A review by whitneyborup
Cannibals and Kings: Origins of Cultures by Marvin Harris

4.0

Fascinating! I read this as a way to start familiarizing myself with cultural materialism/determinism. His idea is basically that ecological factors are responsible for all the twists and turns in population/quality of life/political and economic systems. The idea that war was a product of over-population, that it is a way of cutting down your own population as well as the enemy's, and that this, in turn, produces patriarchal and misogynistic societies was especially interesting to me.