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Cultural materialism is an anthropological theory championed by Marvin Harris.
The basic idea is that social institutions do not emerge at random, but rather come to be as a result of pressures surrounding the relationship between a population and its environment. Cultural materialism, growing as it does from the Berkeley tradition of anthropology, rests on a three-fold division of culture:
- Infrastructure, comprising a societies relations to the environment, particularly in regard to the means of production and human reproduction.
- Structure, the political economy of a society.
- Superstructure, or the greater, symbolic aspects of a society, e.g. art, religion.
Within this division of culture, cultural materialism argues for the 'primacy of infrastructure', or that, while each of these sections changes and affects the other two, infrastructure is in almost all circumstances the most significant force behind the evolution of a culture.
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