Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: An Epistemological Reading

Abstract

This article offers a critical epistemological reading of Marvin Harris’s Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture, focusing on how the work constructs materialist explanations of specific cultural “riddles.” Its aim is to analyze how Harris reconstructs practices often regarded as irrational through infrastructural variables —technological, ecological, demographic, and economic— and through the distinction between etic and emic perspectives. Drawing on three emblematic cases —the cow taboo in India, the prohibition of pork in the Middle East, and the Tsembaga-Maring rituals— the article examines the practical rationality Harris attributes to these practices and the adaptive logic that organizes his interpretation. At the same time, it situates this explanatory strategy in relation to structuralist and interpretivist perspectives, pointing out the epistemological tensions that arise when infrastructural explanations are confronted with the symbolic, historical, and native dimensions of cultural life. The article argues that Harris’s work remains relevant not only for the answers it offers to specific cultural riddles, but also for the way it defines what counts as scientific explanation in anthropology.