Anthropology has long grappled with the question of what drives human culture. Two of the most influential yet opposing theories in the field—interpretive anthropology and cultural materialism—offer starkly different answers.
- Interpretive anthropology, championed by Clifford Geertz, sees culture as a system of meanings and symbols that people construct and interpret.
- Cultural materialism, led by Marvin Harris, argues that culture is primarily shaped by material conditions, economic factors, and ecological constraints.
While both approaches seek to explain cultural behavior, they diverge in their methodologies, assumptions, and ultimate goals. This article explores these differences and their broader implications.
Interpretive Anthropology: Meaning Over Matter
Interpretive anthropology arose in response to earlier structuralist and functionalist approaches that treated culture as a system governed by fixed rules or biological needs. Instead, Clifford Geertz argued that culture is:
- A “web of significance” that humans construct.
- Best understood through interpretation rather than scientific laws.
- Not just behavior, but the meaning behind behavior.
Thick Description and Symbolic Meaning
Geertz’s method, known as thick description, involves deep ethnographic analysis of cultural symbols. His classic study of the Balinese cockfight illustrates this approach:
- Rather than seeing it as mere gambling or entertainment, Geertz argued that the cockfight was a symbolic ritual reflecting status, masculinity, and power dynamics in Balinese society.
- He insisted that anthropologists must "read" culture as they would a text, decoding its metaphors and symbols.
For Geertz, humans are meaning-making creatures, and anthropology should seek to understand how people experience and interpret their world rather than just catalog material conditions.
Cultural Materialism: The Primacy of Material Conditions
In direct opposition to interpretive anthropology, Marvin Harris’s cultural materialism posits that:
- Material conditions determine cultural practices, not abstract meanings.
- The best way to understand a culture is to examine its environment, economy, and technology.
- Ideological beliefs (including religion and symbolism) emerge as adaptations to practical realities.
Infrastructure, Structure, and Superstructure
Harris developed a three-tier model to explain cultural development:
- Infrastructure – The foundation of culture, including environment, economy, and modes of production (e.g., agriculture, technology, resource availability).
- Structure – The social organization that emerges from the infrastructure (e.g., kinship systems, political structures).
- Superstructure – The ideas, beliefs, and symbolic systems that rest on the first two layers (e.g., religion, art, philosophy).
For Harris, superstructure is shaped by infrastructure, not the other way around. For example:
- Hinduism’s sacred cows: Rather than seeing cow worship as a purely religious phenomenon, Harris argued that it served an economic function—cows were more valuable alive (for milk and plowing) than as meat, so religious taboos against eating them helped preserve essential resources.
This materialist approach is explicitly scientific, favoring empirical data over subjective interpretation.
Two Lenses for Understanding Culture
Interpretive anthropology and cultural materialism offer competing yet valuable perspectives on human society.
- If we want to understand how people experience their world, interpretive anthropology provides deep, nuanced insights.
- If we want to explain why cultural patterns emerge and persist, cultural materialism offers a powerful, scientific approach.
Rather than choosing one over the other, modern anthropology increasingly recognizes that both meaning and material reality shape human culture. In a complex and interconnected world, a truly comprehensive approach must account for both the symbols we live by and the material conditions that sustain them.
