This article addresses materialism in the economic sense of the word. For information on the philosophical and scientific meanings, see materialism.

Materialism refers to how a person or group chooses to spend their resources, particularly money and time. Literally, a materialist is a person who is preoccupied with material, rather than intellectual or spiritual, pursuits. However, especially since the 1960s, in common use, the word more specifically refers to a person who primarily pursues wealth and luxury, typically at the expense of personal relationships, charity, and/or the world's environment. A considered and realistic materialism leads to economic behaviors that support a sustainable community. See also consumerism, recycling, and compost.

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.