Chapter 2: Cultural Materialism as a Research Paradigm

This chapter explains how cultural materialism is a deeper and more sophisticated application of Marx’s anthropological naturalism. First, it is nature-based and focuses on humans as material bioforms. Second, just as Marx began with the stark economics of the human condition (economic survival and self-propagation), cultural materialism studies the human bioform’s behavioral and reproductive survival in light of the physical, chemical, biological, and ecological constraints of the natural environment. It demonstrates that all the life-sustaining and species-propagating processes are material and economic in nature, thereby giving the “economic infrastructure” primary significance amongst all other forces and processes driving human development, as revealed in the “structure” and “superstructure.” Third, the investigation takes place through explicit, logico-empirical, inductive-deductive, quantifiable public procedures that are testable through replication by independent observers. Hence its claim to epistemic reliability and probative value. This is confirmed by its commitment to objective description, transparency, logical coherence, and openness to falsification of all its conclusions, including the claim that infrastructure is the principal interface between culture and nature. The claim to epistemic reliability and probative value is further confirmed by three anthropological case studies in this chapter.