[The
above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside
thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant. I
welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this
video.]
Civilizations, even the most advanced among them, are invariably strewn with mythologies, folklore, and recherche taboo. While the contemporary United States would itself provide enough material for a multi-volume study of this kind, Marvin Harris focuses mostly on pre-scientific and pre-literate peoples to answer questions like: Why do Hindus not eat cows, while Jews avoid pork instead? How do you explain the concept of the Messiah? Why was the belief in witches in medieval Europe so prevalent, and why were people so afraid of them? These bald facts have received many anthropological and sociological explanations in the past, including the one that suggests that they are simply irreducible and, therefore, unable to be analyzed. But Harris, a Marxist by conviction, necessarily must see a materialistic explanation. He looks for answers to these questions in the everyday lives and concerns of the people that entertain these beliefs. Because of this, his answers, in most instances, seem to have some bit more explanatory force than those that have preceded him.
According to Harris, the reason why we see Hindu “cow love” (his words, not mine) as odd is because we live in a very fundamentally different position with respect to cows in our day-to-day postindustrial lives. No matter the exigencies or problems in the lives of the market or our family, we can always go to the grocery story and purchase milk, butter, and meat all from a cow. However, Hindus (and he is mostly talking about Indian Hindus here) have acquired the need for an adaptive resilience in its agricultural order that we have long since shed our need for. Hundreds of millions of Indian peasants who have only one cow know that animal as the only source of milk to make it through a dry season. And if they are lucky enough to make it, it is the only thing that can pull a plow once it is time to plant or harvest crops. In short, because of the way their economy is localized around the family unit instead of our food-industrial complex, they place a different value on the cow.
Another topic Harris considers is the first-century Palestinian Judaism with its concomitant messianism. The history of this period, mainly through Josephus’ two reliable books “Jewish Antiquities” and “Bellum Judaicum,” informs us that Jesus was not unique in having the mantle of the Messiah. Between 40 B. C. and 73 A. D., Harris mentions Athrongaeus, Theudas, an “anonymous scoundrel” executed by Felix, a Jewish Egyptian “false prophet,” and Manahem. Josephus was so used to this political apocalypticism that there are even more of these figures that he does not even bother to name. A long line of Jews fashioned themselves as restorers of the Jewish state and wished to free it from the caprice of Roman satraps, with Jesus and John the Baptist being the two whose names have survived the ravages of history.
Harris’ explanation of witchcraft is appealingly commonsensical. During the early middle ages, witchcraft was not especially looked highly upon, but was never considered heretical. Over time, the Church found that they could use these beliefs to scapegoat hailstorms, outbreaks of disease, crop failure, and other ominous signs, therefore stopping people before they reached the heterodox conclusion that God might be involved in all of these negative circumstances, too. Instead of the Catholic Church wishing to root witches out of society, they used the common folkloric beliefs in sorcery to the Church’s advantage. By co-opting sorcery as a heresy, the Church was able to blame the evils of society on its more marginal, “lower” members, while at the same time seeming to want to keep both the Church and society pure. Two birds with one stone!
I can certainly appreciate the broad appeal a book like this has for non-specialists and non-scholars. That having been said, if I could change one thing about this book, it would be that Harris had taken a less flippant approach and more fully fleshed out his sources, or had a full bibliography. Off-the-cuff expressions like “cow love” and “pig hate” really tend to draw away from the authority that Harris has proven through his other work he rightly deserves.
According to Harris, the reason why we see Hindu “cow love” (his words, not mine) as odd is because we live in a very fundamentally different position with respect to cows in our day-to-day postindustrial lives. No matter the exigencies or problems in the lives of the market or our family, we can always go to the grocery story and purchase milk, butter, and meat all from a cow. However, Hindus (and he is mostly talking about Indian Hindus here) have acquired the need for an adaptive resilience in its agricultural order that we have long since shed our need for. Hundreds of millions of Indian peasants who have only one cow know that animal as the only source of milk to make it through a dry season. And if they are lucky enough to make it, it is the only thing that can pull a plow once it is time to plant or harvest crops. In short, because of the way their economy is localized around the family unit instead of our food-industrial complex, they place a different value on the cow.
Another topic Harris considers is the first-century Palestinian Judaism with its concomitant messianism. The history of this period, mainly through Josephus’ two reliable books “Jewish Antiquities” and “Bellum Judaicum,” informs us that Jesus was not unique in having the mantle of the Messiah. Between 40 B. C. and 73 A. D., Harris mentions Athrongaeus, Theudas, an “anonymous scoundrel” executed by Felix, a Jewish Egyptian “false prophet,” and Manahem. Josephus was so used to this political apocalypticism that there are even more of these figures that he does not even bother to name. A long line of Jews fashioned themselves as restorers of the Jewish state and wished to free it from the caprice of Roman satraps, with Jesus and John the Baptist being the two whose names have survived the ravages of history.
Harris’ explanation of witchcraft is appealingly commonsensical. During the early middle ages, witchcraft was not especially looked highly upon, but was never considered heretical. Over time, the Church found that they could use these beliefs to scapegoat hailstorms, outbreaks of disease, crop failure, and other ominous signs, therefore stopping people before they reached the heterodox conclusion that God might be involved in all of these negative circumstances, too. Instead of the Catholic Church wishing to root witches out of society, they used the common folkloric beliefs in sorcery to the Church’s advantage. By co-opting sorcery as a heresy, the Church was able to blame the evils of society on its more marginal, “lower” members, while at the same time seeming to want to keep both the Church and society pure. Two birds with one stone!
I can certainly appreciate the broad appeal a book like this has for non-specialists and non-scholars. That having been said, if I could change one thing about this book, it would be that Harris had taken a less flippant approach and more fully fleshed out his sources, or had a full bibliography. Off-the-cuff expressions like “cow love” and “pig hate” really tend to draw away from the authority that Harris has proven through his other work he rightly deserves.
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