ABSTRACT
All materialist theories in anthropology share an assumption that the features of cultural systems can be explained in terms of the material conditions of life, meaning those behaviors and technologies related to satisfying human subsistence needs. Materialists concur that a society’s “material base” ultimately-either directly or indirectly-affects the other, non-economic aspects of culture, such as its social structure and beliefs. Among the factors that all such theorists would include in society’s material base are the natural resources available to human populations, the knowledge of how to use those resources, and technology used in exploiting those resources. Beyond this point of agreement, there are significant differences among materialist approaches. Two broad varieties of materialism emerged in mid-to latetwentieth-century anthropology: ecological approaches (including cultural ecology, human ecology, cultural materialism, and political ecology) and Marxism (including dialectical materialism and structural Marxism). Most ecological approaches include within a given society’s material base its population size, density, and growth rates. Dialectical materialism does not include these demographic characteristics in the base, but adds to the list above a society’s organization of labor in production and the social distribution of resources and the products of labor. Finally, structural Marxism rejects the base-superstructure distinction altogether!
