Marshall Sahlins

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Marshall David Sahlins (2003)

Marshall David Sahlins (born December 27, 1930 in Chicago , † April 5, 2021 ) was an American anthropologist .

Life

Marshall Sahlins grew up in Chicago. He received his BA and MA from the University of Michigan , where he studied with Leslie White . In 1954, Sahlins received his Ph.D. at Columbia University . Here he was intellectually influenced by Karl Polanyi and Julian Steward . He returned to the University of Michigan as a lecturer in the 1960s and became politically active in protests against the Vietnam War : Together with his colleague Eric Wolf , he organized the first teach-in .

During a two-year stay in Paris, Sahlins got to know in particular the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and experienced the student protests during the May riots in 1968. From 1973 Sahlins taught at the University of Chicago and from June 1997 he held the title of Charles F. Gray Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology Emeritus . He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1976 , the National Academy of Sciences in 1991, and the British Academy in 1998 .

Sahlins resigned in 2013 in protest against the election of Napoleon Chagnon from the National Academy of Sciences. He died in Chicago in April 2021 at the age of 90.

position

Sahlins' research focused on the question of the potential with which culture can influence people's perceptions and actions . Above all, he wanted to prove that culture has a unique power to motivate people that is not of biological origin. His early work served to relativize the notion of Homo oeconomicus and to show that the economic system adapts to the respective environment in culturally specific ways .

Following the publication of Culture and Practical Reason (1976), Marshall Sahlins turned to the relationship between history and anthropology and the way different cultures understand and create history. Although he could see the entire Pacific , most of his research was in the Fiji Islands and Hawaii .

In his work Evolution and Culture (1960 and 1988) Sahlins dealt with cultural evolution and neoevolutionism . He divided the evolution of societies into general and specific . He called general evolution the tendency of cultural and social systems to increase in terms of complexity, organization and adaptation to the environment. However, since the individual cultures are not isolated, there is interaction and a diffusion of their qualities (for example technological inventions). This leads to the fact that cultures develop differently (specific evolution), since various elements are introduced in different combinations and in different stages of development.

In the late 1990s, Sahlins had a heated debate with Gananath Obeyesekere over the details of the death of James Cook in Hawaii in 1779. The focus of the debate was the question of how to judge the rationality of indigenous peoples . Obeyesekere insisted that they think basically the same as people from the Western world , and feared that any other assessment would classify them as " irrational " or "uncivilized". Sahlins, on the other hand, was critical of Western ways of thinking and emphasized that indigenous cultures are different and equal to those in the West.

Publications

author

  • Social Stratification in Polynesia . Seattle University of Washington Press 1958.
  • Moala. Culture and Nature on a Fijian Island. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 1962.
  • Tribesmen. Prentice-Hall, New Jersey 1965.
  • Stone Age Economics. Tavistock, London 1974 ISBN 9780422745307 , Aldine de Gruyter, New York 1972, ISBN 0-202-01098-8 .
  • Culture and Practical Reason. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1976, ISBN 0-226-73361-0 .
    • German edition: Culture and practical reason. Translated by Brigitte Luchesi. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1981, ISBN 3-518-06424-X .
  • The Use and Abuse of Biology. An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 1977, ISBN 0-472-76600-7 .
  • Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities. 1981
    • German edition: The death of Captain Cook. History as Metaphor and Myth as Reality in the Early History of the Kingdom of Hawaii. Translated by Hans Medick and Michael Schmidt, Wagenbach, Berlin 1986, ISBN 3-8031-3532-X .
  • Islands of History. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1987, 0-226-73358-0.
    • Islands of history . Translated by Ilse Utz. Junius Hamburg 1992 ISBN 3885061937
  • Evolution and Culture. Together with Elman Service . Foreword by Leslie White . University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 1988, ISBN 0-472-08776-2 .
  • Anahulu. The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii . With Patrick Vinton Kirch. 2 vol. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1992.
  • How “Natives” Think. About Captain Cook , for Example. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1995, ISBN 0-226-73368-8 .
  • Culture in Practice. Selected essays. Zone Books, New York 2000, ISBN 0-942299-37-X .
  • Waiting for Foucault , Still. Prickly Paradigm Press, Chicago 1993. 3rd edition 1999, ISBN 0-9717575-0-X .
  • Apologies to Thucydides . Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2004, ISBN 0-226-73400-5 .
  • The Western Illusion of Human Nature . Prickly Paradigm Press, Chicago 2008, ISBN 978-0-9794057-2-3 .
  • On kings . Together with David Graeber . Hau Books, Chicago 2017, ISBN 978-0-9861325-0-6 .

editor

  • Thomas Harding and David Kaplan: Evolution and Culture . Together with Elman Service . University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 1960.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Patrick Bahners : Culture can only be understood from within , faz.net, published and accessed on April 7, 2021.
  2. ^ Prominent anthropologist resigns in protest from National Academy of Sciences . ( insidehighered.com [accessed April 5, 2018]).
personal data
SURNAME Sahlins, Marshall
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sahlins, Marshall David; Sahlins, Marshall D.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American anthropologist
DATE OF BIRTH December 27, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago
DATE OF DEATH April 5, 2021
PLACE OF DEATH Chicago