Marshall Sahlins

Marshall Sahlins (1930–2021) was an American cultural anthropologist whose work examined kinship, economic life, cultural meaning, and historical change.

Cultural anthropology: The study of human societies through their cultural practices, meanings, and institutions. Sahlins developed his central arguments within this discipline.
Stone Age Economics: Marshall Sahlins’s 1972 book arguing that hunter-gatherers can meet needs with limited labor and modest wants. It develops his critique of treating economic scarcity as a universal human condition.
Culture and Practical Reason: Sahlins’s 1976 book arguing that cultural meaning, rather than practical utility alone, organizes human action. It presents his sustained critique of utilitarian explanations of culture.
Gananath Obeyesekere: A Sri Lankan-born anthropologist known for challenging Sahlins’s interpretation of Hawaiian responses to Captain Cook. Their debate exposed opposing approaches to interpreting indigenous history and cultural evidence.
The Western Illusion of Human Nature: Sahlins’s 2008 book arguing that Western assumptions about selfish human nature are culturally specific. It extends his critique of universalizing self-interest into theories of human nature.
Structuralism: An approach that explains cultural forms through relationships among underlying structures. Sahlins adapted structuralist analysis to myths, kinship, and historical events.
Original affluent society: Sahlins’s thesis that some hunter-gatherer societies achieved affluence through limited wants and relatively little work. This provocative argument became the best-known claim in his economic anthropology.
Islands of History: Sahlins’s 1985 book on how cultural structures shape historical events and are altered by them. It gives his clearest account of the reciprocal relation between culture and history.
Rational choice theory: A framework that explains choices as attempts to maximize preferences under constraints. Sahlins rejected accounts that make self-interest the universal basis of social action.
Cultural relativism: The principle that cultural practices and beliefs should be understood in their own social contexts. Sahlins’s insistence on culturally specific meanings exemplifies this interpretive commitment.

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