Cultural Materialism: A Theoretical Review

Abstract

A review of the principles of cultural materialism (a synthesis of Marx's causal primacy of the infrastructure and Darwinian mechanisms of natural selection), this paper addresses certain substantive and metatheoretical problems of contemporary anthropology. A position paper, it is written from the standpoint that cultural materialism offers the most powerful and productive set of premises extant in the discipline for the explanation of cultural similarity and difference, stability and change, and for the nonidiosyncratic formulation—and potential falsification—of the broadest possible comparative and diachronic propositions. The implications of this position for disciplinary and subfield relationships in the social sciences are explored.

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