Karl Marx declared: "It is the task of science to reveal the essence, the internal, deep and underlying processes behind the multitude of phenomena, the outward aspects and features of reality."  This means one should be able to glean from the multitude of cultural and linguistic phenomena those universal principles and values which informed mankind how to live. 

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Now when Marx penned the idea: "the task of science was to reveal essence," he was speaking as non-materialist, as a Jew who actually believed that essence referred to "a set of innate qualities of something without which it would not exist or be what it is."   In other words, these qualities which made up essence were fixed and unchanging. They were part of BEING or PERSONHOOD.

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But later in life, Marx clearly changed his mind, denying that essence existed. According to professor of philosophy Philip Kain, "Marx abandoned the idea of human essence".  He replaced essence with "human nature."  Whereas the qualities that made up essence were fixed and constant and were part of BEING, thereby implying a Creator, human nature, consciousness, and history were actually shaped and moulded by social existence, or, by what the apostle Paul called the "material elements of the world" (Col. 2:8).  

 

Whereas, human nature, consciousness, and history are materially malleable; essence is not.  His bottom-up, outside-in perspective was latter called "historical materialism." 

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His abandonment of the term essence is reflected in the following statement. "It is not the consciousness of men that determines existence, but on the contrary, THEIR SOCIAL EXISTENCE DETERMINES THEIR CONSCIOUSNESS”. 

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Now when pursuing a degree in anthropology at the University of Florida, I was introduced to such ideas in an obligatory anthro-class taught by professor Marvin Harris who was convinced that Marx was correct when he declared that "social existence determines consciousness.” For Harris, "the principle was a great advance in human knowledge, surely equivalent in its times  to the formulation of the principle of natural selection by Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin."

 

As a student of Harris, it nevertheless took sometime before I was finally convinced that SOCIAL EXISTENCE, in the case, in the Amazon Rainforest could indeed shape Chácobo consciousness. Thanks to Harris, a cultural materialist, I finally came to understand why Chácobo men lived in communal men's houses separated from their wives and why they as a society had chosen to restructure the nuclear family, replacing the covenantal “one flesh” principle of husband-wife with the biological “one flesh” principle of mother-daughter.

 

How the Chácobo restructured the nuclear family indeed had been highly shaped by what the apostle Paul called the "the material elements of the world"  (Col. 2:8), elements like rainfall, fertility of the soil, and the production of beer.  But such structuring, according to Paul, did not “accord  with Christ.”

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Paul was no cultural materialist, but nevertheless he was one who understood that every society, within limits, is compelled to conform itself to its existing materiality.  As theologian F. W. Dillistone makes clear, each society "gradually takes shape within a particular physical environment.  Its forms are influenced by the character of the environment ---whether it is fertile or hard country, whether the climate is equable or extreme, whether the mineral and water power is abundant or scanty.”

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But that is not the end of the story. I had all ready discovered that Chácobo of another age satirists indeed were aware that how their ancestors had structured the nuclear family was unnatural. In order to set themselves from the control of mothers-in-law, they composed satire recommending a return to the “one flesh” principle of husband-wife.

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As committed Jewish materialists,  Marx and Harris failed to take into account the existence of an innate Interpretative System “written on the heart” whose principles could be "triggered" and brought to consciousness.  If these law-principles did not exist in the  unconscious mind, there would be no Chácobo satire condemning a family structure which had reduced each member of society to a mechanical cog assigned a specific function.  

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Convictions

1. While man and society are free to reject, suppress, and distort these Divine Principles, no human being or society can delete this Divine knowledge from the subconscious.   

2. Existence in the material world, unless one is listening to the voice of conscience,  means one's "behavior and customs" will be highly shaped by the material world.  Paul's advice to the church in Rome was: Don’t let the [material] world around you squeeze you into its own mould, but let God re-mould your minds from within, so that you may prove in practice that the plan of God for you is good, meets all his demands and moves towards the goal of true maturity (Romans 12: 2  -Holman)

3. Besides having a consciousness moulded by SOCIAL EXISTENCE in the Amazonian Rainforest, Chácobo satire reveals the existence of a second internal compass, one that could set them free from its contextual control.