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“... In late February I resigned in protest from the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) on two grounds. The first was the academy’s recruitment of anthropologists to do research designed to improve the combat performance of the US military. One project would study the tactical operations of small units and their leaders in a variety of contexts including ‘major combat operations’; a second would develop methods for predicting individual and collective performance with a view to drawing up research agendas for the US Army Research Institute ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and a blurb promising ‘an epic culture clash’. In the mid-1990s, the anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere debated whether Captain Cook, landing in Hawaii in 1778, was really mistaken by the natives for their god Lono, or whether Cook’s apotheosis was a European myth, spun by sailors and scholars to reinforce white ...”

“... say pre-Post-Modern – masters: Jack Goody (1919), Victor Turner (1920), Mary Douglas (1921), and Marshall Sahlins (1930). Right in the middle came Clifford Geertz, who was born in San Francisco in 1926. In the quarter-century between 1960, when he published his masterly The Religion of Java, and the middle Eighties, he was, after Lévi-Strauss, the most ...”

“... with ‘simplicity’. The experts on the latter theme are cited as Morton Fried, Max Gluckman, Marshall Sahlins – all social/cultural anthropologists. The distinction is important. Tainter would have us believe that prehistorians are concerned with the dead, and social and cultural anthropologists with the living. Outside the Americas, Tainter’s ...”

“... while its ‘blue states’ vote Democrat. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Edmund Leach, Mary Douglas and Marshall Sahlins have pointed out that our normative ‘totemic’ systems of colour – urban gang colours, sports team colours, school colours, gender colours etc – are precisely analogous to those of the indigenous groups traditionally studied by ...”

“... that this book – you can think of it as the third of a trilogy – will be more widely read than Sahlins’s Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities (1981) and Islands of History (1985). What ‘Natives’ Think is entirely focused on the question of whether the Hawaiians, on their first prolonged encounter with Europeans, not only regarded the white men ...”

“... Kuper’s three chapter-length profiles of American anthropologists (Geertz, David Schneider and Marshall Sahlins) are followed by a composite chapter on the younger (now middle-aged) generation of James Clifford and George Marcus, co-editors of Writing Culture. Here the tone changes. Up to this point Kuper has been gently expository, sounding like a ...”

“... Why did people start farming? At the ‘Man the Hunter’ symposium in Chicago in 1966, Marshall Sahlins drew on research from the likes of Richard B. Lee among the !Kung of the Kalahari to argue that hunter-gatherers enjoyed the ‘original affluent society’. Even in the most marginal environments, he said, hunter-gatherers weren’t engaged ...”

“... been the subject of extremely detailed and perceptive analysis by the Chicago anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Valerio Valeri. Although some of this material has been in print since 1979, Sahlins’s first contribution is mentioned by Sagan only in his bibliography, where it is described as ‘an ...”

“... and ‘civilisation’; the second was Evolution and Culture (1960), edited by Elmen Service and Marshall Sahlins, which posited four stages: ‘bands’, ‘tribes’, ‘chiefdoms’ and ‘states’. Flannery and Marcus set out to address two of the criticisms made of these earlier works: first, that they imposed the anthropological present onto the ...”

“... of starvation, he fails to note that they also work far less hard and thus have far more leisure. Marshall Sahlins called hunter-gatherers, even when relegated to the most undesirable environments, ‘the original affluent society’. It’s hard to imagine Diamond’s primitives giving up their physical freedom, their varied diet, their egalitarian ...”

“... at the time, academics at Michigan were doing important work in anthropology (Michael Taussig and Marshall Sahlins), political science (Archie Singham) and African American studies (Harold Cruse). Robinson’s wife and intellectual partner, Elizabeth, began graduate studies in anthropology there, while Robinson joined the politics department, teaching on ...”

“... domination’. In Ecology of Freedom he drew on work by the anthropologists Paul Radin and Marshall Sahlins, who argued that hunter-gatherer societies had been far more prosperous than previously thought and were humankind’s original ‘affluent societies’. Bookchin claimed hierarchy hadn’t existed in these ‘organic’ communities of ...”

“... Well, yes: to six-year-olds who grow up anywhere in the world of scientific reason, what Marshall Sahlins calls ‘the world system’. It is part of our scientific attitude that what we find out about people using any of the seven engines of discovery, and more, is a fixed target. We usually hit something, and then we say that what we hit was ...”