Cannibals and Kings: Origins of Cultures

Front Cover
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Jul 13, 2011 - Social Science - 368 pages
In this brilliant and profound study the distinguished American anthropologist Marvin Harris shows how the endless varieties of cultural behavior -- often so puzzling at first glance -- can be explained as adaptations to particular ecological conditions. His aim is to account for the evolution of cultural forms as Darwin accounted for the evolution of biological forms: to show how cultures adopt their characteristic forms in response to changing ecological modes.

"[A] magisterial interpretation of the rise and fall of human cultures and societies."

-- Robert Lekachman, Washington Post Book World

"Its persuasive arguments asserting the primacy of cultural rather than genetic or psychological factors in human life deserve the widest possible audience."

-- Gloria Levitas The New Leader

"[An] original and...urgent theory about the nature of man and at the reason that human cultures take so many diverse shapes."

-- The New Yorker

"Lively and controversial."

-- I. Bernard Cohen, front page, The New York Times Book Review
 

Contents

Culture and Nature
3
Murders in Eden
13
The Origin of Agriculture
27
The Origin of War
45
Proteins and the Fierce People
67
The Origin of Male Supremacy and of the Oedipus Complex
81
The Origin of Pristine States
101
The PreColumbian States of Mesoamerica
127
Forbidden Flesh
193
The Origin of the Sacred Cow
211
The Hydraulic Trap
233
The Origin of Capitalism
249
The Industrial Bubble
271
Epilogue and Moral Soliloquy
287
Acknowledgments References and Notes
295
Bibliography
307

The Cannibal Kingdom
147
The Lamb of Mercy
169

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About the author (2011)

Marvin Harris taught at Columbia University from 1953 and from 1963 to 1966 was Chairman of the Department of Anthropology.  He has lectured by invitation at most of the major colleges and universities in the United States. In addition to field work in Brazil, Mozambique, and Ecuador on the subjects of cross-cultural aspects of race and ethinic relations, the effects of colonialism, and problems of underdevelopment seen in ecological perspective, Harris pioneered in the use of videotape techniques in the study of family life in this country.

Author of several books, among them the influential Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture and the popoular undergraduate text Culture, Man and Nature: An Introduction to General Anthropology, Harris wrote frequently for Natural History magazine and was a frequent contributor to the professional journals, American Anthropologist and Current Anthropology.  His others books inlcude Cannibals and Kings and Cultural Materialism.

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