Tag: Marshall Sahlins

The past few months have been very busy ones, but I wanted to write a quick update on my progress just to keep myself honest and provide a public accounting of my work so far.

I spent most of September not working on the biography, except to slowly start processing the material I had discovered in August. In late September I began a research trip which took up most of October: I flew to the University of Michigan, where I did work at the Bentley library. It was a wonderful experience. The Bentley staff were very helpful and working in the Wolf and White collections was literally a dream come true. However, I must say the best thing about the Bentley was its reading room: One wall is a giant glass window with a view of a courtyard outside. It is amazing how much this improved my experience of archival work. Library research can be tedious, ritualistic, isolating, and can lead to a lot of sensory deprivation. So having a view of something green and alive was really wonderful.

Ann Arbor was also wonderful to visit. Going to Michigan and meeting with people who were influenced by Sahlins was like meeting my matrikin: People I had heard about but never met, who were uncannily similar to me, but also so different. I received a warm welcome from the people I talked to (who didn’t ask to be named in this blog post) and learned a lot about Michigan and Sahlins.

I took a bus from Ann Arbor to Chicago — that was a real American experience — and then spent a week working at the archives in the Reg(enstein) at the University of Chicago. It was like Ann Arbor except the reading room was five degrees colder and there was no window. Do you know why? Because real intellectuals don’t need a window. #UofC. At any rate, the staff was helpful and I had a great visit back at my old stomping grounds. The highlight of the trip were the David Schneider papers, which were scandalously vivid and inappropriate.

I was back home only briefly before I headed to the last and final trip for my research. I flew to Melbourne and did work in Greg Denning’s papers, which were spread out at two collections: The University of Melbourne and the State Library of Victoria. Both institutions were very helpful, however I must say that the SLV completely earns its reputation as a great cultural institution. Now only were the hours fabulous and the facilities beautiful as usual, but the building is always so alive with people that just walking in is always a pleasure.

From there I traveled to Warrnambool for the Pacific History Association meetings. The meetings were great in terms of scholarly content and had an above-average number of people from PNG there, which I really appreciated. That’s not always true of the PHA conferences held in the American Pacific. However, it was extremely cold. I had a good time, but next time I visit Warrnambool I will buy one of those merino sweaters they sell in duty free.

After Warrnambool I traveled to Fiji to retrace Sahlins’s steps there. It was the least-planned part of the trip and I wasn’t sure what to expect. However I, like many others, was bowled over by Fijian hospitality. Government officials helped plan my trip to Moala and hosted me on the island. Of course, part of being an honored guest involves being steered in certain directions and not others, which I was aware of. Still, even the arrival of tropical cyclone Mal couldn’t make a dent in the great experience I had. Colleagues in Suva — a great little town — were also very welcoming. After years of dealing with Port Moresby it was a great change of pace.

My sabbatical will end in January, when I begin teaching again. At that point I plan to start processing all the material I have collected. I will also begin interviewing people over Zoom then. While this is going on I will start pounding out a rough draft. I might make a few brief detours to collections which are relevant, but I think the main body of research is done now.

Thanks to the hard work of librarians and archivists, there is always more past than there is present. That’s especially true of the recent past. Sahlins’s papers are not even fully catalogued yet, and much of the late 20th century is still in oral memory, not deposited somewhere. So I could do research for this book forever. But I think I have more than enough to put together a fairly strong biography of Sahlins with what I have, and I feel confident that this admittedly arbitrary stopping point is a good one. Now… on to the writing!

Here’s a quick update regarding my work on the Marshall Sahlins biography up to 1 June 2023.

I spent most of May not actually writing the biography, but preparing to write it. As I may have mentioned earlier, I spent the spring semester writing grants to conduct research on the biography and received two. The first is a small travel grant from the University of Michigan that will pay for me to consult the libraries there. The second and much larger grant from Wenner-Gren foundation will allow me to do library research at the University of Chicago and Columbia, and also to visit Moala. I’m excited to receive this funding as it will really make the research for the book possible.

In the meantime I have spent some time reading up on background history, including the history of Russia and Ukraine, as well as some background reading on the leftist traditions that Sahlins would have encountered (see, inter alia, the Russian Revolution). I’ve also done some research on the history of the west side of Chicago, where Sahlins grew up. It’s amazing how much information is on the Internet when you know where to look. There are even yearbooks of the Lewis Institute, where his father studied to get American education credentials. The have lovely art nouveau illustrations from (I imagine) the students. 

Now that it is June and the summer is officially under way for me, I will begin doing interviews with people who knew Sahlins. I’m planning to start with some of his older students who will expertise that I hope will guide me. I will spend about half go July in Papua New Guinea, looking for new research projects there for after the book is finished. Then in August I’ll begin interviewing in earnest.

As most of my friends and colleagues already know, the project I will take during my sabbatical in the (boreal) fall of 2023 is a biography of Marshall Sahlins. I’ll begin in the summer and since that time is almost upon my, I wanted to write the first of what I hope will be several updates about the project.

I’m excited to be working on a project of this importance and size — whether you liked Sahlins or not, he was a major force in anthropology for a long time and his story is a lens to tell the story of anthropology after World War II more generally.

I’m also horned to have the support of many people and institutions. I undertook this research after Marshall’s son Peter approached me about it at the memorial conference in Sahlins’s honor on 4 April 2022. It’s an honor and also quite intimidating as Peter is himself a very distinguished historian who knows more about Marshall’s life than I do! I am also very lucky to be conducting this research with the support of the Wenner-Gren Foundation as well as a Bordin/Gillette Fellowship from the University of Michigan.

The research for the book will be mostly library based, and I plan on doing work in the libraries and archives of the universities Sahlins was associated with: Michigan, Chicago, and Columbia. In addition to working in Hawai‘i through most of the 1970s, Sahlins was also a visiting professor at Mānoa in the 1980-1981 school year, and I’ve done a bit of work on his time here. Our department secretary still has his syllabi on hand!

I also plan to interview people who knew Sahlins, so if I reach out to you soon, don’t be surprised!

Finally, this research will take me to Fiji, where I hope to do some research in the library and archives to improve my extremely basic understanding of that country. Then I’d like to go to Moala, Sahlins’s fieldwork site, to see what sort of relationship people there have with him, his memory and influence, and his book Moala.

The one place I cannot get to at the moment is Paris. Sahlins’s two years in France were central to his intellectual development, but at the moment I don’t have the funds to visit the city and do the sort of in-situ interviewing and library research work I’d like to do. Perhaps I’ll apply for some funding later. Or… if anyone wants to fly me out for a talk… let me know!

Finally, I want to be clear from the beginning that I do not intend this book to be a hagiography. Sahlins loved competition and found it boring to be worshipped. Also, I live in Hawai‘i, where I’ve listened to a lot of voices that are critical of his work. My goal in writing this book is to reveal the complexity of his life and to see it from a variety of angles. If I present him as only a great sage or only a grumpy, obsolete dinosaur, then I will have failed. How well I succeed in this task is something that will only become clear as I move forward with this project. More soon.

(The good folks over at the AJEC blog asked me to write a short piece on Marshall Sahlins and his relationships with European anthropologists. With their permission, I’m reposting it here. You can also go read the original post over at their website.)

I would like to thank the AJEC blog for inviting me to remember my mentor and dissertation supervisor Marshall Sahlins, and particularly his connection to Europe. Famously, Sahlins spent two years in Paris in the late 1960s. He arrived just in time for May ’68 — he told me once that he held his first seminar and then, after that, no one came for the duration of the seminar because they were all out on the street!

During his time in Paris Sahlins was, of course, deeply influenced by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Some Americans see Sahlins as having ‘converted’ to structuralism, but this is far too simple. Sahlins read not just Lévi-Strauss, but the Sartre-Lévi-Strauss debate. Sahlins’s latter work on the ‘structure of the conjuncture’ was intended as a criticism of Lévi-Strauss. Close readers will notice that Sartre’s Question de Méthode often appears in Sahlins’s bibliographies.

Beyond these intellectual influences, Sahlins also treasured the personal networks which connected him to Europe. He helped bring Valerio Valeri — a great Italian student of Lévi-Strauss — to Chicago, as well as Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, who carries the great tradition of Francophone Brazilian social thought. These connections went both ways. I spent a summer at the EHESS thanks to the initiative of Marie Salaun, who managed my invitation from Albin Bensa and Jonathan Friedman. Having a chance to meet great scholars such as Maurice Godelier made me feel very much like a node in what Lévi-Strauss called “restricted exchange” between Paris and Chicago! More recently in 2013 Sahlins was one of the discussants at the American Anthropological Association panel “The Ontological Turn in French Philosophical Anthropology” featuring Bruno Latour and Philippe Descola.

Finally, it should never be forgotten that above all Sahlins was an ethnographer of the Pacific. His connections extended to CREDO, a centre for the study of the Pacific in Europe, in Marseilles, and to the long-running Journal de la Société des Océanistes.

There is much more to say about Sahlins’s relationship to France and the Europe. It was during his time at Chicago that the anthropology department welcomed many European scholars. Marianne Gullestad, for instance, helped strengthen ties between Norwegian anthropology and American anthropology which had originally been made by Frederik Barth. The full history of these cross-continent relationships is yet to be written.

For many readers of this text, mentions of Maurice Godelier or Claude Lévi-Strauss will seem hopelessly old-fashioned, so I’d like to end this piece by stressing how important it is not only to look back but to look forward. Sahlins emphasized how structures maintain their identity through transformation, not stasis. I hope that younger scholars working today will renew and strengthen ties between Europe and the United States. The best way to honor Sahlins’s memory is not to canonize him or dogmatically insist on the importance of his insights, but to find the themes in his work which are the most important to us today, and draw on them in our own work in the future. This is the only way to ensure that a scholarly legacy will endure.

(While I have been active on Twitter posting links to memorials and obituaries of Marshall Sahlins, I have not written very much on my blog. In the next couple of months (or years) I am sure I will have more to say about him. However, I wanted to take the time to make public here the statement I’ve circulated over email. For more of my thoughts on Sahlins’s life and work, see the festschrift I edited in honor of him, A Practice of Anthropology.)

I owe Marshall a tremendous amount. The day he accepted me to work with him at Chicago my life’s path changed fundamentally. Every day I spend in Hawai‘i and every paycheck I receive as a tenured professor I owe, at least a little bit, to him.

Marshall was a great thinker, as many people on this list have mentioned. But he was also a role model. Unlike many superstars at Chicago he had a healthy and happy family life. Even his dogs were happy. As a result I never came of age — as many people do these days, judging from social media — believing that the price of academic success was a barren private life. If anything, the challenge was to find someone to share my life with as remarkable as Barbara!

He was also a person of absolute integrity who said what he meant and meant what he said. He met all of the deadlines I gave him for letters of recommendations, commenting on draft chapters, etc. He also insisted that I meet all of mine. He was not inflexible or inhumane in this, he just thought people should be committed to their commitments, or else not make them. I think this viewpoint drove a lot of his politics. He wanted people to do the right thing — something which is actually incredibly exhausting, but also a very good habit to learn and leads to a virtuous life.

Egalitarianism was another key traits of his personality. He treated everyone the same way, regardless of rank or position. It was a very Chicago (the city, not the university) way of being. I always found this pretty terrifying since he was a Famous and I was a not. But it ended up being valuable. He never told me I was not good enough, or that I would not be pushed to succeed because he had already decided I could not. If Marshall’s books could win awards, why not mine? And you know what, at the end of the day my first book _did_ win an award. It would not have if I had been taught to set my sights low.

Alan Rumsey has rightly pointed out that competition was important for Marshall. He was probably one of the few members of the national academy of science who regreted not being a college football star. His egalitarianism was, as we say in the business, ‘agonistic’. He loved what we call in Hebrew ‘machloket’ — disputation. Arguing with him was an intense, no-holds barred experience, but it never became personal and was always based on reason and evidence. You had to go for the jugular. One particularly important moment in my graduate education was watching his wife (a great bridge player) quietly, carefully, and relentlessly explain to him why he should have been bidding hearts. If you were right and he was wrong, his first move was to become extremely charming and change the subject. But if you kept at him he would admit he was wrong.

One reason his work was so good was that he did this to himself constantly. He had the ability to be self-critical without beating himself up emotionally. He also had a regular and healthy work habit. Both of these are key to academic success or, I would argue, any kind of success. If only we all had a Marshall in our heads to argue with the way he did, all of our work would be much stronger.

Given this, it’s no surprise that Marshall helped mentor an activist scholar like Lilikalā Kame‘eleihiwa or would support the tenure of Haunani-Kay Trask — nor is it surprising that these people would later have their disputes with him.

Much of the academic world has already forgotten many of Marshall’s intellectual contributions — his dissolution of the structure-agency binary seems not to have taken, for instance, outside of anyone who is not Webb Keane. But I think his greatest contribution which we must carry forward is the recognition that there is such a thing as healthy conflict. Certainly in the United States today too many people have forgotten how to disagree with each other and indeed, can only understand disagreement as pathological.

When I think of Marshall the impression I get is one of clarity: Clarity of thought, of action, and of ethics. To this day I walk through the world constantly noticing how many people believe arguments that are not true because they are emotionally comforting, or who use their power and privilege every day to opt out of integrity and responsibility in ways large and small. I think the world would be a better place if everyone had Marshall’s clarity and integrity.

Marshall and I were very different people. I couldn’t connect with him over sports and he had no interest in sacred choral music of the baroque and renaissance, which was my love in graduate school. But he took me seriously and I learned a lot from him. Probably one of my proudest moments came when I was sitting at his kitchen table, listening to his feedback on a dissertation chapter. In despair, I asked him whether he thought my dissertation was any good at all. His looked me right in the eye and told me that it was “better than ok.”

Vale Marshall Sahlins.