marvin harris-theories of culture in the postmodern age
TRANSCRIPT
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.