Marshall Sahlins - Biography

Marshall David Sahlins (born December 27, 1930, Chicago, Illinois) is a prominent American anthropologist. He received both a Bachelors and Masters degree at the University of Michigan where he studied with Leslie White, and earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1954 where his main intellectual influences included Karl Polanyi and Julian Steward. He returned to teach at the University of Michigan and in the 1960s became politically active, protesting against the Vietnam War. In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. 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 Lévi-Strauss) and the student protests of May 1968. In 1973 he moved to the University of Chicago, where he is today the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology Emeritus. His brother is the writer and comedian Bernard Sahlins.

Work

Sahlins' work has focused on demonstrating the power that culture has to shape people's perceptions and actions. He has been particularly concerned to demonstrate that culture has a unique power to motivate people that is not derived from biology. His early work focused on criticising the idea of 'economically rational man' and to demonstrate that economic systems adapted to particular circumstances in culturally specific ways. After the publication of Culture and Practical Reason in 1976 his focus shifted to the relation between history and anthropology, and the way different cultures understand and make history. Although his focus has been the entire Pacific, Sahlins has done most of his research in Fiji and Hawaii. {{quote box | quote = “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 civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation.” | source = Sahlins (1972)

External links

• The Original Affluent Society - the seminal article by Marshall Sahlins
• Faculty Page - from the University of Chicago Department of Anthropology web site
• http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/pqrst/sahlins_marshall.html
• Waiting for Foucault, Still A small, pocket-sized book by Sahlins. Published in 2002 by Prickly Paradigm, now available for free online(in pdf).
• Marshall Sahlins, Poor Man, Rich Man, Big Man, Chief; Political Types in Melanesia and Polynesia, In: Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 5, No.3, pp.285-303, April 1963.
• On the anthropology of Levi-Strauss

About the controversy with Obeyesekere (See also Death of Cook article, about the 2004 re-discovery of the original painting of the incident by John Cleveley the Younger, showing a less idealised Cook):

• http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/humanities/history/52148/modules/pacific_peoplesC.html#obey
• http://www.snarkout.org/archives/2004/07/20/