CULTURAL CONTINGENCIES: A REVIEW OF MARVIN HARRIS'S CANNIBALS AND KINGS¹

Abstract

What other people do gives rise to endless gossip, usually accompanied by reactions of curiosity and moral judgment. We want to know why people act as they do. Concurrently, we want further or fewer occurrences of those actions and thus we comment on the degree of their propriety. Mostly the action alone, its topography, suffices for us to call it right or wrong. But sometimes we wait until we find out why the person (or group) behaved in that manner. Whether or not this mitigates our disapproval or mutes our approval, attempting to relate action to cause puts us in the position of scientist rather than moralist. Take for example the following actions: Contemporary hunter-collectors ... possess. .. many mechanical techniques for inducing abortion. .. such as tying tight bands around the stomach, vigorous massages, subjection to extremes of cold and heat, blows to the abdomen, and hopping up and down on a plank placed across a woman's belly 'until blood spurts out of the vagina." (p. 15) Infanticide runs a complex gamut from outright murder to mere neglect. Infants may be strangled, drowned, bashed against a rock, or exposed to the elements. More 'Harris, M. (1977). Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures. New York: Random House. xii + 239 pp., including index. (Reprinted 1978 as First Vintage Books edition.) Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are from Cannibals and Kings (1977 ed.). The description of Harris's thesis often quotes his argument or paraphrases it closely, but this presentation is more unequivocal than his; phrases such as "tends to," "could have," "almost always" have been dropped for the sake of exposition. Reprints may be obtained from Ernest A

O Estudo Da Cultura Pela Análise Do Comportamento E a Obra De Sigrid Glenn

“…Nessa ocasião, Glenn emprega conceitos do Materialismo Cultural (nomoclone, permaclone, sistema permaclônico) para definir uma metacontingência e a diferencia dos termos "contingências culturais" (usado por ela mesma e por outros) e "megacontingências" (Vargas, 1985). As características principais do conceito permanecem inalteradas em relação à sua publicação anterior: "Metacontingências são relações contingentes entre práticas culturais e produtos destas práticas .…”

Review of Cultural Contingencies: Behavior Analytic Perspectives on Cultural Practices, Edited by Peter Lamal

“…Although contributions of this sort were part of behavior analysis soon after its inception (e.g., Skinner, 1948Skinner, , 1953, they only emerged as a disciplinary practice in the 1980s. Among these interpretations and analyses were reviews of Marvin Harris's (1977Harris's ( , 1979 texts on cultural anthropology (Lloyd, 1985;Vargas, 1985), conceptual syntheses of Harris's (1974Harris's ( , 1983 work with that in behavior analysis (e.g., Malagodi, 1986;Malott, 1988), the emergence of the concept of the "metacontingency" (Glenn, 1988), and the founding of the journal, Behavior Analysis andSocial Action (est. 1986), now Behavior andSocial Issues (1991-present).…”

Self‐conscious Behavior Analysis

“…Notable examples are the work of Marvin Harris within anthropology (Lloyd, 1985;Vargas, 1985), of J. J. Gibson in the field of visual perception (Costall, 1984), and of the community of behavioral ecologists within biology (Crawford, 1986). Other allies can be recognized through their critiques of cognitivist theory from other perspectives (Crossman, 1985;Zuriff, 1985).…”