harris introduced theterm cultural materialism in his magnum opus, The Rise ofAnthropological Theory (1968)—"the RAT," as it is known totwo generations of students. First published in 1968, theRAT was eventually translated into Italian, Spanish, andMalaysian. In 1991, the Social Science Citation Index andthe Arts and Humanities Citation Index named the book a"citation classic."
The RAT was a byproduct of a graduate course Harrisgave at Columbia in the 1960s (which both ot us took).The course critiqued what he saw as prevailing idealist andidiographic approaches in anthropology. The continueddominance of such paradigms, in what he viewed as theirvarious transformations (ethnoscience, symbolic and in-terpretive anthropology, structuralism, and postmod-ernism) would concern Harris until his death. That con-cern is the theme of his last book, a series of his essaysentitled Theories of Culture in Post-Modem Times (1998).
Harris organized his course and the RAT to show thatearlier social theorists had never developed a totally satis-factory materialist and nomothetic (generalizing) researchstrategy dedicated to explaining the evolution of sociocul-tural differences and similarities. The RAT is truK a historyof anthropological theory. Through the lens of culturalmaterialism it analyzes individual theories and schools ofthought from the 18th century through the 1960s. It be-gins with the Enlightenment—the era Harris identifies asthe one in which naturalistic causal explanations of cul-tural phenomena were first established, a modern concep-tion of culture began to evolve, and materialist explana-tions of cultural similarities and differences first appeared.Harris explores the reaction against naturalism and mate-rialism and their eventual replacement by hard-core bio-logical determinism that, with the notable exception ofMarxist materialism, held sway over anthropological the-ory into the early 20th century. Franz Boas and his follow-ers rescued anthropology from biological reduction ismonly to replace it with an idiographic strategy that, fromHarris's perspective did little to advance anthropology asa scientific enterprise. This was followed by a return to ex-planatory models in the form of neoevolutionist and eco-logical approaches to the study of culture.
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The RAT ends with chapters on cultural evolutionismand cultural ecology, which Harris saw as coming closestto the paradigm he was proposing. While admiring a no-mothetic cultural evolutionary approach, he faulted LeslieWhite for his lack of interest in environmental variationand for his emphasis on symboling and culturology. Theanthropologist treated most favorably in the RAT wasJulian Steward, whose combined interests in cultural evo-lution and cultural ecology, and whose concept of theculture core, came closest to Harris's own model oftechno-environmental determinism.
Although the RAT used cultural materialism as a frame-work for evaluating previous theories, the full elaborationand defense of Harris's approach was realized in CulturalMaterialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture (1979).(Like the RAT, it was reissued in 2001.) The yardstick Har-ris used in the RAT to evaluate specific theories andschools of thought was the degree to which they aided theunderstanding of cross-cultural similarities and differ-ences. In his view, cultural materialism is the theoreticalparadigm best able to achieve that goal. Cultural material-ism evolved from and was influenced by a number oftheoretical currents including evolutionary theory, cul-tural ecology, and Marxist materialism. Harris acknowl-edges his debt to all of them, especially the last. But heemphatically separates his own model from dialecticalmaterialism, as well as from the program for political ac-tion that is so closely associated with Marxist materialism.
Cultural materialism "is based on the simple premisethat human social life is a response to the practical prob-lems of earthly existence" (Harris 1979:ix). This statementhighlights the central tenet of cultural materialism: infras-tructural determinism—the assumption that explanationsfor cultural similarities and differences ultimately lie inthe material conditions of human life. A society's infra-structure (or material base) is its system of production andreproduction, which is determined by a concatenation ofecological, technological, environmental, and demographicvariables (1996). The study of a society's infrastructure in-vestigates "how people obtain food and shelter, maintaina population base, and satisfy other basic biological andemotional needs and drives" (Harris and Johnson 2000:vi). Asociety's infrastructure, in turn, shapes its structure andsuperstructure. A society's structure is comprised of its do-mestic economy (social organization, kinship, division oflabor) and its political economy (political institutions, so-cial hierarchies), while its superstructure consists of "theideological and symbolic sectors of culture; the religious,symbolic, intellectual and artistic endeavors" (Harris andJohnson 2000:vi).
The study of infrastructure should be a "strategic pri-ority" because it is "the principal interface between natureand culture." If the goal of science is to establish law-likegeneralizations, then one should begin by studying thoseaspects of sociocultural systems "under the greatest directrestraints from the givens of nature" (1979:57). But Harrisdoes not hold that all changes in sociocultural systems
stem from alterations in their infrastructures, nor does hesuggest that structure and superstructure are mere passivereactors or, in his words, only "insignificant, epipheno-menal reflexes of infrastructural factors" (1979:72). Never-theless, if structural or infrastructural changes are notcompatible with the existing modes of production and re-production, they are "unlikely to be propagated and am-plified" (1979:73).
Cultural materialism holds that over time and in mostcases, changes in a society's material base will lead to func-tionally compatible changes in its social and politicalstructures, along with modifications in its secular and re-ligious ideologies (1999). The ultimate goal of cultural ma-terialism is to explain, not merely describe, cultural vari-ations in the way people live.
Within this model, Harris distinguished emic and eticapproaches to the study of cultural data. In an emic ap-proach the observer learns the cultural rules and categoriesfrom the native's perspective. If informants agree on a de-scription or interpretation of data, the data are consideredaccurate. With the etic approach, by contrast, the observerdoes not use native rules or categories, but rather those de-rived from independent observers using agreed-on scien-tific measures. Quantifiable measurements such as fertilityrates, caloric intake, or average rainfall are employed in or-der to develop general cultural theories without regard towhether those measurements "mean" anything to the na-tive population.
Harris also viewed cultural materialism as a vehicle forunderstanding and solving contemporary social problems.After all, before such problems can be solved, they must beunderstood. In his words, "if it be anthropology to strug-gle against the mystification of the causes of inequalityand exploitation, long live anthropology" (1979:340).
Harris published 17 books, collectively translated into14 languages. He applied his theoretical principles in sev-eral popular books written in an accessible style (1974,1977, 1981, 1985, 1989). In all of them Harris attempts toprovide scientific explanations for what he calls "the rid-dles of culture," an approach that made him both highlyinfluential and controversial. He also wrote two widelyused introductory textbooks that have gone through sev-eral editions each, Culture, People, Nature (1997) and CulturalAnthropology (2002, with Orna Johnson).
Harris carried out field research in Brazil, Mozam-bique, India, and the United States. His ethnographicstudy of Minas Velhas in Bahia state yielded Town andCountry in Brazil (1956) and a chapter in Race and Class inRural Brazil (Wagley 1952). Wagley, Harris's dissertationchair and long-time collaborator and associate at Colum-bia and Florida, was a coauthor of Minorities in the NewWorld (1958).
Harris did groundbreaking work on race. Patterns ofRace in the Americas (1964) is a systematic comparison,using a cultural materialist framework, of the divergentracial patterns that emerged in Brazil, the United States,the Caribbean, and highland Latin America. Harris took
Obituaries 687
particular issue with "cultural heritage" and national char-acter explanations of racial patterns, particularly those ad-vanced by historian Frank Tannenbaum for the Caribbeanand by Brazilian social theorist Gilberto Freyre for Brazil.Freyre had stressed the role of Portuguese national charac-ter in forming Brazilian race relations, and indeed in creat-ing a "new world in the tropics," based on a penchant forracial tolerance and mixture. Harris argued persuasivelyfor the role of material conditions in forming the patternsof race in different parts of the Americas. He also took is-sue with Freyre's contention that slaves received more hu-mane treatment in Brazil than in the United States, sup-posedly because of differences in Portuguese and Englishnational character, religion, and attitudes toward non-Europeans. Harris confronted the harsher dimensions ofBrazilian race relations. While providing a vivid descriptionof racial prejudice in Minas Velhas, he also showed thatprejudice did not necessarily translate into systematic dis-crimination. Again, he took issue with the notion that at-titudes and temperament are the best predictors of behavior.
Harris is well known for his work on Brazilian racialclassification, especially his research on the multiple racialcategories in everyday use throughout Brazil and their re-lation to the categories used in the Brazilian census. Thelast fieldwork he conducted, in the early 1990s, took himback to Minas Velhas, where he worked with the Braziliansocial anthropologist Josildeth Consorte. Their field teamconducted an experiment, operating like census takers andusing random samples of residents (see Harris et al. 1993).One sample was asked to self identify with reference to thefour terms used in the official census; for another sample,the common term moreno ("brunet," an intermediate colorterm) replaced the official term pardo ("brown," an inter-mediate color term). Harris found that when given the op-tion of choosing moreno rather than pardo, many moreBrazilians classified themselves as mixed race, and therewere fewer self-identified whites. Harris hoped to convincesociologists and others who routinely make use of Brazil-ian census data of the serious overestimation of the white,and underestimation of the mixed, segments of the na-tional population.
Writing with Conrad Kottak (1963) Harris coined theterm hypodescent to contrast U.S. and Brazilian racial classi-fication. With hypodescent, mixed children (e.g., thosefrom a union between an African American and a Euro-American) are always assigned to the minority category.Hypodescent did not operate in Brazil, where racial classi-fication was based more on phenotype and social percep-tions, and where full siblings could be classified as mem-bers of different social races (to use a term coined byWagley 1968).
In 1955-56 Harris traveled to Mozambique to studyacculturation among the Ba Thonga. He was critical ofRadcliffe-Brown's classic article "The Mother's Brother inSouth Africa" (1952), questioning its extensionist interpre-tation and already seeking a materialist alternative. Oncein Mozambique Harris became more interested in politics
and did not complete his planned fieldwork. Nevertheless,he did later offer a convincing materialist alternative toRadcliffe-Brown's extensionist explanation for the SouthAfrican avunculate (1968:527-530).
Harris wrote of Mozambican oppression and advo-cated independence for the country in Portugal's African"Wards" (1958), an important but barely known publica-tion. According to Antonio de Figueiredo, who served ashis informal assistant in Mozambique, Harris's "one-yearfield study in Mozambique in 1955-56 and his subsequentdenunciations of the plight of Africans under Portugueserule decisively influenced the abolition of the forced laborsystem a few years later. He had a close friendship withEduardo Modlane, who gave up his own academic careerin America to lead Frelimo, the Mozambique liberationmovement" (2001). Modlane would become the firstpresident of independent Mozambique.
Harris's field work in India was inspired by the read-ing he did to write "The Cultural Ecology of India's SacredCattle" (1966). Again attacking the primacy of the ideo-logical over the material, Harris was concerned with dem-onstrating the many roles that sacred cattle play in Indianecosystems. He interpreted the Hindu doctrine of ahimsaas using the full force of religion to conserve a vital re-source—the sacred cow. In Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches(1974), arguably his most influential popular book, Harristurned his materialist gaze on other "riddles of culture,"including the Jewish and Muslim taboos against pork.
Cannibals and Kings (1977), another fascinating read,took a historical/diachronic view of some of these casesbut extended Harris's analysis to new riddles of culture.The most prominent was Aztec cannibalism, which he in-terpreted in the context of protein shortages because ofthe lack of significant animal domestication in Mesoameri-ca. This position led to an exchange with Marshall Sahlins,whom Harris faulted for what he saw as a conversion froma more materialist evolutionism to Levi-Straussian structu-ralism. Good to Eat (1985) was an attack on Levi-Strauss'scontention that classificatory systems involving food ta-boos could be understood mainly because they were "goodto think." Harris argued that a better approach is to seeanimals first as food for the body rather than the mind.Harris's popular books also showed his enduring fascina-tion with the Yanomamo, principally as described by Na-poleon Chagnon. He rejected Chagnon's initial sociopoli-tical explanation for Yamomamo warfare, as well asChagnon's subsequent use of explanatory models fromhuman evolutionary ecology. Harris insisted that proteinshortages provided the best explanation for Yanomamoraiding patterns.
Our Kind (1989) completes a quartet of Harris's booksaimed at explaining riddles of culture. His renown spreadbeyond academic circles through these readable, intrigu-ing, and controversial works. Harris liked to compare theriddles of culture to potato chips—no one can eat just one.Whenever he offered a solution for one riddle, someonewould say "yes, but what about X?" Of the books in the
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quartet, Our Kind is most like a bag of potato chips; Harrisprovides very short explanations for dozens of cultural rid-dles.
Also popular was Harris's account of the services andinformation economy in his 1981 book originally entitledAmerica Now, later republished as Why Nothing Works, Har-ris's original choice for the title. He sought to highlightand explain the deficiencies of an economy shifting fromheavy goods manufacture to services and information. Us-ing his consistent cultural materialist framework, Harrisshowed how changes in the economy were reflected inU.S. social organization (marriage, the family, gender roles,and sexual relations) and ideology.
Harris was a major force in training students in thescience of anthropology. At Columbia and later at Florida,his popular theory courses were filled with hard-drivingdebates and students who found his critical style invigo-rating. His concern with the direction the Columbia de-partment was taking during the late 1970s led him toleave that university and his Leonia, New Jersey, home tomove to Gainesville. Having earned an early reputationfor combativeness in defense of his theoretical principles,Harris mellowed in Florida. There he spent several moreproductive years teaching, training students, writingbooks, and practicing his skills in architectural planningand carpentry. For many years Marvin and his wife Made-line summered on the Maine coast on Great Cranberry Is-land. Guests at their home were treated to memorable din-ners, day-long fishing trips, and sunset cocktail cruisesaboard the Maddy Sue, Marvin's 36-foot "lobster yacht"built in 1932.
Always a strong proponent of four-field anthropology,Marvin Harris served as President of the General Anthro-pology Division (GAD) of the American AnthropologicalAssociation (1988-90). Concerned about the fragmenta-tion and compartmentalization of anthropology, he andhis successors established GAD as the strongest voice offour-field anthropology within the AAA. The AAA recog-nized his academic achievements by inviting him to givethe 1990 Distinguished Lecture.
Harris's influence extended beyond cultural anthro-pology. As David Hurst Thomas has noted, "roughly halfof the practicing American archaeologists consider them-selves to be cultural materialists to one degree or another"(1989:120). As a result of the forcefulness of his ideaselaborated in his many publications, Harris's theoreticalparadigm has become one of the best known in contem-porary social science.
Marvin Harris is survived by Madeline Harris, his wifeof almost fifty years, his daughter, Susan Harris, and manystudents, including the authors of this obituary.
REFERENCES CITEDFigueiredo, Antonio de, with Allan Burns
2001 Marvin Harris: Making an Impact in Brazil and Mozam-bique. Guardian, December 13, 2001. Electronic document,http://education.guardian.co.uk/obituary/story/0,12212,750138,00.html, accessed March 2003.
Harris, Marvin1952 Race Relations in Minas Velhas. In Race and Class in Ru-
ral Brazil. Pp. 47-81. C. W. Wagley, ed. Paris: UNESCO.1956 Town and Country in Brazil. New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press.1958 Portugal's African "Wards": A First-Hand Report on La-
bor and Education in Mozambique. New York: AmericanCommittee on Africa, Inc.
1964 Patterns of Race in the Americas. New York: Walker andCo.
1966 The Cultural Ecology of India's Sacred Cattle. CurrentAnthropology 7:51-66.
1974 Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture.New York: Random House.
1977 Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures. NewYork: Random House.
1979 Cultural Materialism-. The Struggle for a Science of Cul-ture. New York: Random House.
1981 America Now: Why Nothing Works. New York: Simonand Schuster.
1985 Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture. New York: Si-mon and Schuster.
1989 Our Kind: Who We Are, Where We Came from, andWhere We Are Going. New York: Harper and Row.
1997 Culture, People, Nature, 7th edition. New York: Ad-dison Wesley.
1998 Theories of Culture in Post-Modern Times. WalnutCreek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Harris, Marvin, Josildeth G. Consorte, Joseph Lang, and Bryan Byrne1993 Who Are the Whites? Ernies and Etics of the Racial De-
mography of Brazil. Social Forces 72:451-462.Harris, Marvin, and Orna Johnson
2002 Cultural Anthropology. 5th edition. Boston: Allyn andBacon.
Harris, Marvin, and Conrad P. Kottak1962 The Structural Significance of Brazilian Racial Catego-
ries. Sociologia 25:203-209.Harris, Marvin, and Charles W. Wagley
1958 Minorities in the New World. New York*. Columbia Uni-versity Press.
Radcliffe-Brown, A. R.1952[1924] The Mother's Brother in South Africa. In Struc-
ture and Function in Primitive Society. Pp. 15-31. A. R. Rad-cliffe-Brown, ed. New York: The Free Press.
Thomas, David Hurst1979 Archaeology. Fort Worth, TX: Holt, Rinehart and Win-
ston.Wagley, Charles W.
1968J1959] The Concept of Social Race in the Americas. InThe Latin American Tradition, Charles Wagley, ed. Pp.155-174. New York: Columbia University Press.
