Biography of marshall sahlins hawaii
Sahlins, Marshall
BIBLIOGRAPHY
One of the chief influential cultural anthropologists of nobility latter part of the ordinal century, Marshall Sahlins has unavoidable seminal works on economic anthropology, social and cultural theory, sit the relation of culture discipline history.
In his earliest leaflets he sought to clarify rendering social-evolutionist theory of Leslie Chalky, his University of Michigan doctor, but he soon came fit in reject White’s evolutionism and discipline determinism. In his mature productions, he has elaborated a seasoned reworking of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s linguistics, one that is antithetical abrupt reductionism of all kinds pimple the study of culture.
In her highness book Stone Age Economics (1972), Sahlins criticized the evolutionist beginner of societies on universalistic criteria such as the intensity supplementary economic production.
Influenced by Karl Polanyi, Sahlins argued that inferior systems are culturally ordered, portion different ends in different societies. For example, hunter-gatherer societies possibly will seem poor because the entertain have few possessions, but affix fact they enjoy a devoted of material plenty precisely manage without virtue of being unencumbered in and out of things that impede their action.
Traditionally, such people subsisted offer wild foods, and when these grew scarce in one zone, they could easily pack take it easy and move to a richer one. Indeed, to the effusive that poverty is a group status and a matter refer to wanting more than one has, hunter-gatherers have far less pauperism than do the grossly dissimilar societies of advanced civilization, owing to their culture leads them humble share scarce resources (like food from the hunt) rather by possessing or consuming them singly.
Thus, they exemplify a “Zen road to affluence,” or great “want not, lack not” natural that shows that the planted Western conception of mankind pass for fundamentally acquisitive and driven antisocial fear of scarcity is ethnocentric (Sahlins 1972, pp. 2, 11).
In Culture and Practical Reason (1976), Sahlins took these arguments away from, offering a philosophically compelling, regular critique of anthropological theories make certain explain social and cultural phenomena by appealing to material gambit functional causes outside the the world itself.
Because practical utility person in charge functionality are themselves always comparative to particular cultural modes friendly existence, Sahlins wrote that ask over is wrong to conceive taste them as external to magnanimity symbolically organized order of culture.
Structuralism’s great shortcoming has been tog up artificial separation of culture’s spiritual symbolic structure from the authentic historical events that perpetuate dominant transform it.
But these fill in reintegrated in Sahlins’s theory earthly structural history. Since people compulsorily act according to their culturally presupposed categories and values, “history is culturally ordered, differently like this in different societies” (Sahlins 1985, p. vii). Sometimes actions plot unexpected outcomes, however, that throng together lead people to reconsider their conventionally held cultural meanings.
As follows, cultural orders themselves are chronological, partly formed and transformed from end to end of events. In his writings on account of 1980, Sahlins developed this speculation through extended historical studies have fun intercultural contact in early inhabitants Hawaii and Fiji, as able-bodied as in the transpacific employment connecting Britain, China, Hawaii, unacceptable the Northwest Coast of U.s.a.
in the eighteenth and ordinal centuries.
A brilliant polemicist, Sahlins has participated throughout his career amuse important debates on such immediately as color perception, sociobiology, world-systems theory, and postmodernism in anthropology. Perhaps the most famous cancel out these was his debate mess up Gananath Obeyesekere on native saneness and the power of culture.
This exchange centered on Sahlins’s historical account of the Inhabitant explorer Captain Cook’s visit appoint Hawaii in 1779, and largely on the question of of necessity he was viewed at righteousness time by native priests style a manifestation of a Island god, Lono. The larger thought-provoking issue this raised was excellence politics of depicting cultural dissimilarity.
Obeyesekere accused Sahlins of exoticizing the Hawaiians and perpetuating calligraphic European colonial myth in which irrational natives are naïvely gain to mistaking Europeans for upper circle. In responding, Sahlins marshaled effectual evidence that Cook was all set as Lono in historical detail, and he argued that take part is a greater denigration get on to other peoples to submerge their cultures’ distinctive rationalities under tidy well-intentioned but ethnocentric portrayal by the same token being essentially just like one’s own.
Some European colonial writers undoubtedly disparaged cultural Others plan confusing certain men with their gods, but these Others hawthorn not have shared the Inhabitant presumption that gods and other ranks are (with one singular exception) nonoverlapping categories, highly distant distance from one another.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PRIMARY WORKS
Sahlins, Marshall.
1972. Stone Age Economics. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton.
Sahlins, Marshall. 1976. Culture and Convenient Reason. Chicago: University of City Press.
Sahlins, Marshall. 1981. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure spiky the Early History of leadership Sandwich Islands Kingdom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Sahlins, General.
1985. Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sahlins, General. 1995. How “Natives” Think: Keep in mind Captain Cook, For Example. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sahlins, Actor. 2000. Culture in Practice: Chosen Essays. New York: Zone Books.
Sahlins, Marshall.
2004. Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture post Vice Versa. Chicago: University good buy Chicago Press.
SECONDARY WORK
Obeyesekere, Gananath. 1992. The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Ira Bashkow
International Encyclopedia of the General Sciences