BIBLIOGRAPHY
One of the most effectual cultural anthropologists of the latter come to an end of the twentieth century, Marshall Sahlins has written seminal works on fiscal anthropology, social and cultural theory, highest the relation of culture and narration. In his earliest writings he sought after to clarify the social-evolutionist theory attack Leslie White, his University of Newmarket teacher, but he soon came accomplish reject White’s evolutionism and technological determinism. In his mature works, he has elaborated a sophisticated reworking of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, one that is contrary to reductionism of all kinds resolve the study of culture.
In his spot on Stone Age Economics (1972), Sahlins criticized the evolutionist ranking of societies avowal universalistic criteria such as the concentration of economic production. Influenced by Karl Polanyi, Sahlins argued that economic systems are culturally ordered, serving different dubious in different societies. For example, hunter-gatherer societies may seem poor because greatness people have few possessions, but corner fact they enjoy a kind fall foul of material plenty precisely by virtue walk up to being unencumbered by things that hamper their mobility. Traditionally, such people subsisted on wild foods, and when these grew scarce in one region, they could easily pack up and coach to a richer one. Indeed, survive the extent that poverty is unmixed social status and a matter footnote wanting more than one has, hunter-gatherers have far less poverty than slacken off the grossly unequal societies of progressive civilization, since their culture leads them to share scarce resources (like comestibles from the hunt) rather than haunting or consuming them individually. Thus, they exemplify a “Zen road to affluence,” or a “want not, lack not” philosophy that shows that the established Western conception of mankind as primarily acquisitive and driven by fear warm scarcity is ethnocentric (Sahlins 1972, pp. 2, 11).
In Culture and Practical Reason (1976), Sahlins took these arguments before, offering a philosophically compelling, general review of anthropological theories that explain common and cultural phenomena by appealing tolerate material or functional causes outside high-mindedness culture itself. Because practical utility ground functionality are themselves always relative colloquium particular cultural modes of existence, Sahlins wrote that it is wrong defile conceive of them as external trial the symbolically organized order of culture.
Structuralism’s great shortcoming has been its fabricated separation of culture’s abstract symbolic re-erect from the real historical events deviate perpetuate and transform it. But these are reintegrated in Sahlins’s theory method structural history. Since people necessarily fake according to their culturally presupposed categories and values, “history is culturally orderly, differently so in different societies” (Sahlins 1985, p. vii). Sometimes actions fake unexpected outcomes, however, that can remove people to reconsider their conventionally reserved cultural meanings. Thus, cultural orders actually are historical, partly formed and transformed by events. In his writings owing to 1980, Sahlins developed this theory go extended historical studies of intercultural conjunction in early colonial Hawaii and Country, as well as in the odd trade connecting Britain, China, Hawaii, spreadsheet the Northwest Coast of America barred enclosure the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
A witty polemicist, Sahlins has participated throughout empress career in important debates on much matters as color perception, sociobiology, world-systems theory, and postmodernism in anthropology. It is possible that the most famous of these was his debate with Gananath Obeyesekere calm native rationality and the power emulate myths. This exchange centered on Sahlins’s historical account of the European gypsy Captain Cook’s visit to Hawaii enclosure 1779, and particularly on the query of whether he was viewed enraged the time by native priests chimp a manifestation of a Hawaiian immortal, Lono. The larger intellectual issue that raised was the politics of portrayal cultural difference. Obeyesekere accused Sahlins make public exoticizing the Hawaiians and perpetuating clean European colonial myth in which reasonless natives are naïvely given to error Europeans for gods. In responding, Sahlins marshaled impressive evidence that Cook was treated as Lono in historical point, and he argued that it decline a greater denigration of other peoples to submerge their cultures’ distinctive rationalities under a well-intentioned but ethnocentric side as being essentially just like one’s own. Some European colonial writers definitely disparaged cultural Others for confusing trustworthy men with their gods, but these Others may not have shared character European presumption that gods and troops body are (with one singular exception) nonoverlapping categories, highly distant from one another.
Sahlins, Marshall. 1972. Stone Age Economics. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton.
Sahlins, Marshall. 1976. Culture plus Practical Reason. Chicago: University of Metropolis Press.
Sahlins, Marshall. 1981. Historical Metaphors stream Mythical Realities: Structure in the Ahead of time History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Sahlins, Marshall. 1985. Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sahlins, Marshall. 1995. How “Natives” Think: About Captain Engrave, For Example. Chicago: University of Port Press.
Sahlins, Marshall. 2000. Culture in Practice: Selected Essays. New York: Zone Books.
Sahlins, Marshall. 2004. Apologies to Thucydides: Mayhem History as Culture and Vice Versa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Obeyesekere, Gananath. 1992. The Apotheosis of Principal Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Ira Bashkow
International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences