Biography: Marshall David Sahlins (

Marshall David Sahlins (/slnz/ SAH-linz; born December 27, 1930) is an
Americananthropologist best known for his ethnographic work in the Pacific and
for his contributions to anthropological theory. He is currently Charles F. Grey
Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and of Social
Sciences at the University of Chicago.[1]
Contents
[hide]
1Biography
2Work
o
2.1Early work
2.2Contributions to economic anthropology
2.3Contributions to historical anthropology
2.4Centrality of culture
3Selected publications
4Awards
5See also
6References
7External links
Biography[edit]
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. There his intellectual influences
included Eric Wolf, Morton Fried, Sidney Mintz, and the economic historian Karl
Polanyi.[2] After receiving his PhD, he returned to teach at the University of
Michigan. In the 1960s he became politically active, and while protesting against
theVietnam War, Sahlins invented the imaginative form of protest called the
"teach-in," which drew inspiration from the sit-in pioneered during the civil rights
movement.[3] In 1968, Sahlins signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest"
pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.[4] 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 Lvi-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 is currently the Charles F.
Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology Emeritus. His commitment
to activism has continued throughout his time at Chicago, most recently leading
to his protest over the opening of the University's Confucius Institute[5][6] (which
later closed in the fall of 2014).[7] 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.[8][9]
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.".[10]
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.[11]
His brother was the writer and comedian Bernard Sahlins (19222013).
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 entirePacific,
Sahlins has done most of his research in Fiji 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)[12]
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. 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.[1] Moala, Sahlins's first major monograph, exemplifies this approach.
Contributions to economic anthropology[edit]

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 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 "huntergatherer" 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 betweenhistory 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.[13] 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.
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Marshall David Sahlins (/slnz/ SAH-linz; born December 27, 1930) is an

2.2Contributions to economic anthropology

2.3Contributions to historical anthropology

Contributions to economic anthropology[edit]

Contributions to historical anthropology[edit]

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