Science Quote by Marvin Harris

Harris comes in like a man with a clipboard at a costume party: whatever romantic story you were told about sacred cows, he wants receipts. The sentence is a declaration of method as much as an argument. By insisting the answer lies in "material conditions", he’s bracketing off the usual explanations - spirituality, symbolism, moral sentiment - and treating culture as something built atop economics, ecology, and survival math. That’s the provocation of cultural materialism in one clean line: if you want to understand belief, follow the calories, labor, and risk management.

The phrase "production and utilization" does double duty. It sounds neutral, almost bureaucratic, which is precisely the point. Harris is refusing to treat cattle as a theological riddle and instead as a technology: animals that plow fields, provide dung for fuel and fertilizer, reproduce future traction, and act as insurance in precarious agrarian systems. "Utilization" also subtly rebukes the outsider’s question, which often begins as, Why don’t they just eat the cow? His framing implies that eating is only one possible use, and not always the smartest one when a living animal can generate ongoing value.

The comparative move - India versus "other parts of the world" - signals a critique of ethnocentrism. What looks irrational from an industrial meat economy can be rational in a different environment. Harris isn’t just explaining India; he’s exposing how quickly Western observers mistake their own conditions for human nature.