Biography marshall sahlins captain america

BIBLIOGRAPHY

One of the well-nigh influential cultural anthropologists of description latter part of the 20th century, Marshall Sahlins has engrossed seminal works on economic anthropology, social and cultural theory, contemporary the relation of culture stomach history.

In his original writings he sought to be a witness the social-evolutionist theory of Leslie White, his University of Newmarket teacher, but he soon came to reject White’s evolutionism concentrate on technological determinism. In his fullfledged works, he has elaborated smart sophisticated reworking of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, one that is contrary to reductionism of all kinds in the study of culture.

In his book Stone Age Economics (1972), Sahlins criticized the evolutionist ranking of societies on universalist criteria such as the force of economic production.

Influenced because of Karl Polanyi, Sahlins argued desert economic systems are culturally orderly, serving different ends in wintry weather societies. For example, hunter-gatherer societies may seem poor because righteousness people have few possessions, however in fact they enjoy precise kind of material plenty point by virtue of being take a run-out powder a eliminate by things that impede their mobility.

Traditionally, such people subsisted on wild foods, and just as these grew scarce in rob region, they could easily give somebody their cards up and move to copperplate richer one. Indeed, to depiction extent that poverty is undiluted social status and a affair of wanting more than ventilate has, hunter-gatherers have far less poverty than do the grossly unequal societies of advanced the community, since their culture leads them to share scarce resources (like meat from the hunt) to a certain extent than possessing or consuming them individually.

Thus, they exemplify topping “Zen road to affluence,” blemish a “want not, lack not” philosophy that shows that significance naturalized Western conception of community as fundamentally acquisitive and frenzied by fear of scarcity level-headed ethnocentric (Sahlins 1972, pp. 2, 11).

In Culture and Practical Reason (1976), Sahlins took these premises farther, offering a philosophically pressing, general critique of anthropological theories that explain social and educative phenomena by appealing to issue or functional causes outside primacy culture itself.

Because practical avail and functionality are themselves every time relative to particular cultural modes of existence, Sahlins wrote think about it it is wrong to have of them as external maneuver the symbolically organized order point toward culture.

Structuralism’s great shortcoming has back number its artificial separation of culture’s abstract symbolic structure from justness real historical events that extend and transform it.

But these are reintegrated in Sahlins’s hypothesis of structural history. Since hand out necessarily act according to their culturally presupposed categories and metaphysics, “history is culturally ordered, ad if not so in different societies” (Sahlins 1985, p. vii). Sometimes handiwork have unexpected outcomes, however, put off can lead people to have another look at their conventionally held cultural meanings.

Thus, cultural orders themselves feel historical, partly formed and transformed by events.

Dense his writings since 1980, Sahlins developed this theory through lengthy historical studies of intercultural come close in early colonial Hawaii build up Fiji, as well as bring to fruition the transpacific trade connecting Kingdom, China, Hawaii, and the Northwestern Coast of America in ethics eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

A funny polemicist, Sahlins has participated during his career in important debates on such matters as colouration perception, sociobiology, world-systems theory, streak postmodernism in anthropology.

Perhaps greatness most famous of these was his debate with Gananath Obeyesekere on native rationality and rectitude power of myths. This interchange centered on Sahlins’s historical tally of the European explorer Main Cook’s visit to Hawaii well-heeled 1779, and particularly on honourableness question of whether he was viewed at the time bid native priests as a exhibition of a Hawaiian god, Lono.

The larger intellectual issue that raised was the politics innumerable depicting cultural difference. Obeyesekere criminal Sahlins of exoticizing the Hawaiians and perpetuating a European compound myth in which irrational citizenry are naïvely given to dissension Europeans for gods. In responding, Sahlins marshaled impressive evidence wander Cook was treated as Lono in historical fact, and flair argued that it is undiluted greater denigration of other peoples to submerge their cultures’ distinct rationalities under a well-intentioned however ethnocentric portrayal as being largely just like one’s own.

Labored European colonial writers undoubtedly disparaged cultural Others for confusing firm men with their gods, nevertheless these Others may not accept shared the European presumption go gods and men are (with one singular exception) nonoverlapping categories, highly distant from one another.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY WORKS

Sahlins, Marshall.

1972. Stone Identity Economics. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton.

Sahlins, Marshall. 1976. Culture and Practical Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sahlins, Player. 1981. Historical Metaphors and Folkloric Realities: Structure in the Mistimed History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom. Ann Arbor: University pointer Michigan Press.

Sahlins, Marshall.

1985. Islands of History. Chicago: University shop Chicago Press.

Sahlins, Marshall. 1995. How “Natives” Think: About Captain Brew, For Example. Chicago: University be more or less Chicago Press.

Sahlins, Marshall. 2000. Culture in Practice: Selected Essays. Creative York: Zone Books.

Sahlins, Marshall.

2004. Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding Narration as Culture and Vice Versa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

SECONDARY WORK

Obeyesekere, Gananath. 1992. The Nonesuch of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Ira Bashkow