Cloud Atlas and Marvin Harris
Cloud Atlas and Marvin Harris Memories of graduate level anthropology from the 1970’s seem now like they are from some parallel universe. Being like something from out of the Australian shaman dream time. It was a era full of Lorenz and Leaky and rational thought about human behavior based on biological observations and physical archeology. One of the books students were forced to buy was Cannibals and Kings by Marvin Harris. The book may have remained forgotten in my large collection had it not been for a movie called Cloud Atlas . After watching the movie I immediately started thinking about Marvin Harris. Thus stimulated I found myself digging out his book Cannibals and Kings and rereading it. So like real-life Cloud Atlas characters in a long chain of bearers of some ancestral wisdom let us rediscover Marvin Harris in the context of Cloud Atlas . The book Cloud Atlas was of course written by David Mitchell and he has mention little concerning his inspira...