Marshall D. Sahlins 27 December 1930–5 April 2021 A MEMOIRE

Marshall D. Sahlins was one of the leading anthropologists of his generation: prodigiously productive, incisive, provocative, and relentless in his intellectual pursuits. His writings span a period of over 65 years and trace an intellectual development that charts many of the principal concerns of his era. His writings also represent a dialogue with many of the leading anthropologists of this time and an ongoing debate over current social issues.

In the course of his long career, Sahlins came to use his considerable reading of the world’s ethnographic record to engage critically with fundamental issues in Western thought. Tracing a trajectory through his diverse corpus of writing to identify his contributions to anthropology and beyond is a daunting challenge. This effort offers a personal perspective.

Born in Chicago, Sahlins first studied anthropology under Leslie White at the University of Michigan where he received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees and then went on to do his doctorate at Columbia University in 1954 with Morton Fried as his supervisor and in company with a cohort of contemporaries including Stanley Diamond, Marvin Harris, Sydney Mintz, Robert Murphy, Elman Service and Eric Wolf. Sahlins was the only one of this group to commit himself to research in the Pacific and became thoroughly engaged in a life-long exploration of culture in its relationship to society in varying contexts.

After teaching at the University of Michigan for more than 15 years and 2-year sojourn in Paris, he joined the University of Chicago in 1973 where he became a major intellectual figure in a stellar anthropology department.

His first book, Social Stratification in Polynesia (1958), was a brilliant comparative exercise which, viewed in retrospect, offers a glimpse of some of Sahlins’ persistent concerns. Although ostensibly about adaptative variation in social stratification among Polynesian societies, this study is, as Sahlins himself concludes, about the ‘most engaging as well as pressing problems of anthropological studies … the explanation of cultural variations’ (1958, 247).

From October 1954 to August 1955, Marshall and his wife, Barbara, lived on the small Fijian island of Moala. The results of this fieldwork appeared in a major monograph in 1962, Moala: Culture and Nature on a Fijian Island, a study of over 450 pages, and certainly the most comprehensive ethnographic account of any of the islands of Fiji.

By contrast, Sahlins’ Tribesmen (1969), drafted while he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in Palo Alto, is an attempt to compress an introductory understanding of forty-nine named tribal ‘segmentary’ societies from around the world into a concise account of just 118 pages. Included in a series on ‘The Foundations of Anthropology’ that was initially meant to have a cultural evolutionary perspective and was organised to focus on the supposed ‘main types of culture’, Tribesmen is, as Sahlins admits, ‘largely about kinship’ (1969, iv). The longest section in this volume is Sahlins’ only concerted excursion into the topics of comparative descent, kinship and marriage and includes his analysis of Moala as a system of bilateral—i.e. symmetric—cross-cousin marriage.

Sahlins’ time in Paris and his engagement with currents in French structuralism added a further dimension to his intellectual orientation. His book Stone Age Economics (1972), itself a collection of earlier essays, is concerned not just with ‘primitive affluence’ and ‘domestic modes of production’ but notably with the work of Marcel Mauss and the implications of ‘the spirit of the gift’. The detailed appendices of this book—‘Notes on reciprocity and kinship distance’, ‘Notes on reciprocity and rank’, and ‘Notes on reciprocity and wealth’—are a global survey that returns to issues that Sahlins addressed in his earlier work. One of the hallmarks of Sahlins’ research was his exceptionally wide interpretative reading of world ethnography. Another was his continual reconsideration of his predecessors as sources of theoretical inspiration.

Culture and Practical Reason (1976) is another examination by Sahlins of his continuing concerns with culture and represents his most extended engagement with theoretical paradigms in anthropology. The book is a considered history of cultural anthropology from Boas through Julian Steward interspersed with commentary on Marx, episodic interpretations of his own Moala ethnography and the tantalising juxtaposition of Leslie White’s views with those of Lévi-Strauss. More importantly, in his chapter, ‘La Pensée Bourgeoise: Western Society as Culture’, Sahlins begins a critique of Western thought that was to become ever more prominent in later writings.

Nor was Sahlins silent on contemporary developments within American society. He and Eric Wolf were credited with the first ‘teach-ins’ at the University of Michigan against the Vietnam War. Similarly, in academia, there were developments to which he also strenuously objected—such as sociobiology. His book The Use and Abuse of Biology (1976) is his rejection of sociobiology and of kin selection, ‘the secret wisdom of consanguinity, together with an unconscious system of algebra’ (1976, 25)—Hamilton’s calculation of the shared coefficient of relationship—that underlies it. Much later, he also railed against Confucius Institutes on university campuses as ‘academic malware’ (2015). Although sparked by the University of Chicago’s installation of a Confucius Institute (and its subsequent decision not to renew its association), Sahlins’ trenchant examination of the threat of these institutes to academic integrity has a wide coverage that extends to the situation in the US, Canada, Australia and parts of Europe.

By the time that he wrote Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom (1981), Sahlins had expanded his ethnographic interests in the Pacific to focus more on Hawaii. He had also sharpened and significantly enhanced his earlier perspectives with those he absorbed from his engagement with French structuralism. This short volume is the clearest formulation of this developed theoretical perspective but one that is articulated in a specific ethnographic context. It is a semiological engagement with history in an effort to distinguish structure from event and to understand the relation between them. As his ideas developed, Sahlins’ critical engagement with history increased.

Islands of History (1985), again a collection of previous essays, each of them originally an invited lecture, records Sahlins’ continuing research on the Pacific. Many of these essays prompted further comparative research, as in the case of his ‘The Stranger-King: or Dumézil among the Fijians’ or provoked controversy, as in the case of his ‘Captain James Cook, or, the Dying God’.

Gananath Obeyesekere’s publication of The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (1992) prompted Sahlins to write a substantial and extended response in How ‘Natives’ Think: About Captain Cook for Example (1995), a combination of fierce rebuttal, a detailed examination of a specific Hawaiian history and ethnography and the continued development of his theoretical perspective. This volume is notable, as well, for its seventeen appendices, each dealing with tangential but significant ethnographic matters relating to the main argument of the volume.

At age seventy and still engaged in major work, Sahlins published yet another collection of his previous papers, Culture in Practice: Selected Essays (2000). Although a few of these papers had been published in earlier books, this volume (of some 646 pages) makes evident the prodigious output that Sahlins continued to put forth alongside his steady flow of books. The volume includes his influential 1963 paper ‘Poor Man, Rich Man, Big Man, Chief: Political Types in Melanesia and Polynesia‘ but not his equally stimulating 1961 ‘The Segmentary Lineage: An Organization of Predatory Expansion’. It also has a number of early papers that give an idea of Sahlins’ involvement in opposing the Vietnam War while, by contrast, the second half of the book contains a series of Sahlins’ most serious intellectual adventures, most of them from the 1990s, in the examination of culture and history including his ‘Cosmologies of Capitalism’, ‘Goodbye to Tristes Tropes’ and ‘The Sadness of Sweetness’.

Sahlins was frequently called upon to give invited lectures. In the process of developing those lectures, he honed the art of the short, powerful essay. He was instrumental in founding the Prickly Paradigm Press where he lodged various of these efforts. In one such essay, The Western Illusion of Human Nature (2008), that can be considered his most serious bout in a long intellectual wrestling match with Western intellectual history, he expresses his stark conclusions in characteristic fashion: ‘My modest conclusion is that western civilization has been constructed on a perverse and mistaken idea of human nature. Sorry, beg your pardon, it was all a mistake. It is probably true, however, that this perverse idea of human nature endangers our existence’ (2008, 112).

Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa (2004) is another collection of essays, in this case three essays that draw upon and re-imagine Thucydides’ contribution to an historical understanding of structure, event and agency. The first of these essays considers ‘The Polynesian War’ centred on the nineteenth-century struggle of the kingdoms of Bau and Rewa on Fiji juxtaposed with a re-examination of the struggle between Athens and Sparta in the Peloponnesian wars. The third essay, ‘The Culture of an Assassination’, examines the internal conflict of chiefs within the kingdom of Bau. Sandwiched between these focused studies is a remarkable essay, ‘Culture and Agency in History’, which returns Sahlins to yet another consideration of ideas of human praxis and of superorganic conceptions of culture. The discussions in these essays are deep and demanding, and fundamental to the dialogue that Sahlins was carrying on with himself from the beginnings of his career. Particularly notable is his re-casting of the Peloponnesian war in ‘mythistorical’ perspective.

Marshall Sahlins engaged seriously with the ideas of his close colleagues and their writings. ‘Cosmologies of Capitalism’ is his tribute to Eric Wolf and ‘The Sadness of Sweetness’ a tribute to Sydney Mintz. Sahlins drew upon the work of his departmental colleagues: on Bernard Cohn and Paul Friedrich for their ideas about structural history, on Valerio Valeri for a ‘classics’ perspective, on Nancy Munn for ideas about exchange, on Michael Silverstein for views on semiology. He collaborated with Patrick Kirch on a two-volume study, Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii (1992), the first volume of which was Sahlins’ historical ethnography that is linked to Kirch’s archaeological survey of the Anahulu Valley on the Island of O’ahu. In What Kinship Is – And Is Not (2013), Sahlins takes up the question that David Schneider posed in 1972: ‘What is kinship all about’ and dissolves it. As ideas about kinship are so central to the anthropological endeavour, Sahlins provides, in two engaging chapters, a sweeping ethnographic commentary on the discourse over the nature of kinship from Durkheim (rather than Morgan) to the contemporary ethnographic constructions such as ‘dividual’ or ‘partible persons’ in support of the notion that kinship is a ‘mutuality of being’. In a later effort, Sahlins collaborated with his student David Graeber to write On Kings (2017), a work of mutually compatible perspectives on a topic of perennial interest for Sahlins.

This immense opus has not yet concluded. Another volume has been promised for publication in 2022: The New Science of the Enchanted Universe: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity. As in the case of some of his other major works, Sahlins prefigured this publication in a long 2019 essay, ‘On the Political Economy of the Enchanted Universe’.

As an anthropologist, Sahlins was more than just a notable Austronesianist with well-established ethnographic interests in the Pacific. He was a comparative world-ethnographer whose reading of the anthropological record and its numerous ethnographies was immense and profound. From early on in his career, he became a master of these basic building blocks of an anthropological perspective, and was able, skilfully and subtly, to marshal (or perhaps more appropriately, ‘to marshall’) the diverse expressions of human cultural understandings in his writings. More than any other anthropologist, he focused his ethnographic readings on a critique of the cultural foundations of Western civilisation. His later writings are complex, considered and deeply directed. A disadvantage of his dense use of diverse ethnographies and historiographies is that his writings require some considerable anthropological erudition to follow and to appreciate them while his engagement with Western historical writings carry him well beyond the confines of much anthropological discourse. His anthropological writings on Fiji and Hawaii require a specialised knowledge of the region. His work, some of the finest of his generation, offers a continuing intellectual challenge.

Sahlins, the man, was as complex and as engaging at his writing (see Fox 2021 for a personal tribute). He combined seriousness with humour and could add a quick quip to most any discussion. He was an intellectual who enjoyed human differences. He could argue strongly but be respectfully sceptical and hold back on his judgement or, at times, he could be witheringly ferocious in his criticisms. He was a Chicago boy, and the University of Chicago became his home physically and spiritually. He had a large house on campus from which he presided. For many years, he taught the Anthropology Department’s introductory course, known as ‘Systems’, for incoming PhD students, and through this course and through the supervision of numerous PhD students, he exerted a profound influence on successive generations. He loved sports and followed his favourites. While he continued to support the Cubs in baseball, he remained faithful to Michigan in football. He was a family man who dedicated some of his books to his wife and children. His wife, Barbara, was his compass wherever he travelled. Their fieldwork on Fiji together was crucial and it is to Barbara that Marshall dedicated Moala. His legacy will live on, but it may take another generation or more to begin to appreciate his full contribution to anthropology.

Acknowledgements

I want to acknowledge and thank my colleagues, Greg Acciaioli, Fred Damon, Timo Kaartinen and Alan Rumsey, for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this Memoire.