КУЛЬТУРНИЙ МАТЕРІАЛІЗМ М. ГАРРІСА ЯК СПРОБА СТВОРЕННЯ НОВОЇ НАУКОВОЇ ПАРАДИГМИ
Journal Title: Вісник Маріупольського державного університету. Серія: Історія. Політологія - Year 2018, Vol 8, Issue 21
Abstract
У статті визначено місце дослідницької стратегії культурного матеріалізму в структурі та динаміці наукового знання. Проаналізовано зміни наукових парадигм у соціокультурній антропології. При цьому особливу увагу звернено на національну специфіку та соціальну обумовленість розвитку наукових традицій. Авторка описує особливості теорії культурного матеріалізму як потенційної нової наукової парадигми і звертається до проблем розвитку гуманітаристики на зламі століть. The article addresses the analysis of cultural materialism as a research strategy developed by American cultural anthropologist M. Harris in the 1960s-1970s. This theory is perceived within the context of scientific revolutions (putting in terms of T. Kuhn) in Western anthropology (North American and British ones). In the last third of the nineteenth century, evolutionism, designed by Charles Darwin for biology, has become the first scientific paradigm in the field of knowledge about the man and the society. American researcher H. Morgan and British explorer E. Tylor were considering the studied peoples through the prism of the stages of social evolution. But the accumulation of discrepancies between evolutionary theories and empirical data led to a scientific revolution. At the same time, the specifics of the US and the British Empire predetermined the transition to the new paradigms. In the British case, this was a structural functionalism, which dealt with colonial societies as stable self-sufficient systems. In the US, historical particularism of F. Boas, based on German idealistic philosophy, triumphed. The school of F. Boas examined individual cultures in their entirety, avoiding generalizations and theorizing. Large-scale researches, conducted in the first half of the XX century, have given empirical materials that could not be adequately explained in the framework of the then scientific paradigms. Turbulent social changes and political events after 1945 also pushed the scientific community to a new scientific revolution on all the continents. But the old paradigms were replaced with a huge number of competing scientific schools, studying man, society, and culture from various perspectives, both materialistic and idealistic. Developing the ideas of neo-evolutionists and cultural ecologists, M. Harris gave priority to researching infrastructure. It allowed focusing on the study of precisely measured factors and, accordingly, scientizing anthropology and social sciences in general, seeking answers to pressing social challenges by joint efforts and on a single metatheoretical basis. M. Harris did not put forward a general theory of social formations (structure) and cultural evolution (superstructure), although offered to reconsider the causes of social and cultural phenomena in the realm of infrastructure; if they do not have sufficient explanatory power, the causal arrow should be directed to the internal dynamics of these levels of social life. Thus, M. Harris refused to co-opt the existing theories, but left their adherents the opportunity to adopt a research strategy for cultural materialism. Proposed by M. Harris, the division of the object of anthropology into the ethical / emotional and behavioral / mental, according to the scientist's plan, had to show the place of the spheres research of various schools in reintegrated general anthropology. Cultural materialism, developed by the American scientist M. Harris, became one of the most successful attempts of creating a new scientific paradigm. But as the further history of science demonstrates, the humanities of the late twentieth century were moving in the other direction – even greater fragmentation and retreating from the natural sciences.
Authors and Affiliations
Леся Ярославівна Бідочко
Keywords
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