American anthropologist; student of Steward and Fried at Columbia Univesity. Harris developed a version of the cultural ecology championed by Steward and many of his students, with a stronger emphasis on materialistic determinism. His "cultural materialism" is expressed in his many popular and widely read books, as well as in his textbook of general anthropology (1978), and his history of anthropology (1968). Harris has described himself as a Marxist without dialectics.