Who is sahlins

Over the course of his career, Sahlins sought to de-center Western epistemic paradigms in anthropology, challenging ideas from sociobiology and capitalist economic theory by contending that cultural factors—as opposed to biology and self-interested competition—were key to shaping patterns of human behavior and development. The debate raised important questions about whether and how Western scholars should understand indigenous viewpoints.

Joseph P. In addition to his academic work, Sahlins was politically active throughout his life. As an anti-war activist, in he originated the concept of the teach-in, a form of nonviolent protest that brought together students and faculty to question U.

Teach-ins were widely emulated across the country during the Vietnam War. A good career is when the former happens before the latter. Sahlins was the author of 19 books and more than articles and essays, including Stone Age Economics , in which he pushed back against the idea that hunter-gatherer societies suffered from a lack of resources, suggesting that they were instead relatively affluent.

For his writing, he became the first person to win the Gordon J. Given annually by the University of Chicago Press as its highest honor, the prize recognizes the faculty member who writes, edits or translates the book that has brought the Press the most distinction in the three preceding years.

After his retirement in , Sahlins continued to write and conduct research full-time while serving as publisher of Prickly Paradigm Press , which produced pamphlets on contemporary questions in anthropology. Just before his death, he finished The New Science of the Enchanted Universe , a world ethnography of non-Western cultures—most of humanity—forthcoming from Princeton University Press in Two of the eight honorary doctorates he was awarded in his lifetime came from Parisian universities, while others came from Belgium, Canada and the United Kingdom.

Sahlins and Sahlins collect articles with a specific focus, while Sahlins is a broad overview of his career up to the point of publication. Sahlins, Marshall. Stone age economics. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton.

Influenced by Polanyi, it provides an account of the substantivist school of economic anthropology. Islands of history. Chicago: Univ. Culture in practice: Selected essays. New York: Zone. Also contains an autobiographical introduction. Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on this page.

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Not a member? Sign up for My OBO. He thrived on debate, both academic and political, and often courted controversy. In his book, The Use and Abuse of Biology , Sahlins had argued against the reductive materialism of sociobiology.

Most recently he successfully argued that the presence of the Confucius Society at the University of Chicago had given the propaganda arm of the Chinese Communist Party dangerous leverage in university hiring. Even as times and issues changed, his political activism never waned. We will likely not see his equal in our discipline for a very long time.