Everything about Marshall Sahlins totally explained
Marshall David Sahlins (born December 27,
1930) 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 and became politically active, protesting 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's today the
Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of
Anthropology Emeritus.
Sahlins' work has focused on demonstrating the power that culture has to shape people's perceptions and actions. He has been particularly interested to demonstrate that culture has a unique power to motivate people that isn't derived from biology. His early work focused on debunking 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.
In his
Evolution and Culture (
1960) he touched 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, organisation and adaptiveness to environment. However, as the various cultures are not isolated, there's 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.
In the late 1990s Sahlins became embroiled in a heated 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'. Sahlins, on the other hand, was critical of Western thought and argued that indigenous cultures were distinct and equal to those of the West.
In 2001, Marshall Sahlins became the executive publisher of a small press called
Prickly Paradigm.
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