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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. Hindu vegetarianism was a victory not of spirit over matter but of reproductive over productive forces.

Marvin Harris

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Marvin Harris
Age: 74 †
Born: 1927
Born: August 18
Died: 2001
Died: October 25
Anthropologist
Philosopher
Sociologist
University Teacher
Brooklyn
New York
Eating
Appetite
Westerners
Dangerous
Productive
Reproductive
Moral
Cultural
Hindu
Force
Triumph
Vegetarianism
Process
Meat
Taboo
Spirit
Forces
Morals
Taboos
Matter
India
Processes
Misrepresentation
Victory
Alike
Hindus

More quotes by Marvin Harris

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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 the potential for the nutritional well-being of their followers.
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The commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' does not say it's O.K. to kill some people and not others.
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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 not good nutritionally or ecologically.
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Ethnography literally means 'a portrait of a people.' An ethnography is a written description of a particular culture - the customs, beliefs, and behavior - based on information collected through fieldwork.
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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 if they didn't follow this particular religion.
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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 notion that they are dirty animals.
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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. Therefore, you have a different attitude toward them compared with what continues to exist in the Middle East.
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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 of the things which are really not good for us in such large quantities.
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In many ways the rise of the state was the descent of the world from freedom to slavery
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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 done. It is open to being challenged and to being proven incorrect.
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I don't see how you can write anything of value if you don't offend someone.
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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 enough to begin to eat other foods, there is some switching off of this ability to consume milk.
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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 of human behaviour.
Marvin Harris