Marvin Harris

Marvin Harris was an American anthropologist who founded cultural materialism, a theoretical approach holding that the material conditions of a society, its technology, environment, and modes of production and reproduction, exert primary causal influence over its social structure and ideology, which he treated as adaptive responses rather than independent forces. He applied this framework to explain seemingly irrational cultural practices in materialist terms, most famously arguing in works such as Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches (1974) that India's Hindu prohibition on killing cattle and the Middle Eastern taboo on eating pork were rational ecological adaptations rather than arbitrary religious beliefs. Harris's insistence on grounding cultural explanation in measurable material and ecological factors made him one of the most systematic and widely read materialist theorists in anthropology, as well as one of its most contested.