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This 5 page paper discusses Marvin Harris's book "Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches: the Riddles of Culture. Bibliography lists 3 sources.
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5 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_HVMHaris.rtf
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as they do. The book is well-written and easy to read, and provides examples of cultural practices that seem odd, weird, or downright disgusting. This paper discusses the book. Discussion
The main theme of Harriss book is that what often seems to an outside observer to be an inexplicable activity often has a mundane, ordinary, practical basis. Harris says, "I
shall show that even the most bizarre-seeming beliefs and practices turn out on closer inspection to be based on ordinary, banal, one might say "vulgar" conditions, needs and activities. What
I mean by a banal or vulgar solution is that it rests on the ground and that it is built up out of guts, sex, energy, wind, rain and other
palpable and ordinary phenomena" (Harris, 1989, p. 5). Harris begins his examination of cultural differences in India, and the idea of the sacred cow, which is, as he says with
wry humor, one of our "favorite sacred cows" (Harris, 1989, p. 11). We sometimes see pictures of people starving to death in India while their fat cows look on
in perplexity, and that invariably makes us ask, How can anyone resign themselves to dying of starvation when food is standing right next to them? (Harris, 1989). And then,
"How can we ever hope to understand people so different from ourselves?" (Harris, 1989, p. 11). The answer, of course, is that theyre not so different from us. Harris
goes on to explain, with regard to the cows in particular, that the reason the farmers dont kill and eat them when things are difficult is because they need them
for the next seasons planting (Harris, 1989). If they killed and ate them, which they could do, theyd starve to death anyway because they would have no way to plant
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