HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l’anthropologie: an article (in English) on the complex career of a giant in anthropology.

Golub, Alex, 2026. “Marshall Sahlins: A Life of Transformations,” Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l’anthropologie. https://doi.org/10.70601/67641d2.

American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (1930–2021) was one of the most prominent anthropologists of the post–World War II period. He first developed an ethnographic interest in Fiji and then, through his comparative and theoretical reflections, gradually contributed to many of the discipline’s major debates, including those in political anthropology and economic anthropology, as well as discussions of the relationship between structure and history. But was he an economic anthropologist or a political anthropologist? Was he a materialist or a structuralist? Was he a practice theorist, a historical anthropologist, or part of the ontological turn? Many people—including Sahlins himself—believed that there was a sharp break in his intellectual trajectory. In this essay, Alex Golub argues that, on the contrary, Sahlins’s intellectual life consisted of a series of transformations designed to ensure that his thought remained logically coherent and respectful of reality. As a result, his intellectual career was less a flip-flop than a series of transformations rooted in a single, unchanging intellectual problematic. These intellectual transformations thus exemplified the continuity-in-transformation that Sahlins himself had theorized as the truest form of authenticity. Because Sahlins lived a long life and was highly influential, his transformations shed light not only on his own intellectual life, but also on the nearly century-long history of anthropology through which he lived. 

His multidimensional work, consistently marked by the conviction that culture is a major determinant of human perceptions and behavior, has had a profound impact on contemporary anthropology. Among his many books are Stone Age Economics (1972), Culture and Practical Reason (1976), The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology (1976), Islands of History (1985), How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, for Example(1995), Culture in Practice (2000), and What Kinship Is—And Is Not (2012). Initially educated at the University of Michigan, Sahlins earned his PhD from Columbia University in 1954 and taught anthropology at the University of Chicago.