Adrift from Locality

James Davidson

  • Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa by Marshall Sahlins
    Chicago, 334 pp, £21.00, December 2004, ISBN 0 226 73400 5

For students of the human sciences, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins is, with Clifford Geertz, one of the few Americans who has achieved the status of a name to conjure with alongside the French maîtres à penser, particularly when the conversation turns to the topics of ‘Big Men’ (power-brokers who aren’t chiefs, masters of the games of speech and generosity), or the socially embedded economy of premodern societies, ‘negative reciprocity’ (exchange characterised by hard bargaining, predation or theft), the cultural apperception of colour, or why Americans don’t eat dogs.

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[*] Reviewed by Ian Hacking in the LRB (17 September 1995).