Cultural Materialism: A Theoretical Review

Abstract

A review of the principles of cultural materialism (a synthesis of Marx's causal primacy of the infrastructure and Darwinian mechanisms of natural selection), this paper addresses certain substantive and metatheoretical problems of contemporary anthropology. A position paper, it is written from the standpoint that cultural materialism offers the most powerful and productive set of premises extant in the discipline for the explanation of cultural similarity and difference, stability and change, and for the nonidiosyncratic formulation—and potential falsification—of the broadest possible comparative and diachronic propositions. The implications of this position for disciplinary and subfield relationships in the social sciences are explored.

Intensification: a Late Pleistocene‐Holocene archaeological sequence from Southwestern Victoria

“…But clearly in Australian archaeology we have not sorted out our differences especially regarding how we will associate what were once social lives with what is now material evidence. I refer the interested reader to Barbara Price's (1982) essay on cultural materialism as the most recent good shot in the debate and urge that no matter what direction our theoretical heads follow we not lose sight of the reality of the ~rc.haeological record or try to fit It mto uncomfortable raiment.…”

Institutional Adaptation and Community-Based Conservation of Natural Resources: The Cases of the Tao and Atayal in Taiwan

“…The cases of the Tao and Atayal illustrate the complicated process of institutional adaptations not only as a response to harsh material environments, as cultural materialism has argued (Price 1982;Ross 1978), but also as a response to outside influences. Deep-rooted informal restrictions on appropriation and consumption of local resources may have been developed over long periods of time in response to material conditions and have unintended conservation effects, as shown in the case of the Tao.…”

“…As argued in the anthropological literature on cultural materialism, material conditions shape social institutions and human behaviors (Price 1982). While this functionalist perspective helps explain the existence of specific social institutions related to resource use, it is not particularly helpful in explaining how social institutions evolve, especially when the changes are not associated with changes in the physical world.…”

Of bleeding skulls and the postcolonial uncanny: bones and the presence of Nonosabasut and Demasduit

“…This recognition of the 'agency' (Gell, 1998;Knappett and Malafouris, 2008;Williams, 2004) or 'force' (Bennett, 2004) of things does not seek to redress the seeming imbalance between subjects and objects by asserting, in the manner of cultural materialism (Price, 1982;Harris, 2001Harris, [1979), the irreducibility of matter as a 'given' (or set of givens) that directs and delimits the work of culture. In contrast, 'thing' theorists (Brown, 2001) emphasize a non-deterministic 'onflow' (Thrift, 2007: 5) of everyday life, the complex affective entanglements between various entities and the open processes of becoming by which objects and subjects emerge and hold themselves, with a lesser or greater degree of durability and stability, distinct from and related to one another (Halewood, 2005).…”