Marshall Sahlins

Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-man, Chief: Political Types in Melanesia and Polynesia

With an eye to their own life goals, the native peoples of Pacific Islands unwittingly present to anthropologists a generous scientific gift: an extended series of experiments in cultural adaptation and evolutionary development. They have compressed their institutions within the confines of infertile coral atolls, expanded them on volcanic islands, created with the means history gave them cultures adapted to the deserts of Australia, the mountains and warm coasts of New Guinea, the rain forests of the Solomon Islands. From the Australian Aborigines, whose hunting and gathering existence duplicates in outline the cultural life of the later Paleolithic, to the great chiefdoms of Hawaii, where society approached the formative levels of the old Fertile Crescent civilizations, almost every general phase in the progress of primitive culture is exemplified.

Goodby to Tristes Tropes: Ethnography in the Context of Modern World History

In the midst of all the hoopla about the new reflexive anthropology, with its celebration of the impossibility of systematically understanding the elusive Other, a different kind of ethnographic prose has been developing more quietly, almost without our knowing we were speaking it, and certainly without so much epistemological angst. I mean the numerous works of historical ethnography whose aim is to synthesize the field experience of a community with an investigation of its archival past. For decades now, students of American Indians, Indonesia and the Pacific Islands, South Asia, and Africa have been doing this kind of ethnohistory. But only a few-notably Barney Cohn, Jean Comaroff, John Comaroff, and Terry Turner-have consciously raised the point that an ethnography with time and transformation built into it is a distinct way of knowing the anthropological object, with a possibility of changing the way culture is thought.2 This article associates itself with this project of historical ethnography as a determinate anthropological genre. In particular, I would like to offer some theoretical justification for a return to certain world areas such as North America and Polynesia, areas which have been too long slighted by ethnographers, ever since it was

Structural work How microhistories become macrohistories and vice versa

The structural-cum-symbolic amplification of minor differences: how small-scale, interpersonal or factional disputes are turned into large-scale struggles between nations, kingdoms or their totalized like - thus making macrohistories out of microhistories and vice versa. The phenomenon depends on structural relays of various sorts that endow the opposing local parties with collective identities and the opposing collectives with local or interpersonal sentiments. In the occurrence, the small-scale struggles are transformed into abstract and irreconcilable causes-to-die-for, their outcome depending now on the larger correlation of forces. The discussion focuses on three ethnographic/historical examples: the recent Elián Gonzalez affair in the US; the nationalization of peasant disputes in the Cerdanya, Catalonia during the 17th to 19th centuries; and civil strife in Corcyra and other Greek city-states during the Peloponnesian War. The last was an important source of Hobbes’s idea of the state of nature. It shows that it takes a lot of culture to make a state of nature.

On the ontological scheme of Beyond nature and culture

This article is an alternative reading of Philippe Descola’s ontological scheme, arguing that animism, totemism, and analogism are but three forms of animism, namely communal, segmentary, and hierarchical. Often found in various degrees of salience in the same society, all moreover are versions of an anthropomorphism well known as our own default scheme of things. Ethnographic examples are provided.

Alterity and autochthony: Austronesian cosmographies of the marvelous. The 2008 Raymond Firth Lecture

This lecture consist of reflections on the alterity of power (and vice versa) inspired by Raymond Firth’s extraordinarily rich ethnographic corpus on Tikopia—an inexhaustible anthropological treasure. The dangerous overseas voyaging (or traveling about the skies, as Tikopians deemed it), the powers ascribed to missionaries and other foreigners, the overseas origins of leading chiefs: these and other such attractions and assimilations of the foreign testify to the potency of transcendent realms and beings. The like can be documented for other Austronesian societies. Indeed, as summarily indicated here, the Austronesians figure in a world wide distribution of stranger-kingship. Moreover, the same notions of the powers inherent in alterity help account for the veneration accorded to colonial figures such as Sir James Brooke in Sarawak or Captain Cook in Hawai’i, although the different fates of the two—the rajadom of Brooke and the martyrdom of Cook—also indicate that a similar structure can underwrite quite different contingent outcomes.

On the culture of material value and the cosmography of riches

Herein is a discourse on value and how economics fails as a science thereof by banishing culture to the status of “exogenous factors.” The argument is demonstrated by an ethnographically informed study of the external origins of riches. Among the conclusions: money (“magical property”) as a means rather than the antithesis of extended kinship; scarcity as a function of value rather than the value of scarcity; and other such contradictions of the deceived wisdom.

Alterity and autochthony

This lecture consist of reflections on the alterity of power (and vice versa) inspired by Raymond Firth’s extraordinarily rich ethnographic corpus on Tikopia—an inexhaustible anthropological treasure. The dangerous overseas voyaging (or traveling about the skies, as Tikopians deemed it), the powers ascribed to missionaries and other foreigners, the overseas origins of leading chiefs: these and other such attractions and assimilations of the foreign testify to the potency of transcendent realms and beings. The like can be documented for other Austronesian societies. Indeed, as summarily indicated here, the Austronesians figure in a world wide distribution of stranger-kingship. Moreover, the same notions of the powers inherent in alterity help account for the veneration accorded to colonial figures such as Sir James Brooke in Sarawak or Captain Cook in Hawai’i, although the different fates of the two—the rajadom of Brooke and the martyrdom of Cook—also indicate that a similar structure can underwrite quite different contingent outcomes.

Dear colleagues—and other colleagues

Response to Hau Book Symposium on SAHLINS, Marshall. 2013. What kinship is—and is not. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

The original political society

Even the so-called egalitarian and loosely structured societies known to anthropology, including hunters such as Inuit or Australian Aborigines, are in structure and practice subordinate segments of inclusive cosmic polities, ordered and governed by divinities, ancestors, species-masters, and other such metapersons endowed with life-and-death powers over the human population. “The Mbowamb spends his whole life completely under the spell and in the company of spirits” (Vicedom and Tischner). “[Araweté] society is not complete on earth: the living are part of the global social structure founded on the alliance between heaven and earth” (Viveiros de Castro). We need something like a Copernican revolution in anthropological perspective: from human society as the center of a universe onto which it projects its own forms—that is to say, from the Durkheimian or structural-functional deceived wisdom—to the ethnographic realities of people’s dependence on the encompassing life-giving and death-dealing powers, themselves of human attributes, which rule earthly order, welfare, and existence. For, Hobbes notwithstanding, something like the political state is the condition of humanity in the state of nature; there are kingly beings in heaven even where there are no chiefs on earth.

Twin-born with greatness: the dual kingship of Sparta

This article examines the comparative configurations of diarchy by means of an extended analysis of the Spartan dual kingship in ancient Greece. Twinned and inseparable, both human and divine, the Spartan kings were themselves descended from celestial twins, hence it is argued that the Spartan diarchy is an empirical instantiation of the king’s two bodies—the dual kingship as an expression of sovereign twinship. The essay goes on to consider other royal twins of Greek mythology, one of whom was usually descended from a god, and argues that such myths of dynastic origin constitute a cosmology of sovereign right in which the Spartan myth of stranger-kings of divine descent was opposed to the Athenian ideology of autochthony.