It took a while, but I have a short encyclopedia entry about Marshall Sahlins in Wiley’s International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. After a long period of being hostile to secondary sources in my youth, I now appreciate high-quality well-curated content (in my youth, there was no Internet, and being deluged in low-quality, random-ass information was not an option). That said, in general I am not a big fan of huge reference projects by for-profit publishers. The put content behind a huuuuge paywall, and the content is of uneven quality by people who are not always the top experts in their area. The days when Malinowski’s encyclopedia entry on culture was THE statement on culture are now long gone. Frankly, I wouldn’t have written for Wiley if it wasn’t for the fact that they asked me to write a piece on my dissertation supervisor. I wanted to make sure Marshall got a good write-up and I felt (perhaps over-optimistically) that I was a better option than others. So I did it. I hope it will be useful to someone someday. Hopefully I’ll get around soon to proving an open access equivalent.
This is part of a continuing series of publications about Marshall I’ve done, which include another encyclopedia article, a festschrift, and a bibliography.
Alex Golub 