I don't see how you can write anything of value if you don't offend someone.
Marvin HarrisCounter-culture celebrates the supposedly natural life of primitive peoples. Its members wear beads, headbands, body paint, and colorful tattered clothing; they yearn to be a tribe. They seem to believe that tribal peoples are nonmaterialistic, spontaneous, and reverently in touch with occult sources of enchantment...
Marvin HarrisTags: of-the-dear-hipster-notes
In many ways the rise of the state was the descent of the world from freedom to slavery
Marvin HarrisThe availability of domesticated animal species played an important role in the prohibition of cannibalism and the development of religions of love and mercy in the states and empires of the Old World. Christianity, it may yet turn out, was more the gift of the lamb in the manger than the child who was born in it.
Marvin HarrisHindus and Westerners alike see in the meat-eating taboos of India a triumph of morals over appetite. This is a dangerous misrepresentation of cultural processes. Hindu vegetarianism was a victory not of spirit over matter but of reproductive over productive forces.
Marvin HarrisTags: vegetarianism morals meat culture hindu
Many humanists and artists recoil from the proposition that cultural evolution has hitherto been shaped by unconscious impersonal forces. The determined nature of the past fills them with apprehension as to the possibility of an equally determined future. But their fears are misplaced. It is only through an awareness of the determined nature of the past that we can hope to make the future less dependent on unconscious and impersonal forces. In the birth of a science of culture others profess to see the death of moral initiative. For my part, I cannot see how a lack of intelligence concerning the lawful processes that have operated so far can be the platform on which to rear a civilized future. And so in the birth of a science of culture I find the beginning not the end of moral initiative. Let the protectors of historical spontaneity beware : if the processes of cultural evolution are what I have discerned, they are morally negligent to urge others to think and act as if such processes did not exist.
Marvin HarrisI hold it perniciously false to teach that all cultural forms are equally probable and that by mere force of will an inspired individual can at any moment alter the trajectory of an entire cultural system in a direction convenient to any philosophy. Convergent and parallel trajectories far outnumber divergent trajectories in cultural evolution. Most people are conformists. History repeats itself in countless acts of individual obedience to cultural rule and pattern, and individual wills seldom prevail in matters requiring radical alterations of deeply conditioned beliefs and practices.
At the same time, nothing I have written in this book supports the view that the individual is helpless before the implacable march of history or that resignation and despair are appropriate responses to the concentration of industrial managerial power. The determinism that has governed cultural evolution has never been the equivalent of the determinism that governs a closed physical system. Rather, it resembles the causal sequences that account for the evolution of plant and animal species.
Page 1 of 1.
Data privacy
Imprint
Contact
Diese Website verwendet Cookies, um Ihnen die bestmögliche Funktionalität bieten zu können.