Primacy of the infrastructure means Marvin Harris’s idea that when trying to understand or explain a widespread social practice or belief, one must always begin with an examination of the relationship between infrastructure and the environment. Harris originally called this the principle of infrastructural determinism, a somewhat unfortunate choice of terminology since Harris explicitly recognizes the probabilistic nature of the relationship. Because of misunderstandings and misinterpretations, Harris later renamed this principle the primacy of the infrastructure.
Definition