Marvin Harris 1968

25vii26

This section is somewhat confessional, and takes me back to the atmosphere and circumstances I was embraced by between 1967 and 1972 as a graduate student at Stanford —arguably, where and when my 'career' was forged. Elements to include in the story are (1) the Systems perspective, strongly influenced by (2) the Whole Earth Catalog, leading to (3) Geography/Spatial perspectives and the Regional as a level of organization of activity, to (4) the Ecological, and (5) (via map serendipity) to Agriculture. Each of those has a bibliography, and wants a bibliographical essay to accompany the shelflist of my holdings and influences.

Stanford 1967-1972

Among the books in play in those years was Marvin Harris The Rise of Anthropological Theory (1968), a polemical doorstop of a book that one was supposed to have engaged with. My engagement at the time was cursory, and in fact I didn't explore what I'd missed until 2026, more than 50 years later, in the broader context of 'theory' to which I was directed by the final term in David's question.

...as the agent in
social evolutionary
theory

In earlier correspondence David alluded to "Boasian particularism"

...I think the main difference in the the way we understand the world is whether there are trends or patterns in history and prehistory or whether each culture is unique based on the values and beliefs and traditions that make it a differentiated culture from all the others. If I remember correctly that is what Franz Boaz argued to undermine the19th century linear and racist social evolutionary thinking he and his students reacted to while building their relativistic, subjective view of history as driven by ideas and the diffusion of ideas.

...I have never really understood Boaz's historical particularism...

...which turns out to be a phrase coined by Marvin Harris.

Reading Harris on Boas and the Boasins brought me to considering the milieu of the (German) precursors of Boas, and Windelband's distinction between 'Nomothetic' and 'Idiographic' modes of scientific thought, the 'Nomothetic' being concerned to work on general and law-like and universalizing formulations, while the 'Idiographic' mode is more concerned with variety, with the subjective and qualitative, and more with the complexities of the Story than with stating general formulations, 'Laws' that explain observed behavior. (In later parlance, the distinction between 'Emic' and 'Etic' covers much of the same territory).

I see Nomothetic and Idiographic as styles of inquiry, and my style is surely Idiographic. I think of myself as more Fox than Hedgehog, as wanting to be a knower of many things, rather than one Big Thing

Emic/Etic (a framework I first encountered in 1962, in BN Colby's Ethnoscience course, which also introduced me to 'paradigm'):

...in the emic approach the observer attempts to learn the rules and categories of a culture from the native's perspective ...depend upon informants' explanations
[/lexicon is firmly in emic territory]

...in an etic approach the observer does not use native rules and categories, but rather those derived from independent observers using agreed-upon scientific measures ...quantifiable measurements ...to develop general cultural theories without regard to whether those measurements "mean" anything to the native population

The idiographic/emic perspective has been famously derided as "butterfly collecting". Vladimir Nabokov would protest...

❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ ❧

Harris:

...During the first half of the 20th century, anthropology in the US was characterized by a programmatic avoidance of theoretical syntheses

...the strategy of historical particularism required an almost total suspension of the normal dialectic between fact and theory. The causal processes, the trends, the long-range parallels were buried by an avalanche of negative cases... (250, 251)

Here's how Harris lays out the "cultural materialism" that forms his approach to Anthropology:

societies have
On this menu, it looks like my interests have been more in infrastructure and superstructure. I think 'social evolution' would mostly fall under the output of structures.