Marshall Sahlins

Marshall Sahlins (born December 27, 1930, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died April 5, 2021, Chicago) was an American anthropologist, educator, activist, and author who through his study of the people and culture of the South Pacific—primarily Hawaii and Fiji—made monumental contributions to his field. Though his work is widely respected, a number of his theories placed him at the crux of heated academic disputes. He is also widely recognized as the inventor of the “teach-in,” a method of nonviolent protest that became popular during the Vietnam War era.

Sahlins studied at the University of Michigan (B.A., 1951; M.A., 1952) before earning a Ph.D. from Columbia University (1954). He returned to the University of Michigan as a professor (1957–73), where he gained a reputation for being politically outspoken and, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, staunchly antiwar. He devised the teach-in—a forum in which teachers and students could question, argue, and discuss the immediate political and social issues—as a peaceful way to protest the Vietnam War. The teach-in movement spread to university campuses across the country. In the late 1960s Sahlins spent time as a visiting professor in Paris and studied the influential work of structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Sahlins published Stone Age Economics in 1972, a collection of essays that discuss the influence of culture on economics (as opposed to the impact of single individuals). That book included the well-known essay “The Original Affluent Society,” an examination of the economies of hunting-and-gathering cultures.

Sahlins joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1973. He attacked the foundations of sociobiology in his fifth book, The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology (1976). Sahlins sought to emphasize not biology but culture as the driving force behind human behaviour and development; he argued that human nature cannot be adequately explained by genetic determinism and Hobbesian concepts of brutal competition and self-interest.

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In response to Gananath Obeyesekere’s The Apotheosis of Captain Cook (1992), which criticized Sahlins’s book Islands of History (1985) and its approach to understanding the 1779 interaction between British sea captain James Cook and the indigenous people of Hawaii, Sahlins published How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, for Example (1995). Sahlins argued that anthropologists of the Western world are indeed capable of establishing an accurate understanding of a “native” point of view, in that case in 18th-century Hawaii.

In 2004, in response at least in part to the September 11, 2001, attacks and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Iraq, Sahlins published Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa (2004), in which he traced U.S. foreign policy back to the theories of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides. In 2013 he took centre stage in the scientific community when he publicly resigned—after more than 21 years of membership—from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). In a formal statement, he cited objections to the academy’s election of sociobiologist Napoleon Chagnon (of whose methodology Sahlins deeply disapproved) as well as to recent collaborations between the NAS and the United States military.

Sahlins wrote more than 10 books and was the executive publisher of a small printing press called Prickly Paradigm (established 1993), a press dedicated to publishing radical and inventive texts by 21st-century scholars. After retiring from full-time teaching in 1997, Sahlins was named the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.