Harris’s cultural materialist approach is exemplified in analyses
that explain perplexing social patterns by examining the nature
of infrastructure. Two examples are “Why are there so many sacred cows in India?” and “Why did the Soviet Union collapse?”
To someone from the meat-eating West, the notion of cows
wandering freely in India while people starve is a paradoxical
waste of protein (Harris 1985). The Hindu ban on the slaughter
of cattle and the consumption of beef would seem nonadaptive,
a case where cultural rules run roughshod over common sense
and, by extension, an illustration that mental superstructure,
and not infrastructure, is causally prior.
The religious, symbolic, and political regulations associated
with sacred cattle in India are well known. There are laws regulating the slaughter of cows in India’s constitution, all but two
states’ laws forbid the slaughter of India’s native humpbacked
zebu cow, and a complete ban on cow slaughter is a common
flash point of political agitation. In Hindu sacred literature, the
god Krishna is described as a cowherd and protector of cows.
Milk, butter, curds, urine, and dung are blended into a sacred
nectar used to anoint religious statues and worshippers. Cows
are decorated with flowers, placed in animal shelters when they
are old and sick, in short, venerated and worshipped. The worship of cows is associated with the adoration of human motherhood. It is a major theme in political life; a constant friction
between Muslims and Hindus is that Muslims eat beef. Similarly, British beef-eating was a rallying cause during India’s independence movement, and one source of Mohandas Gandhi’s
political support was his ardent belief in the sacredness of the
cow.
Consequently, India has more cows than any other nation
in the world—an estimated 180 million plus 50 million water
buffalo—a seeming waste created by illogical religious belief.
Not surprisingly, Harris disagrees.
Both politics and religion obviously play a role in reinforcing
and perpetuating the beef and slaughter taboos, but neither
politics nor religion explains why cattle slaughter and beef eating have achieved symbolic prominence. Why the cow and not
the pig, horse, or camel? I do not doubt the symbolic power of
the sacred cow. What I doubt is that the investment of symbolic
power in one particular kind of animal and one particular kind
of meat results from an arbitrary and capricious mental choice
rather than from a definite set of practical constraints. Religion
has affected India’s foodways, but India’s foodways have affected India’s religion even more. (Harris 1985:51)
How has infrastructure produced the sacred cow? Harris’s
detailed answer can be distilled to a simple point—the need for
oxen. Harris cites Vedic texts describing a beef-eating past (before 600 B.C.) when cattle were slaughtered for communal, carnivorous feasts. But as the human population increased and
grazing lands were converted to farmlands, beef became too expensive and eventually was limited only to privileged castes. Beginning in the fifth century B.C., religions (Buddhism and
Jainism) developed that banned killing, and during subsequent
centuries milk, not meat, became the ritual food, and cow worship became part of Hinduism.
But the need for oxen as plow animals meant that cows were
always necessary. Draft animals are needed on small farms. Today tractors are only more efficient on larger farms, and they
break down and are expensive to repair. The poorest of India’s
farmers are the real owners of the supposedly stray animals
wandering in the landscape; with no pasturage, the cows scavenge food from roadside vegetation, food stands, and garbage
heaps. Producing little milk and only an occasional ox, the cow
is nonetheless cost-efficient—sufficient reason for protection
from slaughter:
Not only did she give milk but she was the mother of the
cheapest and most efficient traction animal for India’s soils and
climate. In return for Hindu safeguards against the reemergence of energetically costly and socially divisive beef-eating
foodways, she made it possible for the land to teem with human life. (Harris 1985:66)
This is the interface between nature and culture: infrastructure
pure and simple.
A second case is Harris’s (1992) analysis of the demise of the
Soviet Union. The deterioration of Soviet state Communism was
not, as some contend, due to the triumph of capitalism, the unforeseen consequences of perestroika, or the political foresight of
American foreign policy. Instead, Harris argues that the Soviet
Union collapsed because of infrastructural devolution.
On the eve of perestroika, per capita economic growth in the
Soviet Union was at zero or less, grain production was unchanged
over the previous decade in spite of heavy investments, and between 1970 and 1987 output per unit of input declined at the rate
of 1 percent per year. Factories, agricultural equipment, generation plants, and transmission systems were worn and antiquated.
The diffusion of technological innovations took three times longer
in the Soviet economy than it did in the Western economies. Inadequate distribution systems meant that 20 percent to 50 percent of
the wheat, potato, sugar beet, and fruit harvests were lost between
farm and store. A broad range of pollution—from the radiation of
Chernobyl to the poisoning of the Baltic, Black, and Caspian
seas—was a further index of decline, as was the decrease in life expectancy for Soviet males (Harris 1992:298).
Such problems at the level of infrastructure were compounded
by impediments at the structural level of the Soviet command
economy. State-owned factories’ budgets were allocated based on
the number of employees rather than on the efficiency of production, creating payrolls of unneeded workers. Production quotas
were stated in terms of output without quality control. “This
meant that the penalties for inefficient and irrational management,
such as excessive inventory, over-employment, and excess investment, were minimal and did not lead to the extinction of the enterprise” (Harris 1992:299). The command economy unevenly
distributed the trickle of resulting production. Thus the interminable queues and unpredictable shortages that people endured
in Moscow were paralleled by inequities between the republics.
Russia gained more from the other republics than it redistributed.
Harris points out that in the 1970s–1980s infant mortality increased in Kazakhstan by 14 percent, Turkmenistan by 22 percent,
and in Uzbekistan by 48 percent (1992:300). The perception that
Russia was benefiting at the expense of the other republics intensified nationalistic movements. “The collapse of state communism
and the Soviet empire,” Harris concluded, was “a case of selection
against a political economy that increasingly impeded and degraded the performance of its infrastructure” (1992:300).
Harris’s analysis of the Soviet Empire was presented as a distinguished lecture to the American Anthropological Association,
and he directed a number of comments to his fellow anthropologists. He notes that
infrastructural, structural and symbolic-ideational features are
equally necessary components of human social life. It is no
more possible to imagine a human society without a symbolicideational or structural sector than it is possible to imagine one
without a mode of production and reproduction. Nonetheless,
these sectors do not play a symmetrical role in influencing the
retention or extinction of sociocultural innovations. (1992:297)
Rather, the realm of infrastructure is determinant. Innovations in the realm of infrastructure will tend to change structural
and symbolic-ideational systems, while innovations in structural
and symbolic-ideational systems that reduce the efficiency of the
infrastructure, as measured “by the efficiency of productive and
reproductive processes that sustain [human] health and wellbeing,” will be selected against (Harris 1992:297). And that, Harris argued, is what happened to the Soviet Union.