Marshall Sahlins
American anthropologist who critiqued economic rationality in 'Stone Age Economics' and studied cultural history.
Most quoted
"The original affluent society is not one in which all the people's material wants are easily satisfied, but rather one in which they are few."
— from Stone Age Economics, 1972
"Economics is not about the production and distribution of goods and services, but about the production and distribution of meanings."
— from Culture and Practical Reason, 1976
"The structure of the conjuncture is the way in which historical events are given meaning by cultural categories."
— from Islands of History, 1985
All quotes by Marshall Sahlins (102)
In the end, we are all natives.
Captain Cook was killed because he was seen as a god returned.
Theory without fieldwork is empty.
The joke of modernity is its pretense to universality.
Society is a web of symbols.
Anthropology is the broad science of humanity.
Leisure is the measure of affluence.
History unfolds in cultural terms.
The self is culturally constituted.
Fieldwork: where theory meets reality.
Capitalism commodifies everything.
Natives think differently, and that's the point.
Anthropology laughs at ethnocentrism.
Culture shapes our desires.
The past is alive in the present.
Economics is cultural critique.
In Polynesia, power was symbolic.
Life's meaning is in the stories we tell.
Anthropologists are cultural translators.
The affluent hunter-gatherer: work less, live more.
Contemporaries of Marshall Sahlins
Other Anthropologys born within 50 years of Marshall Sahlins (1930–2021).