Cultural materialism is an anthropological theory championed by Marvin Harris.

The basic idea is that social institutions do not emerge at random, but rather come to be as a result of pressures surrounding the relationship between a population and its environment. Cultural materialism, growing as it does from the Berkeley tradition of anthropology, rests on a three-fold division of culture:

• Infrastructure, comprising a society's relations to the environment, particularly in regard to the means of production and human reproduction.
• Structure, the political economy of a society.
• Superstructure, or the greater, symbolic aspects of a society, e.g. art, religion.

Within this division of culture, cultural materialism argues for the 'primacy of infrastructure', or that, while each of these sections changes and affects the other two, infrastructure is in almost all circumstances the most significant force behind the evolution of a culture.

Just as well, using transformitive grammar to explain materialism in the language of cultural anthropology and political science, a sharp distinction between the philosophical definition and the 'scientific' defintion occurs. In the language paradigms of Cultural Materialism and political science, materialism coresponds with states of consciousness which arise from interaciton with a societies physical environment. Cultural Materialists anayze cultures using what is known as the Universal Set. The Universal set has three basic units, infrastructure, structure and superstructure. Every society has these three elements. The infrastructure of a community is the physical landscape. The structure is the economic systems used to manage the resources. Structure can be divided into at least two different types of economies, domestic economy and political ecoonomy. The former relates how family and kinship groups interact with their environments to meet their basic needs while the latter deals with trade and relations between family and kinship groups. As societies become more complex, the political economy grows. The global marketplace, with the internet as catalyst, has made many a societies political economies interact. In the third and final paradigm is the superstructure. The superstructure consists of abstract ideals such as, law, religion and art. Many theories exist as how these abstract ideas arise from a societies infrastructure. See... Marvin Harris, Antonio Gramsci, Karl Marx, Max Weber or Bryan Haden for more info. on theory.