CC/NUMBER 16 This Week’s Citation Classic °_*“"“?™ Harris M. The rise of anthropological theory: a history of theories of culture. New York: Crowell, 1968. 806 p. [Columbia University, New York, NM This book presents an extensive critical histori- | identified their intellectual pedi cal review of attempts to explain cultural dif- | Culture, Man, and Nature? (later edit ferences and similarities written from a neo- | titled Culture, People, and Nature) demon- positivist and materialist perspective known as | strated the ability of cultural materialism to cultural materialism. [The A&HCI® and the | produce an integrated set of nomothetic ex- SSCI® indicate that this book has been cited in | planations pertinent to the entire range of more than 685 publications.] biocultural and sociocultural phenomena treated in introductory anthropological text- i books. The Intellectual Ancestry of It was in the introduction to TRAT that the Cultural Materialism research strategy of cultural materialism was first given its name: cultural to denote the association with anthropology; materialism Marvin Harris Depart nti copssy to indicate the priority accorded to the mate- ee NTE rial conditions (identified in Cultural Materi- ance Ce alism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture* This book (TRAT) was a by-product of a | as the demographic, technological, eco- graduate course | gave in the Department of | nomic, and environmental infrastructure). Anthropology at Columbia in the 1960s. Crit- | But strongly convergent strategies had been ism and replacement of the prevailing ide- | developing during the 1960s in anthropolog- alist and idiographic approaches had already | ical archaeology under the rubric “The New become something of an obsession with me. | Archaeology.” As M.B. Schiffer has acknow!- 1 organized the course to show how previ- | edged, “The principle of infrastructural de- ous generations of social scientists and an- | terminism...underlies modern archaeology, thropologists had closed off the option of | at least in North America.”5 And, according pursuing a materialist and nomothetic re- | to David Thomas, “Roughly half of the prac- search strategy dedicated to the explanation American archaeologists consider of the evolution of sociocultural differences | themselves to be cultural materialists to one ies. My goal was to extricate the | degree or another.”© Despite a surge of anti- ist position from the hegemony of | scientism in the guise of “postmodern” and dialectical Marxian orthodoxy with its anti- | “interpretationist” approaches, cultural ma- positivist dogmas while simultaneously | terialism is a flourishing research st for exposing the theoretical failure of biolog- | anthropology and related disciplines.’ ical reductionism, eclecticism, historical Much to the publisher's surprise, TRAT be- particularism, and various forms of cultural | came a veritable best-seller, even though it idealism. was published in hard cover, was aimed pri- TRAT (a.k.a. RAT among graduate students) | marily at academic anthropologists, and ad- was the second book in a trilogy. The Nature | vocated a novel, quasi-Marxist research strat- of Cultural Things' provides the epistemolog- | egy. | think the chief attraction of TRAT for ical basis for materialist theories by demon- | many years was that graduate students found strating the feasibility of etic? descriptions of | that, aside from its intended value, they the human behavior stream; TRAT (1968) | could use it as a crutch to study for their formulated the theoretical principles and | qualifying examinations. 1. Harris M. The nature of cultural things. New York: Crowell, 1964. 209 p. (Cited 90 times.) 2. Headland T, Pike K & Harris M. Emics and etics: the insider outsider debate. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990, 3. Harris M. Culture, man, and nature: an introduction to general anthropology. New York: Crowell, 1971. 660 p. (Cited 135 times.) «Cultural materialism: the struggle for a science of culture. New York: Random House, 1979. (Cited 240 times.) 5. Schiffer M B. Review of cultural materialism. Amer. Antig. 48:190-4, 1983 6. Thomas D. Archaeology. Fort Worth, TX: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1989. 7. Sanderson S. Social evolutionism: a critical history. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990. 8. Johnson A & Earle T. The evolution of human societies from foraging groups to agrarian states. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987. (Cited 5 times.) Received November 6, 1990 8 ©1991 by ISI® CURRENT CONTENTS®.