Marshall Sahlins

(PhD, Columbia 1954) Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College, is presently doing research focused on the intersection of culture and history, especially as those play out in early-modern Pacific societies. He recently published a book of his anthropological and political essays ranging from the 60s through the 90s, and is working on two others: a set of studies in history and historiography and a multi-volume work on “The Polynesian War,” a history of the great Fijian War, 1843-1855. From time to time he drops these ethnographic particularities for high-flying cultural theory. (Retired 6/97; still teaching some)
email: m-sahlins@uchicago.edu

Publications:

1992 Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii (with Patrick Kirch), Vol. 1, Historical Ethnography (Sahlins); Vol. 2, Archaeology (Kirch). University of Chicago Press.

1993 Good-bye Tristes Tropes: Ethnography in the Context of Modern World History. Journal of Modern History, 65:1-25.

1995 How "Natives" Think: About Captain Cook, For Example. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1996 The Sadness of Sweetness: The Native Anthropology of Western Cosmology. Current Anthropology, 37:395-415

1999 What is Anthropological Enlightenment? Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century. Annual Review of Anthropology, 28:i-xxiii.

1999 Two or Three Things That I Know About Culture. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 5: 399-422.

2000 Waiting for Foucault. Prickly Pear Press (3rd ed.)

2000 Ethnographic Experience and Sentimental Pessimism: Why Culture is Not a Disappearing Object. In L. Daston, ed., Biographies of Scientific Objects. University of Chicago Press, 158-293.

2000 Culture in Practice: Selected Essays. Zone Press.

2004 Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa. University of Chicago Press (in press).