Marshall Sahlins

Marshall David Sahlins ( SAH-linz; December 27, 1930 – April 5, 2021) was an American cultural anthropologist known for his Pacific fieldwork and theoretical contributions. He held the title of Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.

Born in Chicago to Russian Jewish immigrants, Sahlins grew up in a secular household. His father was a doctor, his mother a homemaker and political activist who admired Emma Goldman. The family claimed descent from the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism. Sahlins earned his BA and MA at the University of Michigan, studying under evolutionary anthropologist Leslie White, and completed his PhD at Columbia University in 1954, influenced by Eric Wolf, Morton Fried, Sidney Mintz, and economic historian Karl Polanyi. He became an assistant professor at Michigan in 1957.

During the 1960s, Sahlins was politically active. While protesting the Vietnam War, he coined the term "teach-in," inspired by the civil rights movement's sit-ins. In 1968, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest," refusing tax payments in opposition to the war. He spent two years in Paris in the late 1960s, encountering French intellectual life, particularly Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the May 1968 student protests. He joined the University of Chicago's anthropology department in 1973. Later activism included protesting the opening of the university's Confucius Institute, which closed in fall 2014. On February 23, 2013, he resigned from the National Academy of Sciences to protest a call for military research on small combat groups and the election of Napoleon Chagnon, following publication of Chagnon's memoir and a New York Times Magazine profile.

Sahlins trained many prominent students. One, Gayle Rubin, described him as a mesmerizing speaker and brilliant thinker who hooked her in his first lecture. In 2001, he became publisher of Prickly Pear Pamphlets, renamed Prickly Paradigm Press, which issues small pamphlets on unconventional topics in anthropology, critical theory, philosophy, and current events. He died in Chicago at age 90. His brother was writer and comedian Bernard Sahlins; his son, Peter Sahlins, is a historian.

Sahlins's work theorized the interaction of structure and agency, critiqued reductive theories of human nature (economic and biological), and demonstrated culture's power to shape perceptions and actions. Though his focus was the entire Pacific, most of his research was in Fiji (especially Moala) and Hawaii.

His early work, shaped by Leslie White's materialist and evolutionary anthropology, included *Social Stratification in Polynesia* (1958), a materialist account of Polynesian cultures. In *Evolution and Culture* (1960), he addressed cultural evolution and neoevolutionism, dividing societal evolution into "general" (increasing complexity and adaptiveness) and "specific" (different development paths due to interaction and diffusion). His first major monograph, *Moala*, exemplified this approach.

In economic anthropology, *Stone Age Economics* (1972) collected key essays in substantivist economics. Substantivists argue that economic life is governed by cultural rules, not by assumptions of rational, independent individuals. The famous essay "The Original Affluent Society" meditates on hunter-gatherer societies, and the book launched Sahlins's persistent critique of neoclassical economics.

After *Culture and Practical Reason* (1976), his focus shifted to the relation between history and anthropology, and how different cultures understand and make history. Central was the problem of historical transformation, which structuralism could not adequately explain. He developed the concept of the "structure of the conjuncture" to address this.