Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches
Sacred cows, pig taboos and witch hunts, each read as a solution to a problem you have not spotted.
Marvin Harris takes practices that look irrational from outside, among them sacred cows, pig taboos, witch hunts and messianic movements, and argues each has a material logic rooted in ecology and economics. Whether or not every case convinces, the method is the value: assume the strange custom is solving a problem you have not identified.
Recommended by 2 People
Tristram Stuart
No matter how extraordinary human behaviour – in our own culture or elsewhere – there’s always an explanation for it. That’s what Marvin Harris argues very persuasively in Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches: The Riddles of Culture. It really opened my eyes.
Interview · December 2009
Derek Sivers
Mind-blowing anthropology. Great argument that the reasons that religions worship cows or hate pigs, that tribes wage wars, or Europe's 200 years of witch hunts, are all very practical economic reasons usually unknown to the participants or washed out of history.
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