Zachary Sorensen
Chicago, Illinois, United States

Many ancient cultural traditions persist through religious practice to this day. They are particularly evident in the taboos surrounding food. In The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig, anthropologist Marvin Harris explores the food taboos of the ancient world, particularly focusing on the prohibition of pork in Judaism and Islam. Harris challenges the notion that cultural practices were solely the result of ideologies or supernatural beliefs, instead advocating for an understanding of culture as something that emerges from society’s material needs and conditions.

Harris begins by questioning the revulsion toward pigs in certain cultures. The Old Testament declares pigs as “unclean,” while the Quran forbids eating “the flesh of swine” but offers no further explanation. Harris argues that the labeling of pigs as “unclean” has less to do with their natural inclinations but to poor animal husbandry practices. He writes, “The pig’s penchant for excrement is not a defect of its nature but of the husbandry of its human masters. Pigs prefer and thrive best on roots, nuts, and grains…they much prefer a fresh, clean mudhole to one that has been soiled by urine and feces.”¹ The twelfth-century rabbi Moses Maimonides argues for pork’s prohibition from what Harris labels a “public health theory,” saying, “food forbidden by the Law is unwholesome.”¹ In the nineteenth century, pork’s association with trichinosis would be confirmed. Cattle, goats, and sheep are still vectors of transmissible diseases, including brucellosis and anthrax, however.¹ Finding such arguments for pork prohibition unsatisfactory, Harris instead focuses on the anatomical features of the animals classified as good to eat in the Old Testament: “Whatever parts the hoof and is cloven-footed and chews the cud among animals, you may eat.” (Leviticus 11:1)

In the ancient Middle East, the three most important food-producing animal species were cattle, goats, and sheep, all ruminants.¹ These animals thrive on diets consisting of high cellulose plants (i.e., grass and straw). From a cultural and ecological perspective, ruminants were a good choice for the ancient Israelites. Cattle, goats, and sheep are all suited to a nomadic lifestyle, and ruminants eat foods unsuitable for human consumption. They also have utility beyond their meat, providing wool, leather, and labor. Conversely, in the hot, arid environment of the Middle East, pigs were ecologically inefficient. Pigs do not graze on grass like ruminants such as goats or sheep. They also cannot be used for labor or wool and do not thrive in desert environments without significant water resources. Raising pigs would have competed with humans for scarce resources and offered little additional utility. Therefore, over time, pig-rearing became impractical and even detrimental to the survival of societies in these regions. Harris states, “The recurrence of pig aversions in several different Middle Eastern cultures strongly supports the view that the Israelite ban was a response to recurrent practical conditions rather than to a set of beliefs peculiar to one religion’s notions about clean and unclean animals.”¹ This practical concern, Harris argues, gradually became codified into religious law and moral sentiment.

Harris’s explanation of the taboo surrounding pork is steeped in the anthropological schools of cultural ecology and cultural materialism—the latter of which Harris coined himself in the 1968 text The Rise of Anthropological Theory. Cultural materialism promotes the idea that the “material realities” (i.e., reproductive, economic, and technological) play the primary role in shaping society.² For Harris, the economic and environmental realities faced by the cultures of the ancient Middle East made pig husbandry a detrimental practice to their culture and therefore, over time, the pig became “abominable.”

The Abominable Pig is a compelling case study of how material conditions could influence religious and cultural practices. By grounding food taboos in material conditions rather than mysticism, Harris looks beyond the surface of tradition and considers underlying factors that might shape belief systems.

References

1. Harris, Marvin. The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig: Riddles of Food and Culture. 1987. Simon & Schuster. pp. 68-70.
2. Buzney, Catherine and Marcoux, Jon. Cultural Materialism. The University of Alabama Department of Anthropology. https://anthropology.ua.edu/theory/cultural-materialism/.
3. Harris, Marvin. The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture. 1968. Crowell.
4. Marvin Harris: American anthropologist. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Marvin-Harris