Marshall Sahlins

Since its first publication over forty years ago Marshall Sahlins's Stone Age Economics has established itself as a classic of modern anthropology and arguably one of the founding works of anthropological economics. Ambitiously tackling the nature of economic life and how to study it comparatively, Sahlins radically revises traditional views of the hunter-gatherer and so-called primitive societies, revealing them to be the original "affluent society."Sahlins examines notions of production, distribution and exchange in early communities and examines the link between economics and cultural and social factors. A radical study of tribal economies, domestic production for livelihood, and of the submission of domestic production to the material and political demands of society at large, Stone Age Economics regards the economy as a category of culture rather than behaviour, in a class with politics and religion rather than rationality or prudence. Sahlins concludes, controversially, that the experiences of those living in subsistence economies may actually have been better, healthier and more fulfilled than the millions enjoying the affluence and luxury afforded by the economics of modern industrialisation and agriculture.This Routledge Classics edition includes a new foreword by David Graeber, London School of Economics.

Reflecting the decline in college courses on Western Civilization, Marshall Sahlins aims to accelerate the trend by reducing "Western Civ" to about two hours. He cites Nietzsche to the effect that deep issues are like cold baths; one should get into and out of them as quickly as possible. The deep issue here is the ancient Western specter of a presocial and antisocial human nature: a supposedly innate self-interest that is represented in our native folklore as the basis or nemesis of cultural order. Yet these Western notions of nature and culture ignore the one truly universal character of human sociality: namely, symbolically constructed kinship relations. Kinsmen are members of one another: they live each other's lives and die each other's deaths. But where the existence of the other is thus incorporated in the being of the self, neither interest, nor agency or even experience is an individual fact, let alone an egoistic disposition. "Sorry, beg your pardon," Sahlins concludes, Western society has been built on a perverse and mistaken idea of human nature.

Marshall Sahlins centers these essays on islands—Hawaii, Fiji, New Zealand—whose histories have intersected with European history. But he is also concerned with the insular thinking in Western scholarship that creates false dichotomies between past and present, between structure and event, between the individual and society. Sahlins's provocative reflections form a powerful critique of Western history and anthropology.

Assoc. for Social Anthropology in Oceania, Special Pubs. No. 1Hawaiian culture as it met foreign traders and settlers is the context for Sahlins's structuralist methodology of historical interpretation.

First devised as after-dinner entertainment at a decennial meeting of the Association of Social Anthropologists in Great Britain, and first published by Prickly Pear Press in 1993, this expanded edition of Waiting for Foucault represents some of the brightest anthropological satire—mixed in with some of the most serious intellectual issues in the human sciences. Whether he's summing up the state of the discipline ("Some things are better left un-Said") or ruminating on the ancients, Sahlins delivers a strong mixture of wit and wisdom.

In this pithy two-part essay, Marshall Sahlins reinvigorates the debates on what constitutes kinship, building on some of the best scholarship in the field to produce an original and creative outlook on the deepest bond humans can have. Covering thinkers from Aristotle and Levy-Bruhl to Émile Durkheim and David Schneider, and communities from the Maori and the English to the Korowai of New Guinea, he draws on a breadth of theory and a range of ethnographic examples to form an acute definition of kinship, what he calls the “mutuality of being.” Kinfolk are persons who are parts of one another to the extent that what happens to one is felt by the other. Meaningfully and emotionally, relatives live each other’s lives and die each other’s deaths. In the second part of his essay, Sahlins draws on his wide ethnographic knowledge to show that mutuality of being is a symbolic notion of belonging, not a biological connection by “blood.” Quite apart from relations of birth, people may become kin in ways ranging from sharing the same name or the same food to helping each other survive the perils of the high seas. In a groundbreaking argument, he demonstrates that even where kinship is reckoned from births, it is because the wider kindred or the clan ancestors are already involved in procreation, so that the notion of birth is meaningfully dependent on kinship rather than kinship on birth. By formulating this reversal, Sahlins identifies what kinship truly is: not nature, but culture.

One of the world's preeminent cultural anthropologists leaves a last work that fundamentally reconfigures how we study most other culturesFrom the perspective of Western modernity, humanity inhabits a disenchanted cosmos. Gods, spirits, and ancestors have left us for a transcendent beyond, no longer living in our midst and being involved in all matters of everyday life from the trivial to the dire. Yet the vast majority of cultures throughout human history treat spirits as very real persons, members of a cosmic society who interact with humans and control their fate. In most cultures, even today, people are but a small part of an enchanted universe misconstrued by the transcendent categories of "religion" and the "supernatural." The New Science of the Enchanted Universe shows how anthropologists and other social scientists must rethink these cultures of immanence and study them by their own lights.In this, his last, revelatory book, Marshall Sahlins announces a new method and sets an exciting agenda for the field. He takes readers around the world, from Inuit of the Arctic Circle to pastoral Dinka of East Africa, from Arawet� swidden gardeners of Amazonia to Trobriand Island horticulturalists. In the process, Sahlins sheds new light on classical and contemporary ethnographies that describe these cultures of immanence and reveals how even the apparently mundane, all-too-human spheres of "economics" and "politics" emerge as people negotiate with, and ultimately usurp, the powers of the gods.The New Science of the Enchanted Universe offers a road map for a new practice of anthropology that takes seriously the enchanted universe and its transformations from ancient Mesopotamia to contemporary America.

When Western scholars write about non-Western societies, do they inevitably perpetuate the myths of European imperialism? Can they ever articulate the meanings and logics of non-Western peoples? Who has the right to speak for whom? Questions such as these are among the most hotly debated in contemporary intellectual life. In How "Natives" Think , Marshall Sahlins addresses these issues head on, while building a powerful case for the ability of anthropologists working in the Western tradition to understand other cultures.In recent years, these questions have arisen in debates over the death and deification of Captain James Cook on Hawai'i Island in 1779. Did the Hawaiians truly receive Cook as a manifestation of their own god Lono? Or were they too pragmatic, too worldly-wise to accept the foreigner as a god? Moreover, can a "non-native" scholar give voice to a "native" point of view? In his 1992 book The Apotheosis of Captain Cook , Gananath Obeyesekere used this very issue to attack Sahlins's decades of scholarship on Hawaii. Accusing Sahlins of elementary mistakes of fact and logic, even of intentional distortion, Obeyesekere portrayed Sahlins as accepting a naive, enthnocentric idea of superiority of the white man over "natives"—Hawaiian and otherwise. Claiming that his own Sri Lankan heritage gave him privileged access to the Polynesian native perspective, Obeyesekere contended that Hawaiians were actually pragmatists too rational and sensible to mistake Cook for a god.Curiously then, as Sahlins shows, Obeyesekere turns eighteenth-century Hawaiians into twentieth-century modern Europeans, living up to the highest Western standards of "practical rationality." By contrast, Western scholars are turned into classic custom-bound "natives", endlessly repeating their ancestral traditions of the White man's superiority by insisting Cook was taken for a god. But this inverted ethnocentrism can only be supported, as Sahlins demonstrates, through wholesale fabrications of Hawaiian ethnography and history—not to mention Obeyesekere's sustained misrepresentations of Sahlins's own work. And in the end, although he claims to be speaking on behalf of the "natives," Obeyesekere, by substituting a home-made "rationality" for Hawaiian culture, systematically eliminates the voices of Hawaiian people from their own history.How "Natives" Think goes far beyond specialized debates about the alleged superiority of Western traditions. The culmination of Sahlins's ethnohistorical research on Hawaii, it is a reaffirmation for understanding difference.

"The main thrust of this book is to deliver a major critique of materialist and rationalist explanations of social and cultural forms, but the in the process Sahlins has given us a much stronger statement of the centrality of symbols in human affairs than have many of our 'practicing' symbolic anthropologists. He demonstrates that symbols enter all phases of social those which we tend to regard as strictly pragmatic, or based on concerns with material need or advantage, as well as those which we tend to view as purely symbolic, such as ideology, ritual, myth, moral codes, and the like. . . ."—Robert McKinley, Reviews in Anthropology

Thucydides' classic work on the history of the Peloponnesian War is the root of Western conceptions of history—including the idea that Western history is the foundation of everyone else's. Here, Marshall Sahlins takes on Thucydides and the conceptions of history he wrought with a groundbreaking new book that shows what a difference an anthropological concept of culture can make to the writing of history.Sahlins begins by confronting Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War with an analogous "Polynesian War," the fight for the domination of the Fiji Islands (1843-55) between a great sea power (like Athens) and a great land power (like Sparta). Sahlins draws parallels between the conflicts with an eye to their respective systems of power and sovereignty as well as to Thucydides' alternation between individual (Pericles, Themistocles) and collective (the Athenians, the Spartans) actors in the making of history. Characteristic of most histories ever written, this alternation between the agency of "Great Men" and collective entities leads Sahlins to a series of incisive analyses ranging in subject matter from Bobby Thomson's "shot heard round the world" for the 1951 Giants to the history-making of Napoleon and certain divine kings to the brouhaha over Elián Gonzalez. Finally, again departing from Thucydides, Sahlins considers the relationship between cultural order and historical contingency through the recounting of a certain royal assassination that changed the course of Fijian history, a story of fratricide and war worthy of Shakespeare.In this most convincing presentation yet of his influential theory of culture, Sahlins experiments with techniques for mixing rich narrative with cultural explication in the hope of doing justice at once to the actions of persons and the customs of people. And he demonstrates the necessity of taking culture into account in the creation of history—with apologies to Thucydides, who too often did not.

A criticism of sociobiology by one of the world's foremost anthropologists

Culture in Practice collects both the seminal and the more obscure academic and political writings of the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins from the 1960s through the 1990s. More than a compilation, this book unfolds as an intellectual autobiography. Sahlins’s reportage and reflections on the anti-war movement in 1964 and 1965 mark the intellectual development from earlier general studies of culture, economy, and human nature to the more historical and globally aware works on indigenous peoples, especially Pacific Islanders.Throughout these essays, Sahlins also engages the cultural specificity of the West, developing a critical account of the distinctive ways that we act in and understand the world. Culture in Practice includes a play / review of Robert Ardrey’s sociobiology, essays on “native” consumption patterns of food and clothes in America and the West, explorations of how two thousand years of Western cosmology have affected our understanding of others, and ethnohistorical accounts of how cultural orders of Europeans and Pacific Islanders structured the historical experiences of both.Throughout this range of scholarly inquiries and critical commentaries, Sahlins offers his own way of thinking about the anthropological project. To transcend our native categories in order to understand how other peoples have been able historically to construct their own modes of existence ― even now, in the era of globalization ― is the great challenge of contemporary anthropology.

Tribesmen (Foundations of Modern Anthropology)

This is the long-awaited fifth edition of Marshall Sahlins’ classic series of bon mots , ruminations, and musings on the ancients, anthropology, and much else in between. It’s been twenty-five years since Sahlins first devised some after-dinner entertainment at a decennial meeting of the Association of Social Anthropologists in Great Britain, published soon thereafter by Prickly Paradigm’s first incarnation, Prickly Pear. What the Foucault? contains all the old chestnuts, but has been thoroughly updated, and is laced through with all the wit and wisdom we’ve come to expect.

In recent years, Confucius Institutes have sprung up on more than four hundred and fifty campuses worldwide, including nearly one hundred across the United States. At first glance, this seems like a benefit for everyone concerned. The colleges and universities receive considerable contributions from the Confucius Institutes’ head office in Beijing, including funds to cover the cost of set-up, the provision of Chinese-language instructors, and a cache of other resources. For their part, the Confucius Institutes are able to further their mission of spreading knowledge of Chinese language and culture.But Marshall Sahlins argues that this seemingly innocuous arrangement conceals the more dubious mission of promoting the political influence of the Chinese government, as guided by the propaganda apparatus of the party-state. Drawing on reports in the media and conversations with those involved, Sahlins shows that the Confucius Institutes are a threat to the principles of academic freedom and integrity at the foundation of our system of higher education. Incidents of academic malpractice are disturbingly common, Sahlins shows. They range from virtually unnoticeable acts of self-censorship to the discouragement of visits from the Dalai Lama and publicly notorious cases like the scandal caused by the director-general of the Confucius Institutes at a recent meeting of the European Association for Chinese Studies when she had certain pages ripped out of the conference program and abstracts.As prominent universities are persuaded by the promise of additional funding to allow Confucius Institutes on campus, they also legitimate them and thereby encourage the participation of other schools less able to resist Beijing’s inducements. But if these great institutions are to uphold the academic principles upon which they are founded, Sahlins convincingly argues that they must reverse this course, terminate their relations to the Confucius Institutes, and resume their obligation of living up to the idea of the university.

Mit diesem kurzen Text, der in den 1970er-Jahren als erstes Kapitel eines ganzen Bandes zu den Stone Age Economics erschien und erstmals in deutscher Übersetzung vorliegt, bricht Marshall Sahlins mit dem vorherrschenden ökonomischen Paradigma, dass mehr Arbeit auch mehr Wohlstand bringt. Denn bis heute wird es weltweit täglich Lügen gestraft, was der Annahme von der ursprünglichen Wohlstandgesellschaft die Brisanz verleiht, die sie noch immer Was wäre, wenn wir immer schon reich gewesen sind? Und was verschiebt sich, wenn wir Armut nicht als eine geringe Menge an Gütern im Besitz Einzelner begreifen, sondern als ein Verhältnis zwischen den Menschen? Was der weltberühmte Anthropologe anhand empirischer Beispiele entwirft, stellt einen radikalen theoretischen Bruch mit dem Höher-Schneller-Weiter dar, das die westliche Konsumgesellschaft vorantreibt.Wenn es neben der Befriedigung von Bedürfnissen durch immer größere Produktion noch einen anderen Weg gibt, dann sollten wir ihn gerade angesichts der Vernutzung unseres Planeten und der Ungleichheit in der Verteilung von Teilhabe wieder in Betracht dass Reichtum auch darin bestehen kann, weniger zu begehren.

Αυτοί οι λαοί -οι Εσκιμώοι, οι Αυστραλοί Αβορίγινες, οι Αφρικανοί Βουσμάνοι και άλλες παρόμοιες πληθυσμιακές ομάδες- αντιπροσωπεύουν την παλαιότερη και ίσως πιο επιτυχημένη περίπτωση ανθρώπινης προσαρμογής. Μέχρι και 12.000 χρόνια πριν, ολόκληρη σχεδόν η ανθρωπότητα ζούσε με αυτόν τον τρόπο. Τους τελευταίους αιώνες, οι κυνηγοί έχουν οπισθοχωρήσει άρον άρον ενόψει του οδοστρωτήρα της νεοτερικότητας. Ο ενθουσιασμός, όμως, για τους κυνηγετικούς λαούς και τον τρόπο ζωής τους παραμένει ισχυρός. Οι κυνηγοί-συλλέκτες στέκονται στην αντίπερα όχθη της πολυπληθούς αστικής ζωής, όπως αυτή βιώνεται σήμερα από τους περισσότερους ανθρώπους· ωστόσο, οι ίδιοι αυτοί κυνηγοί γνωρίζουν, ίσως, τις απαντήσεις-κλειδιά σε ορισμένα από τα σημαντικότερα ερωτήματα για την ανθρώπινη συνθήκη. Μπορούν οι άνθρωποι να ζήσουν χωρίς το κράτος ή την αγορά; Μπορούν οι άνθρωποι να ζήσουν χωρίς συσσωρευμένη ή "προηγμένη" τεχνολογία; Μπορούν οι άνθρωποι να ζήσουν με τη φύση χωρίς να την καταστρέφουν; Σημαντικότερα μάλιστα όλων, μπορούν οι άνθρωποι να διάγουν ένα βιώσιμο βίο βασισμένο στο μοίρασμα και τη συνεργασία;(από τον πρόλογο του Ρίτσαρντ Λη)Περιλαμβάνονται τα κείμενα:- Μάρσαλ Σάλινς: "Η πρωταρχική κοινωνία της αφθονίας"- Νιούριτ Μπερντ - Ντέηβιντ: "Η φύση ως τροφός"- Άλαν Μπάρναρντ: "Ο τροφοσυλλεκτικός τρόπος σκέψης"- Τζέημς Γούντμπερν: "Εξισωτικές κοινωνίες"- Κάρεν Έντικοτ: "Οι συνιστώσες του σεξουαλικού εξισωτισμού στις τροφοσυλλεκτικές κοινωνίες"- Τζέημς Γούντμπερν: "Το μοίρασμα δεν πρέπει να συγχέεται με την ανταλλαγή"- Τζωρτζ Σίλμπερμπαουερ: "Η πολιτική διαδικασία στις τροφοσυλλεκτικές ομάδες των Γκ/ουί"- Τιμ Ίνγκολντ: "Για τις κοινωνικές σχέσεις στην κυνηγετική - συλλεκτική ομάδα"- Ρίτσαρντ Λη: "Σκέψεις για τον πρωτόγονο κομμουνισμό"- Θανάσης Κουραβέλος: Επίμετρο "Για τις κοινωνίες μοιράσματος και τη σημασία τους για μας σήμερα"

Personnalité singulière de l’anthropologie américaine, Marshall Sahlins montre dans ce plaidoyer anti-évolutionniste que les changements socio-culturels observés chez différents peuples ne représentent pas une rupture par rapport à une longue histoire prétendument « immobile ». Il n’y a pas de peuple « sans histoire » comme on l’a parfois prétendu en Occident depuis l’époque des Lumières.

Les cultures humaines se sont-elles constituées en se fondant sur les activités pratiques et sur l'intérêt utilitaire ? L'auteur critique cette thèse et défend l'interprétation symbolique de la culture contre les utilitarismes de toutes sortes. Il propose ainsi une conclusion nouvelle au débat séculaire du matérialisme et de l'idéalisme.Quand il s'agit d'analyser les sociétés dites primitives, le matérialisme historique a ses limites. Aussi, marxismes et structuralismes sont-ils destinés à rester deux perspectives théoriques distinctes.Dans cette controverse entre raison pratique et raison culturelle, la conception matérialiste de l'histoire est en procès. La découverte de la culture fait apparaître que, si le matérialisme historique est la conscience de la société occidentale, il l'est dans les termes et dans les limites de cette société. Sahlins, examinant tels aspects de l'alimentation ou de la mode, avance que la production elle-même n'est pas une logique pratique d'efficacité matérielle, mais une intention culturelle. La rationalité matérielle se fonde sur des relations signifiantes entre personnes et objets.

For nearly a year Marshall D. Sahlins lived in villages on the Fijian island of Moala, learning the "way of the land," as the Moalans call their customs. From this experience he has written a book that is at once an intensive field study and a new approach to the methods of studying primitive communities. It marks an important departure from the standard trait-listing form of anthropological reports, for Sahlins does not isolate such factors as economics, kinship, and political organization. Rather he shows how closely they are interwoven in a primitive culture and why they must be interpreted with reference to the organic whole. This book, frankly evolutionary in its approach, views Moalan culture as an adaptive organization, a human means of dealing with nature so as to ensure survival. Proceeding from the smallest kinship groups, families, to the larger organization of village and island, Sahlins shows how kinship structure can organize the polity and economy. In a culture such as Moalan, kinship behavior is economics and often politics as well. By fully appreciating this fact, the author claims, we are made aware of the wide evolutionary gap between primitive societies and the impersonal structure of modern civilization.

in-8, broché, 456 pp. Fine ride de lecture au dos, sinon très bon état.