Marvin Harris’s Threefold-Based Cultural Materialism
Discussion
Jonathan Rowson on:
* Marvin Harris’s Cultural Materialism: Infrastructure, (social) Structure, Superstructure
"Marvin Harris is an anthropologist and author of a field-creating book called Cultural Materialism published in 1979, a year after Popper’s Tanner lecture, and it’s a hefty tome propping up my laptop as I write. While I have known about Popper since the late nineties, I only came upon Harris when I noticed around 2022 that Daniel Schmachtenger kept referring to “infrastructure, structure and superstructure”. This trio refers to the relationship between the technological and economic base of society (infrastructure), relations of creation and production (social structure which Harris sometimes unhelpfully calls ‘structure’) and culture, norms, values, metaphysics, religion (superstructure).
As far as I can tell, Harris is trying to temper Marx’s economic determinism by moving away from the ‘economic base determines cultural superstructure’ claim with a more fluid analysis that says culture is shaped by many things that all have some material basis, including social structure, ecology, demographics and technology. He says little about class struggle, so it’s as if he’s trying to bring Marx’s historical materialism into anthropology through a filter to make it more palatable.
Harris believes that material conditions shape the world. Much that appears to be driven by something other than ‘infrastructure’ often stems from a material need or aspiration in disguise. He is known for arguing that sacred cows in Hinduism are only ‘sacred’ because they are too economically valuable to be killed, and, similarly, that cannabilism among the Aztecs was driven not by a need for ritual slaughter but by protein deficiency. You have to admire his chutzpah. Harris has examined these cases more closely than I have, but be assured that not everyone agrees with him. His writing is trenchant and impressive in some ways - he is an intellectual assassin par excellence, full of statements like the following:
Principles of production and reproduction probabilistically determine the form of domestic and political economy, which in turn probabilistically determine the form of the behavioral and mental superstructure. - (Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture, 1979)
On reflection, Marvin Harris is not my cup of tea. His work feels too reductionist and totalising to inspire trust, and he effectively ignores individual interiority and agency. In the preface to Cultural Materialism, it becomes clear that Harris’s enemies are “mystification and obscurantism in contemporary social science”, but I’ve heard some version of that quasi-positivist complaint before. Harris’s problem is the lack of scientific status for his discipline, anthropology, and his ‘enemies’ are the kinds of interpretative or symbolic anthropological theorists people love(!) like Clifford Geertz who sees anthropology as being closer to a form of literature than a science (“Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that we ourselves have spun.”).
I include Harris here partly because if he’s right, then the major determinant of our world-historical moment is technology in general, and perhaps AI in particular, and there are many who think that. Even if he is right about that however, it doesn’t follow that what we need is primarily different technology, or a new economy. In fact, considering Harri’s threefold structure helped me understand myself and Perspectiva’s purpose better, though in a curious and roundabout way.
As an undergraduate back in the late nineties, I learned that a key debate within Marxism is whether major societal change stems primarily from the economic base (system!) or the cultural superstructure (souls!) and that the answer to that depends to an extent of on the social structure (society!) and the extent to which it is aware of itself in ‘class consciousness’, particularly whether classes ‘in-themselves’ could become classes ‘for-themselves’. Jean Paul Sartre later developed this latter issue as the problem of serialisation which is relevant to the challenge of field formation in the post-conventional community which informs my work. But I had forgotten all about it.
When I became aware of this debate again, it was quite a shock to realise that in my work for Perspectiva over the last decade, I had been unwittingly responding to Marx.
What prompted my initial interest in bringing spiritual questions into public policy debate around 2011 was noticing that we lacked the imaginative and creative resources to contend with the ecological, economic and political problems we have created for ourselves. The social imaginary we were caught up in felt exhausted, partly because too many of the doors to different kinds of cosmologies were locked, too many hidden spiritual resources that were not permissible to contend with in the public realm. All available intellectual energy went on discussing the economic base and took the cultural superstructure for granted, or paid lip service to it, and that's partly because the postmodern culture of the time did not feel generative (people were too busy watching Seinfeld). My growing conviction, in Popper’s terms, was that we needed World 3 to remember the importance of World 2.
In recent years I have faced the opposite challenge. Today I often work with people who over-emphasise the need for a new collective imaginary. Even a brilliant mind like Iain McGilchrist’s is, with the greatest of respect, sociologically ambivalent. And when I met Jordan Peterson, I challenged him to articulate his sociological vision, which he doesn’t have. Many smart people distrust changes to the economic base and somewhat over-emphasise (in my view) the relative importance of changes in superstructure i.e. the perception and appreciation of certain kinds of disposition and culture. They tend to say that what matters is the quality of perception lies behind or within a particular social or political vision. I have some sympathy for that, but I also feel it places too much emphasis on one aspect of reality.
This discussion matters because effective collective action at scale needs to involve the co-arising of changes in three worlds - I believe this idea becomes self-evident to anyone who thinks deeply about the possibility of transformative social change. There is however an important strategic question about their relative importance, which is where Marvin Harris’s almost exclusive emphasis on infrastructure (‘systems change’ or changing ‘Big Tech’) poses an interesting challenge.
On this interpretation and extrapolation of Harris, Big Tech is now a defining aspect of a broader pattern of, let’s say, rentier extractive capitalism (infrastructure/system) that is atomising society, creating cultural polarisation and undermining civic capacity (social structure/society) leading to alienation, anxiety, loneliness and depression (superstructure/soul). Some hope to change the technology/economy for instance through regulation or a new government, and thereby to change the social structure, which in turn will change our subjective states where joy and suffering arise. Yet others believe a countervailing direction of influence is necessary because a full frontal attack on infrastructure will be too easily repelled. For instance, an educational renaissance may begin to form online with offline sites (society) offering transformative aesthetic, civic and cultural education or Bildung at scale (souls); and that may co-arise with peer-to-peer cosmo-local production fuelled by renewable energy or bioregional regeneration combined somehow with relatively benign versions of AI and/or Web 3.0 (systems) giving rise to meaning, purpose, solidarity, friendship and love…
Sounds good! But how is anything like that going to happen? It seems to me that it can only happen if the changes somehow co-arise and inform and empower each other. Otherwise, each of the different changes will lack the power to establish themselves before countervailing forces with different priorities take hold – before systems of structures of various kinds (regardless of your model) ensure that our immunity to change kicks in. As argued previously through the three-horizons model, only a robust movement coalescing around an H2plus method will keep us out of the H2minus vortex. This is the work, and why we need new methods, supported by a new field, informed by work in the three worlds. That’s my day job."
(https://jonathanrowson.substack.com/p/the-threeness-of-the-world-3)