Exam 12: Contemporary Materialist and Ecological Approaches

According to Harris, the true test of an "etic" analysis of culture is that it is not only scientific, but that it also makes sense and is meaningful to a member of that culture.

According to Harris, "etic" descriptions are those of an outside scientific observer, and are used by the scientific community to generate and strengthen theories of sociocultural life.

Political ecology accepts the basic premise of Malthusian thinking that population growth is the ultimate cause of environmental degradation.

While there are differences between Harris and Marx, both use the concept of a "mode of production" in an identical fashion.

Abortion and other forms of population control are largely unknown outside of industrialized societies.

Timothy Earle's archaeological and ethnohistorical research from Hawaii tends to support Wittfogel's idea that irrigation agriculture leads to the development of a society with centralized, managerial power.

Harris and Marx differ fundamentally in their attitude toward Malthus, with Marx rejecting the notion that there is a "universal law" of population growth for all societies.

The imposition of new taxes by Dutch administrators in colonial Java led to rapid population growth, as peasants sought to increase the amount of labor available to their households.

According to Julian Steward, a major factor leading post-war anthropologists to a materialist perspective was growing up in the Depression and service in World War II.

Evidence from most societies bears out the Malthusian idea that human populations grow right up to their environment's carrying capacity, after which they decline due to war, disease, and famine.