Marshall Sahlins

Marshall Sahlins, born in 1930, American cultural anthropologist known for his studies of Polynesians and his theoretical contributions to anthropology. Born in Chicago, Illinois, Sahlins received his master’s degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1952. He earned his doctorate in anthropology at Columbia University in New York City in 1954.

Sahlins’s early works, such as Social Stratification in Polynesia (1958), reflect the influence of American anthropologist Leslie White, a leading advocate of materialism. Adopting a materialist approach, Sahlins argued that economic and environmental circumstances determined the social structure of Polynesian societies. In 1963 and 1964 Sahlins was a research fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, in Palo Alto, California.

From 1967 to 1969 Sahlins studied in Paris, France, on a Guggenheim Fellowship. Under the influence of French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, Sahlins rejected materialism and embraced structuralism, an analytical approach that views each culture as a closed set of interdependent symbolic codes. These codes are organized by paired opposites, or binary oppositions, such as man and woman or raw and cooked. While materialists concentrate on the ways that economic factors determine historical development of cultures, structuralist anthropologists typically de-emphasize the historical aspects of the cultures they study. Structuralists seek to understand the relationships among all of the elements in a cultural system at a given time

Upon his return to the United States in 1969, Sahlins took a position as professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago and soon became one of the strongest critics of materialism. In Stone Age Economics (1972) and Culture and Practical Reason (1977), he argued that human thought and actions shape physical reality to a large extent. According to Sahlins, even the most practical behavior is shaped by culture. This conclusion led Sahlins to question the primary importance assigned to supposedly practical economic behavior by materialists.

In Stone Age Economics, Sahlins offered cross-cultural interpretations of various economic practices. The most influential argument in the book concerned the economic behavior of hunter-gatherers. Most anthropologists had assumed that hunter-gatherers were preoccupied with the quest for food and lived on the edge of starvation. However, anthropological field studies revealed that contemporary hunter-gatherer societies not only have an adequate diet, but enjoy much more leisure time than supposedly more advanced agricultural peoples. Sahlins concluded that prehistoric hunter-gatherer communities were the “original affluent society.”

In Historical Metaphors and Mythical Readers: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom (1981) and Islands of History (1985), Sahlins attempted to resolve the conflict between structuralist methods and history by demonstrating that cultural beliefs shape historical events. To demonstrate this point, Sahlins focused on the first encounter in 1779 between British explorer Captain James Cook and the Polynesian people in the Hawaiian islands (see Hawaii). According to Sahlins, Cook arrived in Hawaii during a time of year sacred to the Hawaiian harvest god Lono. Impressed by this coincidence, the Hawaiians honored Cook as the embodiment of Lono. When Cook later unexpectedly returned to the island during a sacred time of year for a different god, the Hawaiians interpreted Cook’s presence as a sign of cosmic disorder and clubbed him to death.

In 1992 Sri Lankan anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere published The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific. Obeyesekere argued that the account offered by Sahlins of Cook’s encounter with the Hawaiians depicts them as impractical and childlike. According to Obeyesekere, the claim that the Hawaiians mistook Cook for a god reflects little more than Western fantasies of domination rooted in imperialism. The debate between Obeyesekere and Sahlins soon became one of the most well known contemporary controversies in the field of anthropology. In 1995 Sahlins responded with a detailed rebuttal of Obeyesekere’s arguments in How ‘Natives’ Think, About Captain Cook, for Example.