Harris’ Political Ecological Approach

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Harris’ Political Ecologic Approach
Harris used the cultural materialism (CM) research approach to examine the evolution of culture. Many consider Harris’ work on India’s sacred cow mentality his most successful CM analysis. First, Harris examines the taboo of cow consumption in India, illuminating how infrastructure-level economic and technological forces influence the other two spheres of culture to produce superstructural ideology. Second, Marvin Harris considers ecological forces in reducing the Hindu ban on cow slaughter. He contends that a situation better explained by socio-political reasons has been falsely ascribed to theological holiness. He claims that Indian cattle-related taboos, customs, and rituals demand a “positive-functioned” description based on India’s adaptive reaction to environmental deterioration rather than Hindu theology. This essay evaluates Harris’ political ecologic approach to delineating the relationship between culture and food.
This idea can be characterized as cultural materialism since the cow’s sacred status is diminished to a practical socio-economic response. Harris offers this materialist argument as a broad explanation for other instances where the consumption of an animal’s flesh is prohibited because it has become too expensive due to ecological changes (Harris 203). His theory’s fundamental elements include the realization that the animal was previously eaten or sacrificed, the subsequent increase in population density, and the imposition of a receptive constraint when the animal cannot be raised sufficiently to satisfy societal needs. Harris demonstrates the advantages of contrasting etic and emic perspectives to show how numerous events that initially seem non-adaptive are, in reality, adaptive.
Compared to the pig in the Middle East, whose meat is an abomination after it became costly to rear it for meat, India’s cow was cherished for milk production and traction supremacy more than as meat. As cows in India became expensive for meat rearing, their plowing worth amplified the rising populace demand for more farmland. Hence, they were safeguarded instead of being abominated, and so the Hindu religion came to underline everybody’s sacred role to desist from murdering cow or beef consumption (Harris 202). Harris supports the religious sanction on cattle slaughter and beef consumption today as a furtherance of India’s adaptation to the rising populace-raised energy demands and extended drought situations. In comparison to Bhula Pooja’s assertion, who perceives any sanction on cow murder in antagonism to India’s economic interest, Harris proposes that the taboos in contention do not reduce the capability of the current Indian food production system to support human life. This way, Harris’s cultural materialist hypothesis of comprehending the cradle of the sacred cows makes sense as a result.
In several parts of the world, worshiping cows and bulls was a typical practice starting in Mesopotamia and expanding to Northwestern India with the Indus Valley invasion by Aryan traveling pastoralists who founded the Vedic religion in the second m...