Cultural Materialism

 

There are two strands of cultural materialism. 1 literary pioneered by Raymond Williams 2 Anthropological, pioneered by Marvin Harris.

Anthropological:

This approach, developed by anthropologist Marvin Harris, provides insights into how society and culture intersect. Here's the essence of cultural materialism:

1. Basic Premises:

   - Coined by Marvin Harris in his influential work *The Rise of Anthropological Theory* (1968), cultural materialism encompasses three interconnected schools of thought: cultural materialism, cultural evolution, and cultural ecology.

   - At its core, cultural materialism emphasizes that culture is deeply influenced by material realities—specifically, technological, economic, and demographic factors[RR1] .

   - It operates within a framework of three distinct levels:

     - Infrastructure: This foundational level includes material conditions like technology, production, and reproduction (demographics). Infrastructure shapes and molds the other aspects of culture.

     - Structure: The organizational aspects of culture—domestic arrangements, kinship systems, and political economy—fall under this category.

     - Superstructure: Here, we find the ideological and symbolic elements of society, such as religion and belief systems.

   - Cultural materialists argue that infrastructure—especially economic and technological factors—plays the primary role in shaping a society.

   - Their goal is to create a "pan-human science of society" based on logical and evidentiary grounds.

 

2. Culture as Material Force:

   - Cultural materialism views culture (not as an abstract concept but ) as a tangible force controlled/shaped by societal power structures—both economic and political.

   - These power structures often find expression in the literature produced by a society or culture.

   - In other words Culture is a productive process and its texts i.e., books, films, television shows, or architecture as cultural materials or products of the cultural, political and economic forces.  In this sense to understand the text the critics should be able to situate the text in a relevant historical and cultural context.

3. Demographic, Environmental, and Technological Factors:

   - Cultural materialists invoke demographic changes, environmental contexts, and technological shifts to explain cultural variation.

   - They focus on how these factors interact with the infrastructure to shape societal structures and superstructures.

4. Contrast with Marxist Views:

   - While cultural materialism shares some roots with Marxism, it diverges in key ways.

   - Unlike Marxists, who emphasize reciprocal relationships between production, structure, and infrastructure, cultural materialists propose a more unidirectional influence from infrastructure to structure.

   - For cultural materialists, production lies primarily within the infrastructure, affecting other cultural aspects.

In summary, cultural materialism underscores the material foundations of culture, emphasizing the impact of technology, economics, and demographics on shaping societies and their expressions. It's a fascinating lens through which to explore human behavior and cultural dynamics!

Cultural Materialism and Literary Theory:

Cultural materialism is a Marxist inspired theoretical approach to studying cultural texts that first emerged in the 1980s as a movement in British literary criticism and renaissance studies, hence the interest in Shakespeare, and grew to become one of the foundational theoretical concepts in the academic field of cultural studies.

Raymond Williams in 1977 book Marxism and literature speaks about Cultura Materialism. In literature cultural materialism approaches texts by combining two distinct modes of analysis.

The development of cultural materialism (in literature) can be traced back to the Welsh author Raymond Williams, who coined the term at least in literary criticism in 1976. (in anthropology it is marvin haris is considered the pioneer)

Williams began to approach texts by combining 2 distinct modes of analysis:

1.     focusing on historicism, or the importance of understanding the historical context underlying attacks production.

2.     ideological and political analysis, looking at the relationship between a cultural text and the dominant political ideologies in society at the time the text was produced and the societies in which it's read or reproduced today.

Cultural Materialism = Historicism (understanding the historical context underlying the text’s production) + ideological and political analysis (looking at the relation between the cultural texts and the dominant political ideology of the time)

Understanding historical context, cultural materialism sees culture as a productive process expressed/materialized through its cultural materials or texts (books, films, television shows, or even art and architecture).

In that sense, to understand the text, critics should be able to situate the work in a relevant historical and cultural context.

The meaning in that text would be informed by some combination of cultural material factors. Your social class, gender and ethnicity, your religious background, and the political, economic, and environmental systems in which you live would all work together to influence your understanding of theater and thus play a role in determining the structure and themes of your text.

Also, films, novels, music and art are rarely the work of a single person.

the literature that emerges from a particular society would in some way reflect the dominant values and political discourses inherent to that society. And critics influenced by cultural materialism began to study text in particular things considered canonical by the education system, looking for ways in which themes, characters, and dialogue could be seen as expressions of dominant ideological narratives or as such. Warning those dominant ideological narratives, and this gave cultural materialism a pronounced political orientation that favored a particular form of Marxist criticism.

 But an important part of this was that culture materialists, theorists spent a lot of time exploring how contemporary power structures sometimes appropriate classical cultural texts for political purposes.

So at its core, culture materialist analysis tends to focus on the material and ideological forces at play in a text production by studying that text as the product of specific historical, cultural, and economic forces.

That analysis is then often combined with a political discussion that foregrounds the ways in which hegemony or totalizing political and ideological authority is established and maintained through the production and appropriation of cultural texts.

But to really understand culture we need to go back to Raymond Williams and the two theoretical movements that really informed cultural materialism's origins and development.

Liberal Humanism:

liberal humanist literary critics argued that great texts, like, of course, the works of William Shakespeare, contain a meaning that is both timeless and universally comprehensible. They reveal something universally human that would be true for all people across all of time. So for liberal humanists, you don't need to understand the cultural, economic and historic Early culture materialists were highly critical of these ideas, and they produced a huge body of literature critiquing humanist literary criticism and

publications

a.     Alternative Shakespeare 1, 2, &3

b.     Political Shakespeare

c.     Subject of Tragedy

and the Subject of Tragedy, all published in the 1980s, cultural materialist authors argued. That liberal humanism universalized contemporary Western national identities, projected those identities onto the past, and perpetuated an elitist or even colonial perception of art and culture. And in making those arguments, they drew from a particular approach to Marxist criticism that was popularized by Raymond Williams Now. 

Marxism:

one of the things that was innovative about Raymond Williams body of work and what gave it such a broad appeal in developing this new approach to literature was that while he drew inspiration In particular from Marxism. cultural materialism's interest in historicizing texts and articulating the material and ideological forces at work in their production is taken directly from Marxist literary criticism. But at its core, Marxist criticism is extremely deterministic. It reads cultural texts almost entirely in socioeconomic terms, as products of a dominant cultural ideology that seeks to perpetuate itself and maintain the economic and political subjugation of the proletariat.

This is simplifying things pretty dramatically. Yeah, but in large part it was that sense of determinism that Raymond Williams pushed back against in formulating cultural materialism as an adaptation of existing Marxist theory, rather than reading cultural texts and Marxist terms as simple reproductions of the ideology of the economic base.

In publications like Problems in Materialism, Culture and Materialism, and arguably his magnum opus, Marxism and Literature. Williams proposed a much more dynamic model of the relationship between art and culture.  According to him culture is irreducibly complex and at any given time is made-up of numerous subcultures which are all dynamically linked. As a consequence, culture is never static and exists in a constant state of change. And Every dominant cultural paradigm, every dominant religion, political ideology, or economic system, contains both the traces of its past and the seeds of its future. And. Raymond Williams uses the term structures of feeling to describe Natural context.

Marxism looks at literature as a representation of the dominant political ideology at the time.

While cultural materialism looks at literature as a place occupied by multiple cultures and the place where counter cultures are born.

 

 For Williams, if a text is sufficiently historicized, these structures of feeling are open to critical analysis and help us better understand both the tax relationship to the socioeconomic realities of the culture in which it was produced and the potential ideological goals of those who appropriate or reclaim cultural texts for their own purposes in our world today.

So, as a form of ideological and political analysis, cultural materialism attempts to identify a text alignment with a structure of feeling or a combination of ideological tendencies inherent to the historical and cultural context in which the text was either produced or is reproduced and appropriated today.

That tendency emerged from Raymond Williams revision of certain aspects of Marxist cultural theory and a Marxist inspired rejection of liberal humanism

you wanna do a cultural materialist analysis. Where would you begin? And how does all of this look in practice? Well, seeing as so many cultural materialist critics have written about Shakespeare, I wanted to answer that question by briefly exploring adaptations of Shakespeare's plays and talking through the steps that we would take and analyzing those films from a cultural materialist perspective. Keeping in mind our commitment to both historicism and political commentary, there are at least two historical contexts that we have to account for and discussing a film adaptation of Shakespeare. The first would be the films source material, the literary text and its early theatrical staging in the 16th and 17th centuries in England. And the 2nd would be the context in which the film adaptation of that source material was made. And our goal in all of this would be to place both of those texts i That relate to Elizabethan drama. There's the Royal Court and patronage system, the technological limitations and conventions of theater, and the oversight of religious authorities to consider, but also the commercial necessity of maintaining the interest of a broad public audience drawn from London's mercantile, artisanal and working classes. So our analysis of a film adaptation of Shakespeare would be built on a historical understanding of the source material in particular. The ways in which the economic and ideological conditions of Elizabethan drama might have influenced the production by subtly shaping the author's worldview, or explicitly by influencing the types of stories that Shakespeare was able to tell or altering the text directly through editing and revision. We would then extend the same type of historicist analysis to our film adaptation of Shakespeare, and the economic and ideological forces that work here would be radically different in our world today, the production, distribution and consumption of films. Is not possible outside of the influence of global capitalism. So using a cultural materialist lens, we would be looking for ways in which our film either reproduces that dominant ideology, that sense of feeling, or could potentially be interpreted as subverting that dominant ideological narrative. We might look, for example, at how film form conveys ideology to directors, opt for a more expressionistic setting, foregrounding the film's relationship to its theatrical source material. Or do they From imposing the iconography and material culture of a story world that's completely different from the one depicted in the literary text. A cultural materialist perspective would never look at these things as value free choices. They would always be considered in terms of how those choices can convey ideology, whether that serves to naturalize and legitimize hierarchical worldviews or highlight. The corrupting influence of totalitarian power, or how a particular restaging of Shakespeare might emphasize. Contemporary identity politics and the systemic oppression of ethnic minorities. Our argument would always be that Shakespeare is a place where ideology is made every reimagining of a Shakespearean play. Creates an intertextual space where the socio ideological conditions of Elizabethan drama are folded into the economic and political discourses of the 20th and 21st century. And we would argue that the best way to approach that complex discursive space would be to historicize each cultural lens and explore how the economic and material conditions of its production serve as a lens through which to better understand and potentially challenge ideology. But the shape that that argument ultimately takes would depend on the film in question, and would depend on you on your subjective relationship to the ideological narratives and systems that your analysis calls into question.

 Criticism of Cultural Materialism:

So what are some of the major criticisms of cultural materialism as a theoretical movement in literary criticism and cultural studies? Well, one of the big ones actually relates directly to its method of ideological analysis and the political commitment of cultural materialist critics.

Neema Parvini, for example, argue that many cultural materialists critics missed the forest for the trees. They're so focused on ideological readings and on challenging conservative appropriations of You'll find similar criticisms often made about cultural materialism's commitment to historicism, that historical context in and of itself is not enough to understand a work of literature and doesn't account for the success or cultural significance of a particular work of art.

This is something that's Labo Shijak mentions in The Fright of Real Tears. He raises Marxist famous observation about the Greek poet Homer, that it's easy to explain how Homers poetry emerged from early Greek society. But Is difficult to explain the universal appeal of Homer's text and why they continue to be read and published today. So when a sense a cultural materialism is simultaneously criticized for being both overly historicist and too polemical or ideological in its approach,

Cultural materialism as just one of many different theoretical tools that literary critics can use. It gives us a valuable lens that we can apply to our criticism that helps us understand the ideological orientation and appropriation of cultural texts. But it's at its strongest when the critic is aware of the risks of lapsing into over historicism or overtly polemical criticism. so that's the episode i would love to hear what you think as well did you find our discussion helpful did my digression into shakespearean films do the theory justice let us know in the comments below

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 [RR1]Culture is a productive process influenced by cultural realities (technological, economic and demographic) and expressed through cultural materials (texts i.e, filims, novels, theatre, news papers and architecture)

Disclaimer: This article is in the making.

Reference: 

Armchair Academics. “What Is Cultural Materialism? Definition, History, and Examples.” YouTube, 16 Oct. 2022, www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ai3fWjQfr0.