Blackwell Reference Online

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A critical approach which developed in Britain during the late 1970s and 1980s, cultural materialism is difficult to pin down as a theoretical and analytical concept. This is partly because it is often used in a polemical or descriptive rather than conceptual way. There is clearly a link between “cultural,” “dialectical,” and “historical” materialism, and “cultural materialism” is allied to marxism , although often implicitly rather than explicitly. It is also hard to define because the concept itself depends on both the tension between and the breakdown of its constituent terms – “culture” and “materialism,” or rather, material forces – in ways which change the meanings of both. Thus the concept is materialist in that it suggests that cultural artifacts, institutions, and practices are in some sense determined by “material” processes; culturalist in its insistence that there is no crude material reality beyond culture – that culture is itself a material practice. To a certain extent, then, cultural materialism hangs on a paradox : culture is itself material, yet there is always a further, shadowy, material reality that lies beyond it, and from which it derives its meaning. In this way cultural materialism runs the risk of mimicking the very idealism it seeks to repudiate. Moreover, as Raymond Williams pointed out in “Problems of materialism” (repr. in Williams, 1980), “materialism” ... log in or subscribe to read full text