Customer Reviews

Cannibals and Kings: Origins of Cultures

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Marvin Harris is one of those writers that it's almost impossible to disagree with, while you are reading him. Later, when you've put down his book, and you're trying to recap his points, they seem simplistic and muddy. So you pick up the book again and, there they are, all his arguments and evidence, as clear and convincing as ever. I think this has to a lot to do with the sheer quality of his writing, as well as the fact that he is someone who has spent the better part of his life studying, teaching, and observing human culture. His themes are broad, and sweep over the entirety of human cultural evolution. Harris is convinced of the primacy of humankind's ecological roles and modes in shaping human culture. He explains warfare, the state, the male superiority complex, food taboos, industrialism, plant and animal domestication, cannibalism--all in terms of the productive and demographic imperatives of human life throughout the past several thousand years. His basic argument is presented as a cycle: when the going is good, human populations expand. But as population pressures increase, the current method of obtaining energy and protein from the environment must be intensified. This intensification, however, comes at the price of diminishing returns for time invested. Sooner or later a crisis is reached. The humans in question must either restrict their population growth (primarily through infanticide, abortion or contraception), or up the technological ante and find a new way of exploiting their environment. And so civilization ratchets onward, increasing the level of time spent on subsistence, sharpening the hierarchies of power, bringing cities, and prisons, and slavery, and bosses, etc. Along the way, various cultural oddities can be explained as responses to material tradeoffs. But no mere description of Marvin Harris' writing does him justice. Read the book.

After reading 'Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches' I looked to see if Marvin Harris had written any other books. That's when I found this book and snapped it up immediately. I was not disappointed. It was just as hard to put down as the first one.

Marvin Harris uses his wit and humor to make a book of great importance easy to read. He takes us on a journey from the caves to capitalism and fills us in on how and why societies differed. He talks about how cannibalism, female infanticide, war, patriarchy, and capitalism arose in various areas. He shows how adaptation to population pressure shaped the way a society developed, and how the local ecology played a major role in making societies different. He takes us right up to contemporary times, where he shows us that we have to adapt to our population explosion by intensifying our technology.

A warning though, this book can scare you. After reading how population explosion and intensification lead to massive changes in society, you are left to wonder where we are headed. If you have read Malthus's 'An Essay on the Principle of Population' and Toffler's 'Future Shock' the effect hits harder. You really begin to see the 'big picture' and realize that our current pace of change can't hold.

This book also gives you a hint that the idea of a four-day workweek is just a pipe dream. As our population continues to grow, we will have to spend more time feeding and caring for it. It turns out that primitive humans have had the most leisure time of all of us.

Legendary anthropologist Marvin Harris is perhaps the most readable ethnological writer of all. I read his celebrated Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches years ago with delight. This volume, written in the mid seventies, is also delightful. It's a little dated in spots, of course, and Harris's opinions are sometimes just opinions; and in some cases he is clearly out of sync with the most recent discoveries, but all is forgiven because he is just so interesting to read.

Mainly Harris is marvelously satirical. The narrative sparkles with put downs of religiosity or any sort of sanctimonious BS. Harris pronounces from on high, however. He seems to believe that his speculations about how or why something happened are almost certainly going to be supported by the evidence (when the field work catches up with his theories!) He was the author that showed me that the prohibition against eating pork in the Middle East and beef in India was based not so much on religious scruples but on economic self-interest dressed up as prohibitions from the gods. In this book Harris leads me to believe that all human taboos even those against murder may be culturally derived, rather than instinctively based. The horror stories that he focuses on here, especially about the Aztec cannibals, seem to prove that if we want protein enough and can't get it, we will as a people set up a religion that makes it sacred to kill whatever is available, including prisoners of war, as the Aztecs did, to get that protein; after which, we will rationalize our actions as injunctions from the gods.

By the way, cows are sacred in India because if you kill your cow and eat it during the drought, you will have no cow to plow the land when the rains return and you will never be able to plow the land again. The cow (and ox of course) are doubly valuable because they eat grasses and weeds and other vegetable matter that we cannot digest. Consequently cattle and other ruminants increase our wealth by turning otherwise unavailable sun energy into protein and calories, or into energy to pull wagons and plows, etc. Other animals, pigs and dogs, chickens and turkeys, who eat some of the same things we do, are less valuable in this sense.

If you've never read Marvin Harris, do yourself a favor and buy this book. It's fascinating and reads as fast as a thriller.

Even if you do not agree with all of the author's particular thesis, the general idea makes a lot of sense and he is undeniably brilliant. It is probably one of the most interesting books I have read, I read it ten years ago and I still remember a lot of it, so it withstands the passing of time.

This book's main thesis is that cultures vary depending on the resources available or unavailable to the specific community, implying that culture (including religion) is created to mistify and thereby ensure best practises among the members of the community to guarantee the survival of the tribe. The author presents an excellent account of "sacred" (for example cows in the Hindu religion) and "evil" (for example pigs in Judaism), both are prohibited food but the circumstances and therefore implications differ. Eating something evil is a mere sin, while eating something sacred implies much more than a sin. The book also covers topics as birth control, infanticide, sacrificial genocide, specially but not exclusively of women, among very different societies from Aborigins, Mayas, Aztecs, the French society of the industrial era, etc.

Very religious people, specially those that really observe their religion's food prescriptions might feel offended or annoyed, since the author is categorical in his conclusions. I felt a little disturbed myself by the author's narrative of cannibal practises among the Aztecs, but this is definitely not the author's fault (we just weren't taught this at school).

I found the book a bit difficult to read, but well worth it. This was the first book I read written by an anthropologist, but when I tried to read others, I realized that this one was a piece of cake. Talking about the work of anthropologists, you can find another very good explanation of religious beliefs and rituals, as well as their possible origin in Religion Explained, which is not difficult to read.

The striking feature of Harris' 'Cannibals and Kings' in my opinion was how easy the author was able to deliver the information to the reader. Without previous experience in anthropology, I was able to understand the concepts he has laid out and the reasoning behind them. The impact that ecology has had on our developpment and our future is shown in this work, we must know where we have come from to realize where we are going. I greatly enjoyed this book, it has enticed me to switch my major to anthropology.

Marvin Harris' "Cannibals and Kings" is one of those classic anthropological, historical studies that makes reading non fiction fun. The phenomenon of solving riddles of humanity with a smile on your face, constantly nodding and saying stuff like "yeah that makes sense" and "damn this guys good" begs the question: Why care about Harry Potter? While Harris is more theatrical and less scientific in nature than predecessor's like Jared Diamond, the sheer wit of his arguments will move you. Furthermore unlike reading most fiction, during "Cannibals and Kings" you really are growing sager with each turn of the page. So if you're looking for a practical understanding of human evolution that's more entertaining than fiction then buy this book.

This is the book that introduced me to Marvin Harris and cultural materialism - one of the most important intellectual developments of the 20th century. If you like this book and you want to delve even further into Harris's theories, check out "Cultural Materialism - the Struggle for a Science of Culture". Not only does he explain CM, he explains and refutes competing schools of anthropology.

There are already several fine reviews, so I will only suggest reading the following works (all of them sound anthropology, good to understand ourselves) in addition to Harris' book: a) "Understanding Early Civilizations" by Bruce Trigger (a great comparative review of early civilizations); b) "Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony" by Robert B. Edgerton (on primitive societies and their discontents); c) "Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality" by Paul Barber (persuasive explanation of why people believe in vampires); d) "Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath" by Carlo Ginzburg (it delivers more that its title promises); and e) "When They Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth" by Paul and Elizabeth Barber (myths lest we forget natural disasters).

I first was exposed to Marvin Harris in 1983 while commuting and being bored sitting in a train to work. A very pretty young lady next to me was reading an apparently very well used volume by the name of 'Of Canibals and Kings, origins of cultures' and although I initially was primarily interested in drawing the beautiful girl's attention, we ended up spending the rest of the next half-hour talking about what she was reading about. I never even got to know her name nor did ever see her again, but what I took away from this chance encounter was the title of the book and its author.
In short, within days I obtained a copy and read it in one session. Although English is not my native language, I found it delightful, informative, thought provoking and brilliantly written to perfectly serve intelligent and capable readers and turn them towards critically observing and questioning the tenets of the common drivel that we are spooned up by church and politics alike. Marvin Harris' explanation of Cultural Materialism transcends religious and political boundaries and cuts down to the chase of the birth, ascendence and demise of cultures, amongst which our present can be explained, understood and to certain extent steered and corrected.
He has a knack of turning a compacent 'believer' into an exploring 'understander' and I think that with that being his legacy, he did us all a very big favor. He did to me.

Anyone with a mind not too cluttered with wishful thinking will find this book validating and sobering. Harris opens the door for further questions about what forces formed the human brain originally as well as whether there is really any reason to hope for anything other than the inevitable destruction of our environment(planet)... haunting in many respects.