"Cultural Materialism is the strategy I have found to be the most effective in my attempt to understand the causes of differences and similarities among societies cultures."

"Marx had come closest in the nineteenth centur to being the Darwin of the social sciences."

"Because Marx's materialism is wedded to Hegel's notion of dialectical contradictions, Engels gave it the name dialectical materialism."

Karl Pearson - one of the founders of the discipline of mathematical statistics - "the provable is the probable"

"Positivism is the name which the nineteenth century social philosopher Auguste Comte gave to the scientific way of knowing."

"Hume's anti-metaphysical position was elaborated and defended during the first half of the twentieth century by the philosphical movement known as logical positivism."

"For Kuhn, scientific revolutions occur as a result of 'anamolies' encountered by the practitioners of normal science. The practioners find themselves unable to solve a growing number of problems, which leads to a crisis, which in turn provides the opportunity for the rise of a new paradigm. Kuhn, however, has no theory as to why one paradigm rather than another should triumph at a particular time."

"Kenneth Pike formed the words "etic" and "emic" from the suffixes of the words phonetic and phonemic."

"Phonetic accounts of the sounds of a launguage are based upon a taxonomy of the body parts active in the production of speech utterances and their characteristic enviornmental effects in the form of acoustic waves."

"...emic accounts of the sounds of a language are based on the implicit or unconscious system of sound contrasts that native speakers have inside their head and that they emply to identify meaningful utterances in the language."

(etic=surface or sound - emic=meaning or intention)

"The road to etic knowledge of mental life is full of pitfalls and impasses. Extreme caution is called for in making infrerences about what is going on inside people's heads."

"A society for us is a maximal social group consisting of both sexes and all ages and exhibiting a wide range of interactive behavior. Culture, on the other hand, refers to the learned repertory of thoughts and sctions exhibited by the members of social groups - repertories transmissible independently of genetic heredity from one generation to the next."

Marx - "The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness".

Infrastructural Determinism

"Infrastructure, in other words, is the principal interface between culture and nature."

Hero of Alexandria

"Marx left the problem of objectivity unresolved. Lacking the concepts of emic and etic operations and indiscriminately mixing mental and behavioral phenomena, he bequeathed a heritage of Hegelian dialectical double talk now being pushed to extremes by new-wave Marxists."

"...cultural materialism asserts the strategic priority of etc and behavioral conditions and process over emic and mental conditions and processes..."

"Nomothetic explanations deal with recurrent types of conditions, general causes, and general effects."

"The astonishingly rapid floresence of art and architecture at early neolithic sites such as Catal Huyuk and Jericho suggests that when neolithic economies were based on both agriculture and stock raising they were exremely efficient and that their standard of living quickly (if temporarily) rose beyond that of the terminal hunter-gatherers."

manioc

"It is always cheaper to produce obedience through mystification than through police-military coercion."

"The demystification of the world religions begins with this simple fact: Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam prospered because the ruling elites who invented or co-opted them benefited materially from them. By spiritualizing the plight of the poor, these world religions unburdened the ruling class of the obligations of providing material remedies for poverty."

"And from the general closing down of the American dream, which was founded on the rape of the previously unexploited resources of an entire continent, we get the revival of religious fundamentalism, astrology, and salvation in or from outer space."

"Homo sapiens is the only primate species that needs puberty rituals to shock and cajole the junior generation into accepting adult responsiblities."

"Like other idealists, Hegel believed that things are expressions of ideas. But Hegel insisted that ideas are not only what they are but also what they are not. Moreover, ideas are continuously changing from what they are into what they are not. What exists today is not merely destined to change, as many philosophers had previously insisted, but is destined to change into its opposite, or its "negation". Everything that exists can therefore be said to contain the "seeds of its own destruction". These seeds of destruction can be indentified by analysis aimed at exposing "contradictions". The core of Hegel's contribution to Marx is the recognition that change, movement, and vitality arise out of "contradictions"."

"Cultural Materialsim seeks to "question everything"..."

"It portrays a universe of dissonance unerlying apparent order and...deeper order beyond the dissonance..."

Superstructure (top)
Stucture (middle)
Infrastructure (base, bottom, foundation)

"French Structuralism is the most infulential anthropological strategy in contemporary Western Europe. It is anitpositivist, dialectical, idealist, and ahistorical. Its founder-genius, Claude Levi-Strauss, avows a disinterest in testable theories and ignores casuality, origins, and historical processes."

"For the "structure" in structuralism...refers exclusively to the mental superstructure. ...Levi Strauss himself speaks of the 'undoubted primacy of the infrastructure.' "

"Structuralists follow Durkheim in believing that the mind has "molds" that make it possible to think of the totality of things. These molds are the structuralists' structures."

"...each culture fills the "molds" with its own distinctive content - its own ideas."

"The idea that meals are messages has been an inspiration to many anthropologists."

"...it is folly to assume that people always can or always want to understand each other."

"For Geertz to study culture is to study a semiotic field. Culture is to be interpreted as one interprets an "assemblage of texts" through a process of "thick description". "

"Those who believe that prudence and common sense demand that one must avoid a commitment to any particular research strategy fail to realize that such a belief constitutes a commitment to a definite research strategy - the strategy of eclecticism." Eclecticism was the dominant research strategy in the United States during the first half of this century. Under the pervasive influence of Franz Boas, American anthropologists devoted themselves to the collection of field data over a broad range of toics roughly corresponding to Wissler's scheme of universal catagories. Obscurantism is a research strategy whose aim is to subvert the possiblity of achieving a science of human social life. One of the most fecund sources of contemporary obscurantist attitudes in the social sciences is phenomenology, the neo-Kantian philosophy founded by Edmund Husserl. Husserl proposed that ordinary natural science cannot be applied to socio-cultural life because social acts involve a property not present in other sectors of the universe - namely, the property of meaning. According to Husserl, meaning can only be understood subjectively. ...phenonemologists reject the possiblity of separating observers from the observed. ....Truths are always relative and social. Castaneda resolved to do fieldwork that would involve him in the symbols and conventional meanings of a lived experience entirely different from that of Western social reality. Castaneda's account differs from the others because he tells his story from the "inside" deliberately letting the emics and his own subjective feelings dominate the narrative.

Quoted Schopenhauer's - "We want what we will, but we don't will what we want".