Explanation and Insight into Marvin Harris' "The Epistemology of Cultural Materialism"

In The Epistemology of Cultural Materialism, Marvin Harris provides a titillating discussion of the emic and etic perspectives, using examples and commentary to show how each can be a pathway to gaining insight about human behavior. While I cannot expand in detail on the entire work here, I intend to draw attention to key points and provide afterthoughts.

Harris is most well-known for his work in developing the anthropological realm of cultural materialism. A set of ideas within the umbrella of cultural ecology, cultural materialism forms distinctions between behavioral and mental events and the etic and emic perspectives to guide anthropological research. In the first sections of The Epistemology of Cultural Materialism, Harris draws on Karl Marx’s strategy to “demystify” social life by seeking to learn who individuals are not as they are perceived by others, but as they actually exist. Through the medium of Marx, Harris here is pointing to the problem that anthropologists are fallible humans, with widely varying internalized structures and mental frameworks for interpreting the world, attempting to study other humans in order to generate scientific truth. As a cultural materialist, Harris acts to remedy this problem with a twofold solution. First, Harris divides the study of human social life into behavioral and mental fields. The behavioral field is “all the body motions and environmental effects produced by such motions, large and small, of all the human beings who have ever lived,” while the mental field is “all the thoughts and feelings we humans experience with our minds.” This distinction allows us to differentiate between what is happening internally and externally with an individual. The second remedy Harris employs to the problem anthropologists have of working as humans studying humans is to recognize the emic and etic perspectives. The emic perspective elevates the native, the one being studied, while the etic perspective elevates the scientific observer’s perceptions and values this person’s divisions of social behavior.  

In introducing the terms etic and emic, Harris notes that we must be careful in using the divisions in conjunction with mental and behavioral divisions of social behavior. He charges Kenneth Pike, the coiner of the terms emic and etic (the suffixes from phonemic and phonetic, respectively), with being heavily biased towards an emic perspective. Kenneth valued the etic perspective as a stepping stone to reaching the emic perspective. Harris argues that this use should not be favored because etic analysis will only lead to insight regarding etic structure, while emic analysis will only lead to insight on emic structure. Further, one is not more epistemologically correct or “truer” than the other, but instead both emic and etic perspectives can reveal information that can be subjective or objective. Harris also dispels the idea that etic data must somehow precede emic interpretation, keenly noting that the first information acquired about an individual in a society (and thus, the society as a whole) comes from questions like “what are the people over there doing,” a method that will yield emic information before the scientific observer can categorize it using etic approaches.

Harris nears an end to his work by discussing examples that show how deciphering certain categories in his matrix of emic, etic, behavioral, and mental sociocultural fields can be challenging. He provides the example of schoolchildren regularly attending school with only one shoe on in a small Brazilian town. When Harris asked the children why they did so, they claimed that they had a sore on the foot without a shoe, despite Harris never being able to identify such sores. He falsely hypothesized that children must like to go to school barefoot. Upon further inquiry with adults however, he learned that siblings would each wear a shoe from a single pair so they could economize. This example shows how the etic/mental cross-section in the matrix can be challenging when one hypothesizes about what individuals are thinking with inaccurate information or baseless assumptions. He also cites the example of a farmer versus a scientific observer discussing how a field is watered. Neither the emic farmer nor the etic observer’s perspectives have more value than the other in this case.

 The Epistemology of Cultural Materialism provides a great, if brief, explanation of the thinking that goes into a cultural materialist approach. The divisions between the etic and emic and the behavioral and mental categories of social behavior provide a useful means to learn about culture through the individuals within a society. Harris also provides a convincing argument that the etic and emic perspectives should be valued equally on their own terms, not as stepping stones to one or the other perspective. It would be informative however if Harris had expanded on the utility of using both approaches in unison through a comprehensive methodology to learn. While I agree that etic/emic analysis leads to insight regarding etic/emic structure, it seems the yielded knowledge from these approaches does not need to remain separate in perpetuity. Perhaps with structural insight from both approaches together, more nuanced understandings of particular cultures can be acquired. This lack of unity between the etic and emic perspectives seems to be symptomatic of Harris’s dismissal of broad, cross-cultural approaches. He writes “What difference does it make if a similar belief is found in a thousand … cultures? As long as the concept is real, meaningful, and appropriate to the members of those cultures, it remains an emic concept with respect to those cultures.” Harris argues in the section this quote is pulled from, Cross-Cultural Emics, that certain societal traits should not be considered etic just because they are exhibited across multiple cultures. This is a sentiment I can support, but he fails to expand and say what he does believe qualifies as etic. I am not of the persuasion that no activity counts as etic, and the utility of recognizing patterns and noting key differences between cultures should not be ignored. For many people, the most relevant information derived from cultural anthropological research is how it relates back to their own experiences within their own culture. It is unclear from my interpretation of this essay how Harris feels about cross cultural comparison, but it seems that he finds it to have minimal value relative to the emic and etic structures of individual cultures. Still, his work here provides great insight into the cultural materialistic means of understanding human interaction.  

-Phil