Marvin Harris Quotes

24 quotes in 458 categories

• I don't see how you can write anything of value if you don't offend someone.
• In many ways the rise of the state was the descent of the world from freedom to slavery
• Hindus and Westerners alike see in the meat-eating taboos of India a triumph of morals over appetite. This is a dangerous misrepresentation of cultural processes.…
• I don't know of any cases where as a result of religious precepts a population have found themselves enjoying less food than they would have…
• But with the Industrial Revolution and introduction of various industrial techniques for purifying sugar, we have a situation in which what we are consuming is…
• Food, like sex, is one of the principal kinds of human activity that engage people when they wonder about how to account for different kinds…
• Pigs prefer to wallow in clean mud, but if nothing else is available, they will frequently wallow in their own urine, giving rise to the…
• Every theory presented as a scientific concept is just that; it's a theory that tries to explain more about the world than previous theories have…
• Pigs eat grass if they are very hungry, but they can't use it as a regular source of food.
• Here you do have forests, where pigs could be raised by letting them root about in the forests for a good part of the year.…
• Ethnography literally means 'a portrait of a people.' An ethnography is a written description of a particular culture - the customs, beliefs, and behavior -…
• There are very important and practical issues raised by following this alternative route which says, lets look to material conditions, to the systems of production,…
• The commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' does not say it's O.K. to kill some people and not others.
• Like most North Americans, I'd been raised on the notion that milk is the first food, and everybody must like it because it's so good…
• When a woman gives birth to a child, the child needs to be able to digest the mother's milk; but when this child is old…
• Now we are in a situation in which for a significant part of the industrial world too much could become a danger, especially too much…
• Yes, a general principle that comes out of research behind Good to Eat is that there are no world religions that have acted to decrease…
• However, further research has shown that it is the normal condition for humans and for most other mammals. It seems pretty clear why this is…
• If I can bring some light to bear on problems like that, I feel that people will be enlightened not only on the question but…
• The answer has to be sought in the material conditions of the production and utilization of cattle in India compared with the production and utilization…

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