Marshall Sahlins

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Marshall Sahlins

Sahlins in 2003

Born Marshall David Sahlins

December 27, 1930

Chicago, Illinois, U.S.

Died April 5, 2021 (aged 90)

Chicago, Illinois, U.S.

Citizenship American

Alma mater University of Michigan (BA, MA)

Columbia University (PhD)

Children Peter Sahlins

Scientific career

Fields Cultural Anthropology

Institutions University of Chicago

Thesis Social Stratification in Polynesia: a Study of

Adaptive Variation in Culture (1954)

Doctoral advisor Morton Fried

Doctoral David Graeber, Dominic Boyer, Martha Kaplan

students

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Marshall David Sahlins (/ˈsɑːlɪnz/ SAH-linz; December 27, 1930 – April 5,

2021)[1][2] was an American cultural anthropologist best known for his
ethnographic work in the Pacific and for his contributions to anthropological
theory. He was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus
of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.[3]
Biography[edit]
Sahlins was born in Chicago, the son of Bertha (Skud) and Paul A. Sahlins. His
parents were Russian Jewish immigrants.[4] His father was a doctor while his
mother was a homemaker.[2] He grew up in a secular, non-practicing family. His
family claims to be descended from Baal Shem Tov, a mystical rabbi
considered to be the founder of Hasidic Judaism. Sahlins' mother
admired Emma Goldman and was a political activist as a child in Russia.[5]
Sahlins received his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees at
the University of Michigan where he studied with evolutionary
anthropologist Leslie White. He earned his PhD at Columbia University in 1954.
[2]
There his intellectual influences included Eric Wolf, Morton Fried, Sidney
Mintz, and the economic historian Karl Polanyi.[6] In 1957, he became assistant
professor at the University of Michigan.[2]
In the 1960s he became politically active, and while protesting against
the Vietnam War, Sahlins coined the term for the imaginative form of protest
now called the "teach-in", which drew inspiration from the sit-in pioneered
during the civil rights movement.[7] In 1968, Sahlins signed the "Writers and
Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest
against the Vietnam War.[8] In the late 1960s, he also spent two years in Paris,
where he was exposed to French intellectual life (and particularly the work
of Claude Lévi-Strauss) and the student protests of May 1968. In 1973, he took
a position in the anthropology department at the University of Chicago, where
he was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology
Emeritus. His commitment to activism continued throughout his time at Chicago,
most recently leading to his protest over the opening of the
university's Confucius Institute[9][10] (which later closed in the fall of 2014).[11] On
February 23, 2013, Sahlins resigned from the National Academy of Sciences to
protest the call for military research for improving the effectiveness of small
combat groups and also the election of Napoleon Chagnon. The resignation
followed the publication in that month of Chagnon's memoir and widespread
coverage of the memoir, including a profile of Chagnon in The New York
Times Magazine.[12]
Alongside his research and activism, Sahlins trained a host of students who
went on to become prominent in the field. One such student, Gayle Rubin, said:
"Sahlins is a mesmerizing speaker and a brilliant thinker. By the time he finished
the first lecture, I was hooked."[13]
In 2001, Sahlins became publisher of Prickly Pear Pamphlets, which was
started in 1993 by anthropologists Keith Hart and Anna Grimshaw, and was
renamed Prickly Paradigm Press. The imprint specializes in small pamphlets on
unconventional subjects in anthropology, critical theory, philosophy, and current
events.[14] He died on April 5, 2021, at the age of 90 in Chicago.[15]
His brother was the writer and comedian Bernard Sahlins (1922–2013).[16] His
son, Peter Sahlins, is a historian.[17]
Work[edit]
Sahlins is known for theorizing the interaction of structure and agency, his
critiques of reductive theories of human nature (economic and biological, in
particular), and his demonstrations of the power that culture has to shape
people's perceptions and actions. Although his focus has been the
entire Pacific, Sahlins has done most of his research in Fiji (especially the island
of Moala) and Hawaii.
"The world's most 'primitive' people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small
amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is
a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization. It has grown with civilization, at once as an invidious
distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation."
Sahlins (1972)[18]

Early work[edit]
Sahlins's training under Leslie White, a proponent of materialist and
evolutionary anthropology at the University of Michigan, is reflected in his early
work. His 1958 book Social Stratification in Polynesia offered a materialist
account of Polynesian cultures.[19] In his Evolution and Culture (1960), he
touched on the areas of cultural evolution and neoevolutionism. He divided
the evolution of societies into "general" and "specific". General evolution is the
tendency of cultural and social systems to increase in complexity, organization
and adaptiveness to environment. However, as the various cultures are not
isolated, there is interaction and a diffusion of their qualities (like
technological inventions). This leads cultures to develop in different ways
(specific evolution), as various elements are introduced to them in different
combinations and on different stages of evolution.[3] Moala, Sahlins's first major
monograph, exemplifies this approach.
Stone Age Economics (1972) collects some of Sahlins's key essays
in substantivist economic anthropology. As opposed to "formalists,"
substantivists insist that economic life is produced through cultural rules that
govern the production and distribution of goods, and therefore any
understanding of economic life has to start from cultural principles, and not from
the assumption that the economy is made up of independently acting,
"economically rational" individuals. Perhaps Sahlins's most famous essay from
the collection, "The Original Affluent Society," elaborates on this theme through
an extended meditation on "hunter-gatherer" societies. Stone Age
Economics inaugurated Sahlins's persistent critique of the discipline
of economics, particularly in its Neoclassical form.
Contributions to historical anthropology[edit]
After the publication of Culture and Practical Reason in 1976, his focus shifted
to the relation between history and anthropology, and the way different cultures
understand and make history. Of central concern in this work is the problem of
historical transformation, which structuralist approaches could not adequately
account for. Sahlins developed the concept of the "structure of the conjuncture"
to grapple with the problem of structure and agency, in other words that
societies were shaped by the complex conjuncture of a variety of forces, or
structures. Earlier evolutionary models, by contrast, claimed that culture arose
as an adaptation to the natural environment. Crucially, in Sahlins's formulation,
individuals have the agency to make history. Sometimes their position gives
them power by placing them at the top of a political hierarchy. At other times,
the structure of the conjuncture, a potent or fortuitous mixture of forces, enables
people to transform history. This element of chance and contingency makes a
science of these conjunctures impossible, though comparative study can enable
some generalizations.[20] Historical Metaphors and Mythical
Realities (1981), Islands of History (1985), Anahulu (1992), and Apologies to
Thucydides (2004) contain his main contributions to historical anthropology.
Islands of History sparked a notable debate with Gananath Obeyesekere over
the details of Captain James Cook's death in the Hawaiian Islands in 1779. At
the heart of the debate was how to understand the rationality of indigenous
people. Obeyesekere insisted that indigenous people thought in essentially the
same way as Westerners and was concerned that any argument otherwise
would paint them as "irrational" and "uncivilized". In contrast Sahlins argued that
each culture may have different types of rationality that make sense of the world
by focusing on different patterns and explain them within specific cultural
narratives, and that assuming that all cultures lead to a single rational view is a
form of eurocentrism.[3]