Marshall Sahlins

His brother was the writer and comedian Bernard Sahlins (1922–2013).

His son, Peter Sahlins, is a historian.

Sahlins is known 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 that culture has to shape people's perceptions and actions.

Although his focus has been the entire Pacific, Sahlins has done most of his research in Fiji (especially the island of Moala) and Hawaii.

Sahlins's training under Leslie White, a proponent of materialist and evolutionary anthropology at the University of Michigan, is reflected in his early work.

Marshall David Sahlins (December 27, 1930April 5, 2021) was an American cultural anthropologist best known for his ethnographic work in the Pacific and for his contributions to anthropological theory.

He was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.

Sahlins was born in Chicago, the son of Bertha (Skud) and Paul A. Sahlins.

His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants.

His father was a doctor while his mother was a homemaker.

He grew up in a secular, non-practicing family.

His family claims to be descended from Baal Shem Tov, a mystical rabbi considered to be the founder of Hasidic Judaism.

Sahlins' mother admired Emma Goldman and was a political activist as a child in Russia.

Sahlins received his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees at the University of Michigan where he studied with evolutionary anthropologist Leslie White.

He earned his PhD at Columbia University in 1954.

There his intellectual influences included Eric Wolf, Morton Fried, Sidney Mintz, and the economic historian Karl Polanyi.

In 1957, he became assistant professor at the University of Michigan.

His 1958 book Social Stratification in Polynesia offered a materialist account of Polynesian cultures.

In the 1960s he became politically active, and while protesting against the Vietnam War, Sahlins coined the term for the imaginative form of protest now called the "teach-in", which drew inspiration from the sit-in pioneered during the civil rights movement.

In the late 1960s, he also spent two years in Paris, where he was exposed to French intellectual life (and particularly the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss) and the student protests of May 1968.

In his Evolution and Culture (1960), he touched on the areas of cultural evolution and neoevolutionism.

He divided the evolution of societies into "general" and "specific".

General evolution is the tendency of cultural and social systems to increase in complexity, organization and adaptiveness to environment.

However, as the various cultures are not isolated, there is interaction and a diffusion of their qualities (like technological inventions).

This leads cultures to develop in different ways (specific evolution), as various elements are introduced to them in different combinations and on different stages of evolution.

Moala, Sahlins's first major monograph, exemplifies this approach.

In 1968, Sahlins signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

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 produced through cultural rules that govern the production and distribution of goods, and therefore any understanding 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, particularly in its Neoclassical form.

In 1973, he took a position in the anthropology department at the University of Chicago, where he was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology Emeritus.

In 2001, Sahlins became publisher of Prickly Pear Pamphlets, which was started in 1993 by anthropologists Keith Hart and Anna Grimshaw, and was renamed Prickly Paradigm Press.

The imprint specializes in small pamphlets on unconventional subjects in anthropology, critical theory, philosophy, and current events.

He died on April 5, 2021, at the age of 90 in Chicago.

On February 23, 2013, Sahlins resigned from the National Academy of Sciences to protest the call for military research for improving the effectiveness of small combat groups and also the election of Napoleon Chagnon.

The resignation followed the publication in that month of Chagnon's memoir and widespread coverage of the memoir, including a profile of Chagnon in The New York Times Magazine.

Alongside his research and activism, Sahlins trained a host of students who went on to become prominent in the field.

One such student, Gayle Rubin, said: "Sahlins is a mesmerizing speaker and a brilliant thinker. By the time he finished the first lecture, I was hooked."

His commitment to activism continued throughout his time at Chicago, most recently leading to his protest over the opening of the university's Confucius Institute (which later closed in the fall of 2014).