Marvin Harris - Early Career

Early Career

Being born just before the Great Depression, Harris was poor during his childhood in Brooklyn. He entered the U.S. Army toward the end of the Second World War and used funding from the G.I. Bill to enter Columbia University along with a new generation of post-war American anthropologists. Harris was an avid reader who loved to spend hours at the race track and he eventually developed a complex mathematical betting system that was successful enough to provide support for his wife, Madelyn, and him during his years of graduate school.

Harris' early work was with his mentor, Charles Wagley, and his dissertation research in Brazil produced an unremarkable village study that carried on the Boasian descriptive tradition in anthropology—a tradition he would later denounce.

After graduation, Harris was given an assistant professorship at Columbia and, while undertaking fieldwork in Mozambique in 1957, Harris underwent a series of profound transformations that altered his theoretical and political orientations.