Marshall D Sahlins

Marshall Sahlins interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 6th June 2013

0:05:07 I did an M.A. at Michigan but did a Ph.D. at Columbia; I heard that Kroeber and Steward were there at Columbia so I applied, but when I got there they had left; the young turks were taught by the younger professors - Morty Fried, Elman Service; the older ones were some of the worst teachers I ever had; the Michigan M.A. exam was seventeen hours in four fields, so you had to know a lot; by the time I got to Columbia it was a breeze as far as passing Ph.D. qualifying exams, which I did in a year; then you could write a library thesis and go to the field afterwards, which I did; so I had a Ph.D. at age twenty-three, and then I went to the field; the thesis was on social stratification in Polynesia and was published; my supervisor was Morton Fried; he was a bright man and very good, humorous, intelligent, engaged, inspiring - a great teacher - it was a pleasure to have him as a Ph.D. supervisor even though his field was China and mine was not; at Columbia I also ran into other people - Elman Service - and outside the department, people like Karl Polanyi, so it was a good two years; the summer before I went to the field I was the recorder for David Schneider's matrilineal kinship seminar - I was the recorder who drew the kinship diagrams; we had David Aberle, Kathleen Gough, Harry Basehart, among others, and Schneider was at Harvard; the dispute with Needham was not yet going on though Schneider was disputable, a disputing person;

03:36:00 At that time we were all evolutionary anthropologists and Morty Fried came up with this unpublished article which had been rejected by the American Anthropologist written by Paul Kirchhoff who was in Mexico at the time; it was about conical clans, and we all thought it was a new stage of clanic development, as was a ranked lineage, or what Firth called a ramage, with differentiation by seniority of descent; everybody wanted to find an ethnographic example; Fiji struck me as a place where there was still a culture more or less intact, certainly in that respect, so I went; my shock on arrival was - I have just picked up an old paper of mine which anthropologises it - but I was taken under the wing of the head of Fijian affairs who was a famous Fijian called Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna ;we were talking about where I should do work in Fiji and he came up with a warning not to go to one place, Moala, where they were very obstreperous; I thought it sounded interesting, so I went there under his aegis and got a royal welcome with a Fiji kava ceremony as he was a classificatory sister's son in that area, besides being the most powerful Fijian; everybody was there and they wanted to know why I had come; I said the usual things about wanting to study their customs; the Chief said that they were all there so what was it that I wanted to know; I asked where they had come from; they said they had come from Egypt, through New Guinea on a banana leaf - they started from Tanganyika to Egypt; at that Time I thought this place has been corrupted by European contact; I have since been able to decode these neo-traditional myths or traditions of origin that enlarge relations on a planetary scale but without radically changing the structure of the traditional myths; so it really is a case of having a new cosmography opened up by colonialism with new centres of power and authority; so I have basically be able to de-mythify these - in fact I do not use the word myth any more because I want to change all the ethnological vocabulary that smuggles in our ideas of reality; I think that the notion of mythical charter is one of the most foolish notions that you can imagine; if myth has the implication of fiction, it cannot be a social constitution; it is only a fiction from our point of view but it is not a good piece of ethnological vocabulary; I am against things like folk biology or mythical charter,

10:34:10 I was a year in Fiji and have been back about five times, usually for the summer, their winter, fortunately, but I haven't been back since the nineties; I did a senior thesis on a Jewish mystical secret religious cult in Turkey in 1952; I worked in New Guinea for about three months one summer, on the north coast with my graduate student, and that is about it; I did a National Research Council investigation of native Alaskan fisheries; you might have seen a reference to that recently because it got involved in the international incident I set off by resigning from the National Academy of Sciences in February this year; that was the only thing I ever did in the NAS besides electing members; I never understood what the National Academy was about anyhow; all you did was elect other people to the National Academy; I am also a member of the British Academy, but not a voting member, being a foreigner

13:03:04 On writing - I never learnt to type and write with a .5mm pencil and a pink pearl eraser on yellow 8.5 X 11 pads, writing every other line; I work from about 8.30-9 to about 11.30-12 in the morning; I rewrite the first chapter, first page, endlessly for two weeks; there are one or two problems - in order to know the beginning you have to know the end, or as one of my students said when I asked why she did not write her thesis, in order to write the first sentence you have to eliminate all the other possible sentences; I think, as Said said, the beginnings are the hardest things, so I write the beginning a lot, and usually I have to write it all over again; I do a lot by hand although when somebody transcribes it on a computer I have been able to rewrite some, if it is short enough, on the computer, but just with two finger typing; my ideas come between the time I wake up and the time I get out of bed, about half an hour; I don't have a pad beside me; Ogden Nash, the comic poet, had one, and he got up one night and wrote down the genius poem that he had thought of in the middle of the night; in the morning it read "higamous hogamous, women are monogamous. Hogamous higamous, men are polygamous"; apparently it was the way you learnt to ski in Summer and swim in the Winter; at night, whatever problem you are dealing with whirls around, somehow you are working on it; in the morning it can become clear; in a very rare case I will write it down when drinking coffee if there is a particular sentence or something, but generally I don't have to

17:09:06 I am not terribly happy with any of my writings once they are gone; the book that has sold the most is 'Stone Age Economics' which to me is already from the stone age, if not the stoned age; the chapter about the original affluent society became a hippy cult article, so has had the most influence and sold the most copies; it was Elman Service talking about Arunta that really set me off; certainly he deserves at least equal if not more credit for the whole idea because he was musing about it in class; that set my interest and I went round looking for the data, and it worked; I published it first in France and that got me into the literary circles there which was fun; in the sense of its public value and people telling me that's what made THEM an anthropologist, yes, it has been the most powerful, but it is not necessarily the one that I love the most; I think the little article on colours was the most intelligent that I wrote, which people don't know much about - a cultural explanation about why certain scientists thought there was a natural sequence of colour determinations; it is about the semiotics of culture and the necessity for contrastive positions, a kind of Saussurean analysis from the signified to the signifier; if you are going to make a distinction of meaning you have to have a clear distinction of sound, and it is the same with colour if it is going to be meaningful in the society; you can't have a red that looks orange, it has to be a saturated red; there was something I discovered in that article which I thought was really interesting and that is that people who are red-green colour blind can go through life without knowing it, and call the things that we call red, red, and green, green, even though they don't see these colours; the reason is that there is a difference of brightness between these colours so that when people refer to them they make a distinction, which means they can share the name while having totally different experiences; the level of meaning is what's critical while the way of perceiving is not; I found that quite amazing; the other thing that I found amazing is what I wrote the other day in the LRB about the nature of our human sciences as fundamentally organised by the fact that the way we work and what we are working on are the same thing, that is they are meaningfully constructed, and so the method and the truth are one, because our subjects like ourselves are symbolic beings who are organising their world symbolically, and we have the power to decode it; so an anthropological explanation involves reproducing in your mind, as logic, the way that world is constructed; in human sciences there is a fundamental identity, as Vico saw it, between the made and the true, the interchangeability of the method and the object since the method is trying to follow a symbolic construction and the logic thereof; once we say it is logical, we have incorporated whatever it is - cannibalism, Aztec sacrifice, whatever - as our own interior subjectivity; I find that amazingly interesting; for me, that was Levi-Strauss's most important implication of structuralism; the things I have written on historical metaphors was also very popular; on Captain Cook, 'How Natives Think', is a good book; it was a hard thing to do; if you were attacked or your work was attacked in what you felt was a spurious manner, what are you going to do, apart from saying that you hadn't said that or you didn't understand me, in which case the dispute goes on endlessly; I only decided because Obeysekere got all these prizes from eighteenth century historians, and the anthropologists were all passing on it, so I decided to do a frontal assault and it worked; this little kinship book, it is hard for me to tell if it means anything, I think only time will tell; 'Apologies to Thucydides' I thought was a good book; 'Culture and Practical Reason' also got a lot of good press, but I thought it was badly written and too dense; it and the Cook book won prizes from the University of Chicago Press for the best book by a University of Chicago author published for the year

27:57:11 I heard Paul Bohannan say once that he had fallen at the feet of many masters, then picked himself up and dusted them off; I feel that way; when I was working at Michigan as an undergraduate, Leslie White was a great man, at Columbia , Polanyi was a great man; Levi Strauss was a great man, my younger teachers - Morty Fried - I liked them all and learnt from them; Evans Pritchard I appreciate more and more, especially as recently I have been working on African kings; I am trying to write a book on stranger kings, and Africa's got nothing but stranger kings; I find some of his under-appreciated work, like the Sanusi book, are sensationally good; I think he was one of the Greats, no question; everybody read 'The Nuer', of course, and the 'Azande Witchcraft' but I wasn't...I never met him; Jack Goody is a great anthropologist too; he is a wise thinker and a bad lecturer, he wanders, but he is prolific; Edmund Leach was another great man; he came by when I was an assistant professor at Michigan, and from that time I ran into him several times; we were together in one of these Wenner Gren things; there are certain things that he wrote, especially 'Highland Burma', which are immortal, and also the stuff on affinal and lineal kin.

31:49:02 During the McCarthy era, I was told that our classes were being watched, but I taught Marx during that period; nothing ever happened to me; when I was first hired at Michigan a very famous mathematician was kicked out, Chandler Davis who was Natalie Zemon Davis's husband, and there were some protests but not much; I was never really touched by it personally; Moses Finley (previously Finkelstein) was fingered by Carl August Wittfogel, who also fingered the CanadianAmbassador to Egypt, who jumped out of the window - a guy named Norman; Wittfogel, as I understand it, was himself a communist who was destined to receive the Stalin Prize; when he got to Moscow he was not given it because the line had changed and oriental despotism was no longer the precursor of capitalism, and now it was feudalism; he got back on the train to Germany where he was arrested for being a communist; that is what I have heard; who knows what the deeper psychological attributes were that produced Wittfogel's paranoia, but he was an absolute terror during the McCarthy era; I read the testimony about Moses Finlay and it was all hearsay and the company he kept; Finlay got a part-time job at Rutgers; he was actually a friend of the Boas family; I believe that he spoke at Boas's funeral; I saw him in the Polanyi seminar and a lot of the stuff that Polanyi published on Aristotle's discovery of the economy was really Moses Finley though the attribution usually runs the other way; in 1956 I was here at that conference on models and Eric Wolf and I were walking down the street and were hailed from behind by a man in a Don's gown, and it was Moses Finley; we went up to his room and had sherry and I thought this was a good recuperation; then before you know it he was Professor of Classics with a knighthood

36:09:52 Politically I am a populist; in America I would be a man rather of the left; I was involved in the protests against the Vietnam war; I am the inventor of the notion of the teach-in and the first teach-in against the war at Michigan; I militated for a while during the Vietnam period and then I went to Paris; I was in the Paris-American committee against the war, so I was active; I have been a pain to the University of Chicago administration since about the nineties when they decided to commodify the university, to reorganize the university to increase the endowment rather than using the endowment to increase the university; I have written against the war in Iraq, I don't know whether you saw my stuff in ‘Anthropology Today’; I pick my fights but they are always on the same side

38:00:56 Keith Hart taught at Chicago for a while; he is a very wise thinker but in a different set of materials than me; I enjoy writing above all other academic activities; teaching and lecturing are to me virtually the same; I am not a Socratic teacher, but a lecturer; I didn't particularly like teaching undergraduates, I prefer graduate teaching; I suppose I have had about thirty to forty graduate supervisees, but I have never counted; they probably thought of me as an easy supervisor, with some exceptions; I like low-maintenance students, those who are really highly motivated; I have had some failures, students that I really thought should have finished and didn't; teaching is sometimes a great pleasure but I get more pleasure out of writing, and I get even more pleasure out of reading ethnographies; cultural differences are, for me, interesting, especially if they are totally off the wall, like Shirkaga's shadows on the wall that have their own villages, things like that I find fascinating

41:18:06 I have three children; one is a professional historian at Berkeley, a son, who is the author of some repute, including a book called 'Boundaries' which sometimes is attributed to me, and I would be glad to take credit for; one of my students said it was my most popular book in Spain