Marvin Harris

“Human social life is a response to the practical problems of earthly existence.”

“Rather than societies being shaped by vague mysterious forces... they are shaped by the mundane, practical, and observable circumstances of life.”

“The production and reproduction of human life are the basic and universal components of all sociocultural systems.”

“The purpose of explaining sociocultural differences and similarities is to build a science of history.”

“Every society has a sex-gender system—a set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human, social intervention.”

“Warfare is not a characteristic of all human societies. But it is a characteristic of all state-organized societies.”

“The plain fact is that the same premises which lead to the view that it is morally wrong to kill and eat human beings can be used to show that it is morally wrong to kill and eat other animals.”

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