I’m renaming these posts so that they are less confusing. This update was written in August, published in September, but is about work I did in July, so I am just calling it “work in July 2023” to be less confusing.
July was a good month for my Sahlins research. The biggest news that I spent a few days pounding out copy, and the manuscript is now over 10,000 words. Some of this was from Sahlins’s early life, but a lot of it was just drafting introductory sections like ‘What Hawai‘I was like in the 1980s’ or ‘who Karl Polanyi was’.
I also did some background reading. I decided to take the high road when it came to researching the Vietnam war era of Sahlins’s life, and began reading Karnow’s book “Vietnam”, which many consider to be the best one volume history of the war. It is well-written, based on years of journalistic work in the field, and very impressive. I am over 100 pages in and the Vietnamese have just repulsed the Tang empire, so I will certainly come to the study of the war briefed on the longue durée.
I then transitioned to reading to prepare for my trip to New York, which will occur next week, with a focus on the Steward grad students who influences Sahlins. I’ve long been interested in Fried, and am now more interested. Kirchhoff is especially interesting and there is now work done on him — he corresponded with Trotsky! Service, who I long knew as a ridiculously hard-core person, has been revealed to me as even more hard-core. Julie Lewis’s dissertation is good and is a valuable source, as she interviewed many of them.
I also worked through Sahlins’s dissertation, Social Stratification in Polynesia, and the scholarly response to it. Experts on the Pacific — Firth, Hogbin, (Felix) Keesing, and Guiart — thought Sahlins was totally wrong but impressed by the ambition of the effort and the ethnographic synthesis. Kaberry and (Cora) Du Boi wrote penetrating, insightful, and skeptical reviews. You could hear the eyebrows raising archly. Guiart’s review is absolutely amazing for its passion, verve, unfairness, and insight. Sahlins’s task is impossible. Or it is impossible, but the work of a lifetime. The sources are inadequate for the task. Or they are adequate, but Sahlins did not consult the right ones. That sort of thing.
I’m really looking forward to working in New York. I’m sure I’ll have more to say in September.
Alex Golub 