Marshall D. Sahlins, Groundbreaking Anthropologist, Dies at 90
His work focused on the way cultures shape, and are shaped by,
individuals — a framework he demonstrated through his passionate
political activism.
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Marshall D. Sahlins in an undated photo. He was renowned as both an
anthropologist and a political activist.
Marshall D. Sahlins in an undated photo. He was renowned as both an
anthropologist and a political activist.Credit...Ulf Andersen/Getty Images
Clay Risen <https://www.nytimes.com/by/clay-risen>
ByClay Risen <https://www.nytimes.com/by/clay-risen>
NYT, April 10, 2021UpdatedApril 11, 2021
Marshall D. Sahlins, a brilliant and witty anthropologist who, starting
in the 1970s, explored how individuals shape and are shaped by their
cultures — a point he had already put in practice a decade earlier as
the inventor of the “teach-in” against the Vietnam War — died on April 5
at his home in Chicago. He was 90.
His son, Peter Sahlins, a historian at the University of California,
Berkeley, confirmed the death.
Professor Sahlins had not fully developed his ideas about culture when,
in March 1965, he and several colleagues from the University of Michigan
gathered in his living room to discuss what they could do to oppose
President Lyndon B. Johnson’s escalation of the war.
Some wanted to go on strike, a move that threatened to shut down the
university and, Professor Sahlins worried, harm the students they were
there to instruct. Instead, he said, taking a page from the sit-in
protests of the civil rights movement, what if they set aside their
syllabuses and gave lectures about America’s foreign policy, politics
and history?
Professor Sahlins called friends at Columbia, where he had received his
Ph.D., and other schools, and within weeks faculty at dozens of campuses
were holding teach-ins. In May 1965, Professor Sahlins led a national
teach-in in Washington that received worldwide news media coverage.
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His activism didn’t stop the war, of course. But the teach-in created an
intellectual bridge between older leftists like Professor Sahlins and
the budding activists of the baby boom generation. And as one of the
earliest high-profile protests against America’s intervention in
Vietnam, it set a template for future antiwar activism.
It also signaled something of an intellectual turn for Professor
Sahlins. Until then he had been a committed materialist, convinced that
cultures evolved along with technological development. His undergraduate
mentor at Michigan,Leslie A. White
<https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leslie-A-White>, was a leading
figure in the effort to turn anthropology into something of a science;
he even devised equations purporting to measure cultural evolution as a
function of a society’s ability to produce energy.
But as the 1960s progressed, Professor Sahlins grew disenchanted with
elements of his mentor’s view, in part because it valorized America’s
technologically advanced culture at a time when he was fiercely opposed
to its military aggression in Vietnam.
A Guggenheim fellowship in 1967 took him to France, where he encountered
both the revolutionary activism of the French student movement and the
work of the anthropologistClaude Lévi-Strauss
<https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/world/europe/04levistrauss.html>.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss was famous for his theory of structuralism, the idea
that culture could be analyzed by examining its symbolic structures. And
like a previous generation of American anthropologists, he argued that
so-called primitive societies were every bit as sophisticated as
supposedly more advanced ones.
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Professor Sahlins agreed, and he remained a devotee of Mr. Lévi-Strauss
for the rest of his career. He had one big problem with Mr.
Lévi-Strauss’s approach, though: As the students demonstrating in the
streets made clear, structures changed as they collided with reality,
and the Lévi-Strauss framework had no way to account for that — it was,
Professor Sahlins believed, fundamentally ahistorical.
He joined the University of Chicago in 1973, and over the next two
decades he worked out a form of structuralism that accounted for
historical contingency and the actions of individuals. He summed up his
ideas in his 1985 book, “Islands of History
<https://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/09/books/acting-out-culture.html>,”
which includes a lengthy examination of Capt. James Cook’s last visit to
the Hawaiian Islands, in 1779.
Image
In “Islands of History,” published in 1985, Professor Sahlins argued
that the killing of Capt. James Cook by Hawaiian islanders, inexplicable
to Western eyes, made perfect sense within the islanders’ culture.
In “Islands of History,” published in 1985, Professor Sahlins argued
that the killing of Capt. James Cook by Hawaiian islanders, inexplicable
to Western eyes, made perfect sense within the islanders’ culture.
Professor Sahlins argued that the warm reception Captain Cook initially
received, and his later death, coincided with the islanders’ belief in a
banished god who would one day return, only to be defeated by their
chief — in other words, that Cook’s demise, inexplicable to Western
eyes, made perfect sense within the islanders’ culture.
Professor Sahlins’s argument did not go unanswered. In what became a
closely watched intellectual dispute,Gananath Obeyesekere
<https://anthropology.princeton.edu/people/emeritus-faculty/gananath-obeyesekere>,
an anthropologist at Princeton, accused Professor Sahlins of creating “a
myth of conquest, imperialism and civilization” by depicting the
Hawaiians as naïve and gullible; instead, he insisted, they would have
seen Cook as merely a man, just as Westerners would have.
Never one to shirk a fight, Professor Sahlins hit back with a
book-length retort, “How ‘Natives’ Think: About Captain Cook, for
Example” (1995). Professor Obeyesekere, he charged, was the real
imperialist for denying the uniqueness of the islanders’ culture and
insisting that they adhered to a universal rationality — one that just
happened to be the Western view of the world.
“It is difficult for the nonspecialist to judge whether he or Mr.
Obeyesekere is right about Captain Cook and the Hawaiians,”Richard
Bernstein wrote in The New York Times
<https://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/24/books/books-of-the-times-cook-was-a-a-god-or-b-not-a-god.html>.
“But at least until Mr. Obeyesekere replies, Mr. Sahlins appears to have
won a decisive round in an academic boxing match.”
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Professor Sahlins wrote prodigiously — 15 books and dozens of articles
in academic journals — but he never dropped his political activism. He
was instrumental in forcing the University of Chicago to close its
branch of the Confucius Institute, a China studies program that he said
was little more than a propaganda arm of the Chinese government.
In 2013 he took the rare step of resigning from the National Academy of
Sciences, because of both its support of military research and its offer
of membership toNapoleon Chagnon
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/30/science/napoleon-chagnon-dead.html>,
an anthropologist whose work Professor Sahlins found reductive and
dangerous.
Those reasons were two faces of the same demon he had been fighting in
both his political work and his academic career.
“Chagnon’s view of self-aggrandizing human nature is the sociobiological
equivalent of the neocon premise of the virtues of American imperialism:
making the world safe for self-interest,” Professor Sahlins said in
aninterview with Dissent magazine
<https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/a-thousand-kinds-of-life-culture-nature-and-anthropolgy>.
“A huge ethnocentric and egocentric philosophy of human nature underlies
the double imperialism of our sociobiological science and our global
militarism.”
Marshall David Sahlins was born on Dec. 27, 1930, in Chicago and grew up
on the city’s West Side. His father, Paul, was a doctor, and his mother,
Bertha (Scud) Sahlins, was a homemaker.
He graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in
anthropology in 1951, the same year he married Barbara Vollen. She and
their son survive him, as do two daughters, Julie and Elaine Sahlins,
and three grandchildren.
He received his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1954 and became an assistant
professor at Michigan in 1957. Despite later moving to the University of
Chicago, he never abandoned his love for Michigan, or its football team:
When he received an honorary degree from the university in 2001, he
asked that the ceremony take place on the 50-yard line of its football
stadium.
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Though his writing could be extremely dense, Professor Sahlins was
famously quick-witted, a quality he shared with his brother,Bernard
Sahlins
<https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/18/theater/bernard-sahlins-patriarch-of-sketch-comedy-dies-at-90.html>,
a founder of the Second City comedy troupe in Chicago.
In 1993, the two wrote aletter to the editor
<https://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/16/opinion/l-u-of-chicago-earns-its-funless-ranking-416593.html>of
The New York Times mock-protesting arecent column in which Russell Baker
<https://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/06/opinion/observer-mostest-of-the-leastest.html>had
claimed that his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, was the least fun
college in the country — even though a recent poll had given that
unwanted accolade to the University of Chicago, where Marshall taught
and Bernard had studied.
“We are unmoved to tears by his reminiscences,” they wrote, “of watching
only second-rate striptease acts in Baltimore bars or getting kicks from
a parody of a mathematics professor demonstrating the solution of a
calculus problem.”
Such antics, they added, “testify to a degree of Philistine frivolity
inconceivable at Chicago.”
Professor Sahlins could be equally cutting about his own achievements.
Duringan interview at the Chicago Humanities Festival in 2013
<https://www.chicagohumanities.org/media/marshall-sahlins-anthropology/>,
he was introduced as the greatest living anthropologist.
“If I’m the greatest living anthropologist,” he said, “then longevity
must be a good career move.”
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