"A thought-provoking, stimulating volume on the past, present and future of cultural materialism that is both laudatory of Harris' research strategy and critical of it." Paul Shankman, University of Colorado One of the most important anthropologists of all time, Marvin Harris was influential worldwide as the founder of cultural materialism. This book accessibly analyzes Harris's theories and their important legacies today. The chapters explore cultural materialism's epistemology and its relation to rational choice theory, Darwinian social science, and population pressures. The authors assess...

A strong advocate for anthropology as a science, Lawrence Kuznar reviews the recent challenges to this ideology from creationists and 'scientific' racists on one side and postmodernists, marxists and feminists on the other. Moreover, Kuznar provides a brief review of anthropology as a science, summarizes major theoretical works in anthropology and other fields on the science/humanism debate, and offers several important case examples from cultural anthropology and archaeology showing science in action. An interesting, provocative book for anthropologists and ideal for advanced undergraduate...