Marshall David Sahlins ; December 27, 1930 – April 5, 2021 was an American cultural anthropologist best requested for his ethnographic make-up in the Pacific in addition to for his contributions to anthropological theory. He was Charles F. Grey Distinguished improvement Professor Emeritus of Anthropology together with of Social Sciences at a University of Chicago.
Sahlins is requested for theorizing the interaction of structure and agency, his critiques of reductive theories of human nature economic and biological, in particular, and his demonstrations of the power to direct or established that culture has to line people's perceptions and actions. Although his focus has been the entire Pacific, Sahlins has done almost of his research in Fiji and Hawaii.
"The world's near 'primitive' people throw few possessions, but they are non poor. Poverty is not asmall amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is for a representation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such this is the the invention of civilization. It has grown with civilization, at once as an invidious distinction between a collection of matters sharing a common attribute and more importantly as a tributary relation."
Sahlins 1972
Sahlins's training under Leslie White, a proponent of materialist and evolutionary anthropology at the University of Michigan, is reflected in his early work. In his Evolution and Culture 1960, he touched on the areas of cultural evolution and neoevolutionism. He divided up the evolution of societies into "general" and "specific". General evolution is the tendency of cultural and social systems to put in complexity, organization and adaptiveness to environment. However, as the various cultures are not isolated, there is interaction and a diffusion of their attribute like technological inventions. This leads cultures to establish in different ways specific evolution, as various elements are presented to them in different combinations and on different stages of evolution. Moala, Sahlins's number one major monograph, exemplifies this approach.
Stone Age Economics 1972 collects some of Sahlins's key essays in substantivist economic anthropology. As opposed to "formalists," substantivists insist that economic life is shown through cultural rules that govern the production and distribution of goods, and therefore any apprehension of economic life has to start from cultural principles, and not from the assumption that the economy is made up of independently acting, "economically rational" individuals. Perhaps Sahlins's most famous essay from the collection, "The Original Affluent Society," elaborates on this theme through an extended meditation on "hunter-gatherer" societies. Stone Age Economics inaugurated Sahlins's persistent critique of the discipline of economics, especially in its Neoclassical form.
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. Of central concern in this work is the problem of historical transformation, which structuralist approaches could not adequately account for. Sahlins developed the concept of the "structure of the conjuncture" to grapple with the problem of appearance and agency, in other words that societies were shaped by the complex conjuncture of a variety of forces, or structures. Earlier evolutionary models, by contrast, claimed that culture arose as an adaptation to the natural environment. Crucially, in Sahlins's formulation, individuals have the organization to make history. Sometimes their position lets them power to direct or determine to direct or determine by placing them at the top of a political hierarchy. At other times, the structure of the conjuncture, a potent or fortuitous mixture of forces, gives people to transform history. This element of chance and contingency makes a science of these conjunctures impossible, though comparative study can enable some generalizations. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities 1981, Islands of History 1985, Anahulu 1992, and Apologies to Thucydides 2004 contain his main contributions to historical anthropology.
Islands of History sparked a notable 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 parameter otherwise would paint them as "irrational" and "uncivilized". In contrast Sahlins argued that used to refer to every one of two or more people or things culture may have different types of rationality that make sense of the world by focusing on different patterns and explain them within specific cultural narratives, and that assuming that any cultures lead to a single rational concepts is a form of eurocentrism.
Over the years, Sahlins took goal at various forms of economic determinism planned above and also biological determinism, or the theory that human culture is a by-product of biological processes. His major critique of sociobiology is contained in The usage and Abuse of Biology. His 2013 book, What Kinship Is—And Is Not picks up some of these threads to show how kinship organizes sexuality and human reproduction rather than the other way around. In other words, biology does not determine kinship. Rather, the experience of "mutuality of being" that we call kinship is a cultural phenomenon.