ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the approach to South American indigenous cultures taken by Lawrence Sullivan in Icanchu's Drum, a monumental study of religion that is as far from Julian Steward and Marvin Harris as it seems possible to get. The lesson to be learned from Sullivan's study is that people should proceed with some caution as they attempt to construct an adequate theoretical approach to understanding the totality of each human adaptive system, including religious beliefs. To enhance understanding of the theoretical approach, the chapter examines its historical underpinnings in the earlier cultural ecological theory of Steward and the later cultural materialist theory of Harris. It concludes with a discussion of the ecological theories of Roy Rappaport and Kent Flannery to show how their work can be viewed as a means of bridging the rather wide gap between the approach of the "vulgar" materialists and that of the "touchy-feely" mentalists at the other end of the continuum.
