Part 2. They say that Paris 1967 changed Marshall Sahlins

They say that Paris 1967 changed Marshall Sahlins, the encounter with both the revolutionary activism of French students and the structuralism of Levi-Strauss.  And it’s true; Paris 1967 did change Marshall Sahlins.  But he came prepared for Paris 1967.  In 1965, he had formulated the plan to resist the murderous US war in Vietnam by “teaching in” instead of “walking out.”  And in 1966, he had published the singularly impactful, “The Original Affluent Society.” He came prepared.

Of course, in the decades after “The Original Affluent Society” he published so much more that was brilliant; yet, if he had published only that piece, it would have been enough.  Dayenu.  Rejecting and refuting materialist determinism, but staying passionately concerned with the material conditions of human lives, “The Original Affluent Society” belongs in a series of key anthropological texts that demonstrate the intellectual wrongs of social evolutionism; and on this matter, Marshall’s essay is definitive. And yet it did even more.  It also opened up a critical understanding of neoclassical economics as bourgeois thought or capitalist rationalization, a position later elaborated in Culture and Practical Reason from 1976.  And along with opening that line of critical thinking about a certain Western knowledge, “The Original Affluent Society” also laid a foundation for de-growth theory, which is so urgently needed now in the midst of our climate emergency, as Jason Hickel and others in anthropology have shown us.

Death is a moment that oddly, even uncomfortably, brings the personal and the professional together in our relations to our teachers and colleagues. The risk in turning to discuss the personal, which we feel so keenly when we lose someone, is that we end up talking about ourselves, not the person we should be remembering.  So it is with some caution that I will say that after I had my PhD and was no longer a student at Chicago, there were two key moments that shifted me more into the category of colleague, and I hope friend, for Marshall.  One was a joke I told when giving a talk at the Chicago Department several years later; Marshall made sure I knew the joke had landed, at least for him.  The second moment was when, while I was serving on the AAA Executive Committee, the Association adopted a robust stance in opposition to anthropologists taking employment in the thoroughly unethical Human Terrain Services project within the US endless war in Afghanistan.  Marshall stopped me crossing a street outside the AAA convention hotel; he had expected the AAA to retreat into a proclaimed political neutrality.  “Good job on HTS” was more or less his comment, and I knew it was the highest of praise.  A good joke and social justice politics, both were fiercely important to Marshall.  I will miss him, teach his works and his activism, and remember him—as will so many of us.  May he rest in power and liberation.