o justify the duties and privileges of the various roles and classes in the society in the minds of its members. As Eagleton puts it, "The function of ideology, also, is to legitimate the power of the ruling class in society; in the last analysis, the dominant ideas of a society are the ideas of its ruling class" (5).
Marx also realized that to interpret history in terms of those dominant ideas or abstract ideals is to buy into the traditional propaganda that claims divine sanction for the privileges of the ruling class in those societies. Instead, one must interpret history and historical change in terms of the technological and economic developments that make change possible and in terms of the social processes that those changes set off. As a simple example, wars are not fought for glory, honor, justice, etc.; they are fought to gain an economic advantage. In this sense, Marx was a major founder of all modern social science, which emphasizes attempting to perceive the actual processes behind social behavior, rather than settling for what people believe about their behavior.
At the same time that Marx was developing his theories, Edward Burnett Tylor was devising the concept of culture and thus founding the field of cultural anthropology. Looking at the diversity of societies throughout the world, Tylor could see no basis for asserting that any sort of human behavior or knowledge is innate. Instead, he proposed that each person learns, largely in early childhood, everything from the culture he or she is born into. What a person can know and how he or she can behave is thus limited to the possibilities included in that culture.
Even when one is exposed to other cultures, the basic values of one's own culture have been learned so early and engrained so deeply that they are held as unconscious assumptions, so that differing values are perceived as wrong rather than as alternatives. A cultural anthropologist must work h...