UJAK

Marvin Harris: theories of culture in the postmodern age

Theory of Culture

Fernando Jesús García Hípola

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Contents 1. Definitions ............................................................................................................................. 2

2. Emis and Etics Perspective .................................................................................................... 5

3. Nature of social facts and holism .......................................................................................... 7

4. Science, Objectivity, Morality................................................................................................ 9

Biology and Culture: Breeds .............................................................................................. 9

Biological interpretation of inequality ............................................................................ 10

5. Neo-Darwinism .................................................................................................................... 12

6. Ethnomania ......................................................................................................................... 14

7. Cultural Materialism ............................................................................................................ 17

8. Postmodernism ................................................................................................................... 19

9. Origins of the collapse of communism and capitalism ....................................................... 21

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1. Definitions

For some sociologist a culture consists of the values, motivations,

norms and dominant ethical and moral content in a social system. For

others, culture encompasses not only the values and ideas, but the

whole set of institutions by which men are governed. For Marvin

Harris, a culture is socially learned way of life found in human societies

and covers all aspects of social life, including thought and behavior. But

there is a debate whether culture is the only transmission of ideas, or

rather of the behaviors and attitudes that can be caused by ideas or

not.

In sociology seems to be widely believed that ideas are the only thing

to be transmitted between generations. Some sociologists and Durham

are in this position, "Durham is not alone: most contemporary

anthropologists maintains that culture consists exclusively of ideals or

mental entities shared and socially transmitted as values, ideas, beliefs

and related". Durham gets the term "meme" used by Richard Dawkins

in his book The Selfish Gene. A meme is the minimum unit of

information in the brain that is transmitted from generation to

generation, and that influence behavior. But the behavior would not

influence the ideas, a position with which Marvin Harris disagrees. The

reason that the behavior does not influence these ideas as

anthropologists is that the behavior is transitory, perishable, while

ideas are eternal in the sense of being transmitted.

Marvin Harris attacked this idea: ideas are ultimately rules of the form

"if ... then" transmitted from generation to generation. However,

humans seem to develop a lot of conflicting and contradictory rules

that do not respond to this transmission. He gives the example of a

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wedding in Micronesia. "Parents must crouch or crawl on the floor with

a married daughter who is sitting, can not initiate any action in his

presence, should avoid talking abruptly, take your requests and will

never do violence, even in response to provocation. But Goodenough

himself attended at least one case of a father who violated these rules

and ended his married daughter giving her a resounding slap. Explain

this erratic behavior of the father because he had discovered his

daughter returning from a tryst. Such conduct itself violated a number of

rules "

Another problem with the postulated 'ideas guide behavior lies in the

contradictory behavior is observed when large amounts of both

individuals try to meet certain standards. For example: Closer to our

environment, traffic jams are another example of unpremeditated

consequences of collective compliance. To my knowledge, there is no

rule stating that the traffic should be concentrated to its collapse. On

the contrary, the rules that apply to driving try to ensure rapid and

secure movement of a particular destination.

On the other hand, have been cultural manifestations in animals that

lack the ability to develop and communicate ideas, such as some

species of monkeys. Therefore, culture can not only must the

transmission of ideas, but of behavior.

Arguably ideas guide behavior in the short term, but it is the behavior

that leads to long-term ideas. In the early twentieth century, the basic

rules of marriage and gender roles stipulated that, after marriage,

women should withdraw from the paid labor, become housewives,

fathering three or more children and stay married to the same

husband for the rest of his days. The ideas associated with this

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behavior still enjoyed widespread and deeply rooted well into the

1970s. However, the behaviors themselves began to change in the

1950s, as women were impelled to join the workforce in response to

the changing economy.

The ideas are disseminated tough the communication behavior

through imitation. Thus, ideas can be indirectly borne by imitation, if

the behavior of the transmitted form gives rise to the idea. For

example, a person may imitate cleaning habits others. Over time, that

person will eventually develop the idea to be cleaned to get

comfortable, but that does not mean that the idea had at first been

developed simply by the habit of behavior, as a hobby.

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2. Emis and Etics Perspective

Cultures can be studied from two points of view: an approach is from

the perspective of the participant and the other from the observer.

Studies focused from the perspective of the participant generate emic

descriptions and interpretations. Focused from the point of view of the

observer generate descriptions and etic interpretations.'s Emic

statements are those of the participants of a culture online and

collaborate on the values that are , for their part, are etic statements of

a given culture scholar trying to find objective information about that

culture. The distinction between emic and etic was introduced by

Kenneth Pike to explain the differences between phonetic and

phonemic aspects of the language.

Although Etic is closely related to objectivity, it is not emic subjectivity.

Thus, objectives emic studies that simply describe the reality of a

culture can be made without analyzing. That is, the emic is the

objectivity of what it states not as a universal fact, but as a contingent

fact that it is. Emic studies also found when asked to explain a cultural

particularity with no written record of their reasons. The

interpretations can be different: for example, two different

interpretations Sablins faced Marshall (1995) Genanath Obeyesekere

(1992) about what was happening in the minds of Hawaiians when

they killed the famous English explorer Captain James Cook in 1779.

The first says that he was mistaken for a God who in the Hawaiian

religion was evil, the second believes that Native thought it was a rival

boss, and that was the cause of his murder. Both interpretations are

equally supported by the evidence, but only one will be correct course.

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It is interesting how cultures often create emic etic statements to mask

a statement. Certain habit that is contradictory to the beliefs of that

culture is created, but that it becomes necessary, to justify, emic

reasons are created when in fact the reasons are different, which can

be revealed by emic interpretations. For example, in some primitive

cultures the term is "Windingos" to designate certain people that

dangerous monsters to be killed became. An anthropological study

found that actually Widingos were annoying or psychological problems

to society than were killed in times of scarcity people to avoid

problems.

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3. Nature of social facts and holism

One can distinguish two opposite movements: methodological holistic

and methodological individualists:

Methodological individualism holds that social and cultural

phenomena to be explained solely in terms of data on individuals. In it

we find Karl Popper, Friedrich Hayek the economist Adam Smith and

indirectly.

The methodological holism has among other members to Emile

Durkheim, Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer, Auguste Comte and, ultimately,

the "artificial animal" of Thomas Hobbes. Methodological holistic

sociocultural argue that life is a level higher than outside and

individuals subject to the phenomena in question phenomena. Thus,

society and culture and its constituent parts exist before individuals

whose only option is to participate in the institutions and learn the

roles that society has assigned them. Three propositions can

summarize the ideas of holism:

• The whole is less than the sum of its parts and can not be reduced to

them.

• The whole determines the nature of its parts. .

• The parties can not be understood if studied independently of

everything.

The problem is that holism is very abstract. Everyone has seen a tree, a

table as a whole. But no one has directly seen the culture, society as a

whole. It individualists wrongly infer that such concepts are really just

abstractions of man and do not have any sense. However, such entities

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really exist just as this tree can exist, this table: just to know that we

have to use indirect methods. Electrons, for example, can not be

observed directly, but by indirect means and astute scientific

reflections. The same applies to entities such as culture, society. The

whole and its parts are mutually determined.

One can distinguish several types of Holism:

Functionalist holism: The whole is greater than the sum of its

parts, not the whole determines the nature of its parts. as the

nature of the parties does not determine everything, and the

whole can be understood independently.

Omni-Holistic compression: tries to give equal weight to the

different parts.

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4. Science, Objectivity, Morality

A problem in sociology today is the desperately looking for objectivity,

and thus begin to some sociologists argue that the researcher should

not morally or emotionally involved in their studies to not bias the

results. This has led to the emergence of an anti-positivist movement

that totally rejects the scientific method in the social sciences that

dehumanize people. They argue that sociology has to have political and

philosophical implications, and that the results should not be criticized

simply load it. Marvin Harris believes that the correct posture is to

stick to objectivity in sociology at the time of performing the studies,

but not abandon political activism and the fight against injustice.

Biology and Culture: Breeds

The biologism is a movement that rejects education planning or have

an influence on how cultures are formed, and that heredity is the main

responsible. A great part of this school argues that humanity is divided

into races, which are subdivided into inferior and superior races. The

disappearance of the superior races is an inevitable long-term natural

selection. Franz Boas was one of the most sociologists struggled to

combat these ideas. For example, showed that major differences is

given in some cultures belonging to individuals of the same race with

cultures of individuals of different races. Race is therefore not a valid

taxonomic category from the biological point of view to describe the

human peoples. However, this only serves to affirm that there are no

races in the sense etic (objective). But there are races in the emic

sense, i.e., in different cultures there are criteria to categorize the

different races.

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Biological interpretation of inequality

Some biologists and psychologists have used the IQ to justify social

inequalities. One example is the Harvard psychologist Richard

Hermstein and political scientist Charles Murray, who published The

Bell Curve. The book not only advocates the immutability of IQ, but

advocates a permanent structure classes involved intelligence-based

inequalities. Distinguish three segments in society: the cognitive elite,

composed of individuals with high IQ and they tend to have a higher

socioeconomic status, the middle class, with normal IQs, and the

under-class, consisting of those who are below normal IQ, and they

tend to live in increasingly precarious conditions. Weather tends to

increase the distance between the under-class and the cognitive elite,

and there will be a time that will lead to an undesired state: the

cognitive elite will impose tougher laws and more intellectually

challenging conditions for the under-class, leading ostracism. The

authors assume that Thus, the lower the IQ of a group, the worse the

work is, the higher the rate of unemployment, increased poverty and

economic impoverishment, etc.. The authors propose as a solution to

learn to live with inequality "finally, the cognitive elite and middle

classes will be aware of the fact that the under-class is not smart enough

to function effectively in the postmodern social environment increasingly

complex and technical. Arise a new and more realistic attitude about

inequality, according to which the secular doctrine of the Enlightenment

that we can all achieve and implement equality disappears. "To achieve

the infra-class living side inequality, we must teach they do not try to

get wealth, as there will be scope for their lack of intelligence. Instead,

to promote clandestine institutions to fool the infra-class into believing

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that occupy a good sociological level. These are the points that defend

Harvard Hermstein Richard and Charles Murray:

• simplify the rules, remove bureaucracy. There are too many forms to

fill, too many regulations, too much fine print. Cutting red tape and

remove offices. Diminish the power of the cognitive elite, the only one

that takes advantage of the complexity. Make clear early and criminal

justice. Concentrate on a few crimes under, in the opinion of those who

all are evil.

• Return to marry his only legal range. Marriage and family are

establishing the facts giving rise to as many people rated low

intelligence positions. The ability to have sex without marriage

confuses said estate

Of course the theory of these authors is absurd. It has been shown that

IQ is malleable, and that there are many other kinds of intelligence

besides IQ. In addition, today we find in the upper classes people with

low levels of intellectual factors, there are also physicists, philosophers

with a good education who are unemployed.

A refutation that can be done to these authors is the Flynn effect:

Studying intelligence tests performed in the U.S. Army, the

psychologist James R. Flynn warned that recruits who were in the

media regarding his contemporaries were above average compared to

previous generations of recruits. The Flynn effect occurs too quickly to

be justified by genetic processes which require several generations.

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5. Neo-Darwinism

Part of the neo-Darwinist tries to explain culture through the evolution

theory of Darwin. For example, For example, a neo-Darwinian

explanation of the laws that promote the ability of a sovereign to

become rich and powerful is to be rich and powerful gives more

opportunities for sexual pairing and thus leads to greater reproductive

success.

Three main objections can be raised to the neo-Darwinian theories of

culture. The first is that cultural selection often does not encourage

innovation in behavior and ideas that enhance reproductive success.

The second is that such success (although it could be shown

theoretically that determines cultural selection) is almost impossible

to measure in human populations. And the third is that every neo-

Darwinian explanation is facing a more economical and less needy

Cultural materialist explanation of data on reproductive success.

For example, the neo-Darwinian theories predict that higher-income

families should have more children, when it really does not matter. The

reason that the wealthy classes have high birth rates should be

explained in sociological terms, not biological. For example, polyandry

is the activity for which in some cultures one woman marries several

men. The etic explanation is that this woman can not have so many

children, and so the inheritance will only pass a person from

generation to generation, preserving the wealth of the lineage.

However, if it is satisfied Marvin Harris some research biologists

movements. "According to the theory of the supreme practice fodder,

environmentalists proposed for nonhuman species, these studies

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reveal that, in most cases, foragers tend to choose, after finding them,

those plants and animals that give them the greatest net energy yield

in relation to the time spent on look for, prepare and process. "

Addressing the issue of sexual inequality in some societies have

developed certain theories of biology:

"Dickeman is based on the model developed by Richard Alexander

(1974), which predicts that female infanticide is more common in

societies in which women espouse men of high rank, and less likely in

societies where women marry men of lower rank. The logic is as follows:

when men trust that male babies reach adulthood, their reproductive

fitness tends to be higher than women, because men can make many

more women reproductive acts. Therefore, when men have good chance

of social success, given its excellent living conditions (when they are rich

and powerful), enhanced reproductive success of parents will be achieved

by investing in children, not daughters. Moreover, in classes and lower

castes, where survival of men carries many risks, reproductive success is

enhanced by investing in girls, not, of course, the children. "

Marvin Harris poses an alternative from the point of view of cultural

materialism: "fact that female infanticide practiced by groups who can

well afford to raise many more children than they actually breed. Since

the adoption, the practice of female infanticide among elites can not be

explained in terms of enhancing reproductive fitness. In my opinion,

the whole system is one of many cultural stratagems aimed at

preventing excessive reproductive success undermine the privileged

position of a small number of rich and powerful families "

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6. Ethnomania

The ethnomania is defined as the interest of a cultural group for its

origins, history and traditions, neglecting the other groups believe that

it is inferior. Marvin believes Harrris etnomani is a fact to be avoided.

Biologically we have said that there is no differentiation between

human races. So what is the difference between the emic races and

cultural sense? Each culture sets its own criteria: in the western race,

for example, you can call it black to have a black skin color, i.e. it caters

to the physical aspect. In other cultures can be the criterion used is the

country to which it belongs. Would you say an American man with blue

eyes and curly blond hair is truly born Chinese in China?

One approach that seems common to every culture is "worth a drop of

blood." That is, to determine that a person belongs to a certain race,

just having a more or less close ancestor of that race. For example,

imagine a person who looks black, but do not know for sure if it is. So if

an ancestor was indisputably black, we say it is black. If not, do not tell.

Of course this approach is unfair and does not have a biological basis.

Given the discrimination that black people have suffered throughout

history there has been a ethnomania defending blacks against white,

and still just as discriminatory. This view has been defended by some

sociologists, some black and some not.

One reason they give this group of sociologists to defend the

superiority of the black race as "the myth of culture stolen." For them,

the Greco-Roman culture, which is where Western culture is based, is

actually plagiarized from the Egyptian. It also considers that there is

historical evidence that the Egyptians were black. Marvin Harris

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disagrees, and says, "Geography and ecology, not race, justifying why

when Stonehenge, the largest megalithic construction in Britain was

erected in 1100 to take. C, the Great Pyramid of Cheops had already

been erected 1,700 years. Early developments in Egypt, Mesopotamia,

India and China owes much to their location in large fertile basins

surrounded by arid lands unsuited for agriculture, and the dependence

of their populations gigantic irrigation works under government

control. "

Indeed, Egypt's culture needed to be irrigated. The facilities could only

be provided by an as large as the state, centralized structure. This led

to the development of civilizations dry.

Another ethno-manic theory is that this melanin in the skin of blacks

can pick and decode cosmic rays and act as an infrared telescope. This

explains the incredible knowledge that the Dogon people of West

Africa region have about the existence of a star accompanying Sirius,

which is invisible to the naked eye and that European astronomers

discovered until the invention of the telescope. Theory sociologically

and biologically absurd.

Albino theory, which has more scientific credibility, explain the origins

of the white man and the black man. The black man would come

directly from Cro-Magnon man. Meanwhile, the white man would have

evolved Neanderthal. Neanderthals had to spend a long time in a global

icy caverns. To ward off the cold, developed smaller penises, lower

height and an irascible and violent, and that social life was not as

prevalent in caves. "Psychological. Skin color

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is an adaptive trait to the problem of balancing the positive and

negative effects of solar radiation, which on one hand can cause skin

cancer and, second, to favor the synthesis of vitamin D. "However, no

biological studies that refute this hypothesis .

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7. Cultural Materialism

Cultural materialism distinguishes three structures in a cultural system

is divided:

Infrastructure: The set of materials that make up a culture

media, for example, hospitals, the people themselves.

Structure: is the system of relationships established in various

infrastructure components. For example, the economy.

Superstructure: set of symbolic values and beliefs present in a

culture system. And society. For example, religion.

Law of the primacy of the infrastructure: There is a fundamental

principle of cultural materialism that argues that changes in the level

of infrastructure to help improve living conditions will always be

positively received by the population, but in contradiction with the rest

of levels. Is masking the emic etic explanations why we talked about

earlier. In turn, changes in the structure and superstructure will be

discarded if they contradict infrastructure. For cultural materialists

like Harvin Harris, this is the principle governing the history of

civilizations and societies. Any trait that we find in the traditions,

religion, history respond to a positive innovation in the infrastructure

level.

"For example, if we look at the recent process of change in Iran

beginning with the overthrow, we might think that we are in presence

of a categorical refutation of the primacy of the infrastructure. It could

be argued that "religion is in control", as is the Islamic revival that

toppled the shah and brought the mullahs to power. But the systemic

origins of these events are not in the Islamic ideology that brought

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Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran from exile in France. Must go back to the

despotic and exploitative colonial infrastructure that Iran was imposed

after the Second World War, as well as opposition to the attempt by

Western oil companies gain control of Iranian oil reserves. "That is,

find the root causes of change to infrastructure level. P t seems that

there are causes to superstructural level (religion) because it is aligned

with the causes of infrastructural level to not conflict with them.

It seems that research supports the law primacy of long-term

infrastructure but not short-term. In the short term appears to be more

appropriate to explain social change through a probabilistic

determinism.

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8. Postmodernism

Postmodernism is a movement or intellectual orientation that stands

in antithesis of modernism. Of the defining characteristics can

emphasize the discrediting of Western science and technology. Is a

response to positivism in the twentieth century, and the establishment

of the scientific method in sciences such as sociology and other

humanities disciplines. Other features are:

• The representation of social life as a "text."

• Raising the text and language to the level of fundamental phenomena

of existence.

• The application of literary analysis to all phenomena.

• The questioning of reality and the adequacy of language to describe

reality.

• The contempt or rejection of the method.

• The rejection of general theories. The invocation of the multiplicity of

disparate voices.

• The priority given to power relations and cultural hegemony.

For postmodern science is an ideological product. We found

representatives of this movement Prancoís Lyoterd Jean-Paul DeMan,

Jacques: Derrida and Michel Foucault. Thus, postmodernists associate

science and reason to domination and oppression of totalitarian

regimes. Science, to find the best possible response streak diversity

and leads to intolerance. . Postmodern From the point of view of the

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"reasonable" methods are always brutally unfair to someone. The post-

modern attempt to replace science and reason with emotion, feelings,

introspection, intuition, autonomy, creativity, imagination, fantasy and

contemplation. Marvin Harris criticizes postmodernism: he believes

that the scientific method has been the one that has helped greatly to

the advancement of sociology in the S XX.

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9. Origins of the collapse of communism and capitalism

Modern sociology has sought to explain the origins of capitalism. Since

capitalism in Japan was developed independently from the case of

Europe, any theory that seeks to explain the origins of capitalism must

explain both cases, Europe and Japan.

Current theories suggest that the cause of the rise of capitalism we find

in decentralizing states. In centralized states emerged a class of

bureaucrats who did not help the development of capitalism. Also

important is the development of maritime trade (common in Japan and

Europe), and the emergence of capitalism in small states. Technological

advances made both in Europe and in Japan, although they were not

the same, if they were parallel.

As for the decline of communism, Marvin Harris believed that the

cause was not the failure of Marxist theory, but that was not applied

properly in the Soviet Union. For him, that was not really communism,

as a dictatorship of the proletariat was created without the proletariat,

so the economy stagnated. By the law of primacy of infraestrucura,

communism was advocad to failure:

"The Soviet political economy failed because of its inability to accept

the disappearance of her based on heavy industry and infrastructure

innovations curtailed because that would have allowed an increasing

overcome technological, demographic, environmental and economic

crisis infrastructure."

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Bibliography:

Harris, Marvin (2004). Theory of Culture in Posmoderm times.

Barcelona: Crítica.