Marshall Sahlins | |
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 Sahlins in 2003 | |
| Born | Marshall David Sahlins (1930-12-27)December 27, 1930 |
| Died | April 5, 2021(2021-04-05) (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 students | David Graeber,Dominic Boyer,Martha Kaplan |
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Marshall David Sahlins (/ˈsɑːlɪnz/SAH-linz; December 27, 1930 – April 5, 2021)[1][2] was an Americancultural 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 ofAnthropology and of Social Sciences at theUniversity of Chicago.[3]
Sahlins was born inChicago, 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 fromBaal Shem Tov, a mystical rabbi considered to be the founder ofHasidic Judaism. Sahlins' mother admiredEmma Goldman and was a political activist as a child in Russia.[5]
Sahlins received his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees at theUniversity of Michigan where he studied with evolutionary anthropologistLeslie White. He earned his PhD atColumbia University in 1954.[2] There his intellectual influences includedEric Wolf,Morton Fried,Sidney Mintz, and the economic historianKarl 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 theVietnam War, Sahlins coined the term for the imaginative form of protest now called the "teach-in", which drew inspiration from thesit-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 ofClaude Lévi-Strauss) and the student protests of May 1968. In 1973, he took a position in the anthropology department at theUniversity 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'sConfucius Institute[9][10] (which later closed in the fall of 2014).[11] On February 23, 2013, Sahlins resigned from theNational Academy of Sciences to protest the call for military research for improving the effectiveness of small combat groups and also the election ofNapoleon Chagnon. The resignation followed the publication in that month of Chagnon's memoir and widespread coverage of the memoir, including a profile of Chagnon inThe New York TimesMagazine.[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 anthropologistsKeith Hart and Anna Grimshaw, and was renamedPrickly 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 comedianBernard Sahlins (1922–2013).[16] His son,Peter Sahlins, is a historian.[17]
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 entirePacific, Sahlins has done most of his research inFiji (especially the island ofMoala) andHawaii.
"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'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 bookSocial Stratification in Polynesia offered a materialist account of Polynesian cultures.[19] In hisEvolution and Culture (1960), he touched on the areas ofcultural evolution andneoevolutionism. He divided theevolution 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 adiffusion of their qualities (like technologicalinventions). 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 insubstantivist 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 ofeconomics, particularly in itsNeoclassical form.
After the publication ofCulture and Practical Reason in 1976, his focus shifted to the relation betweenhistory and anthropology, and the way different cultures understand and make history. Of central concern in this work is the problem of historical transformation, whichstructuralist 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), andApologies to Thucydides (2004) contain his main contributions to historical anthropology.
Islands of History sparkeda notable debate withGananath Obeyesekere over the details ofCaptain James Cook's death in theHawaiian 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 asWesterners 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]
Over the years, Sahlins took aim at various forms of economic determinism (mentioned above) and alsobiological determinism, or the idea that human culture is a by-product of biological processes. His major critique of sociobiology is contained inThe Use and Abuse of Biology. His 2013 book,What Kinship Is—And Is Not picks up some of these threads to show how kinship organizes sexuality and human reproduction rather than the other way around. In other words, biology does not determine kinship. Rather, the experience of "mutuality of being" that we call kinship is a cultural phenomenon.[21]
Sahlins's final book wasThe New Science of the Enchanted Universe: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity. The book explores the worldwide phenomenon of "meta-persons." A reviewer defined metapersons as "supreme gods and minor deities, ancestral spirits, demons, indwelling souls in animals and plants—who act as the intimate, everyday agents of human success or ruin, whether in agriculture, hunting, procreation, or politics."[22]The book was published posthumously, and almost didn't get published at all. In fall 2020, Sahlins fell and becameparalyzed. Then, near his 90th birthday, his mind fell into adissociative state. Doctors gave him days to live. But he rallied and emerged from the dissociative state, determined to finish. He could not use his hands, so he began dictating pages to his son, historian Peter Sahlins. They finished a month before his death.[citation needed]
According to his obituary in the socialist magazineJacobin,
some of [his books] have profoundly influenced the way we think anthropologically, and also more generally in the social sciences. His analysis inspired a wide range of radical thinkers, includingleft andpost-left anarchists. The ecologicalneo-primitivistJohn Zerzan owed much to Sahlins (“my single most important influence”), whileHakim Bey has repeatedly cited “The Original Affluent Society” as the major inspiration for his thinking. His impact on radical thought inside the academy was profound as well. He was a PhD adviser and mentor toDavid Graeber at the University of Chicago. Graeber’s anarchist leaning, political commitment, and ability to speak clearly to large audiences owe much to Sahlins, whom he held in the highest regard.[23]
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