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An incredible book for a number of reasons, chief among them of course being the provocative comparison that yields much fruit: ancient Greek political relationships and late eighteenth-century / early nineteenth-century Fiji political relationships are eerily similar.. Within this thought, and its implied secondary layer of comparisons (between Athens and Sparta, and two somewhat equivalent Fiji powers), Sahlins develops a framework for his investigations:
Uniting the whole is Sahlins' dialogue with Thucydides, with his idea of how to present for readers to come the relationship between history and culture, collectives and individuals. At one point he calls Thucydides "the brilliant origin of the unhappy Western consciousness of history as the expression of the worst of us." As he goes on,
There's much to enjoy here and more to learn from. Sahlins is a master of his art, a singular mind. A gigantic text.
[C]ompeting societies are usefully considered in counterposition to one another, as a system of differences. [...] Attention should be paid to such relatively synchronic processes of complementary opposition. Dialect-history: the past is more than one country.From that comparative perspective, he draws out an elongated, eloquent set of histories, sometimes in parallel and sometimes opposed, in service of the claim that culture organizes history. In doing so, he also tackles imperial domination and economic exploitation ("the imperial animus is not just an internal impulse, but is set in a political context of opposition -- of rule or be ruled") as well as questions about theoretical utility (rightwing theories of individualistic rationality are given some attention, but moreso the ostensibly left-leaning cultural studies uptake of Foucauldian power relations) and about individual-social relationships. Interestingly, the last question involves an investigation of baseball (not Napoleon but Bobby Thompson) and Elian Gonzalez.
Uniting the whole is Sahlins' dialogue with Thucydides, with his idea of how to present for readers to come the relationship between history and culture, collectives and individuals. At one point he calls Thucydides "the brilliant origin of the unhappy Western consciousness of history as the expression of the worst of us." As he goes on,
Eliminating the marvelous [as Thucydides did] thus became a prescription for devaluing the cultural in favour of the natural for the sake of the universal. [...] Thucydides was writing in the early stages of what was to become a vast Western delusion of conceiving society as a collection of autonomous individuals: as if there were nothing to consider in the making of history -- as in the making of economics or polity -- other than the interplay between sui generis individuals and the undifferentiated totality called society. [...] Missing from Thucydides' account is the whole set of mediating institutions and values involved in the constitution of historical agency: the complex relationships, both conjectural and systematic, that give authority to certain persons and groups, thus confining their collective destiny to their particular dispositions.As you can tell, this isn't dense reading but it certainly is thoughtful and requires patience. There is also much here that's relevant to the contemporary, of course (especially now that charismatic nationalists whose identity-driven politics are again in power and driving collective discussions); arguably, that's the whole point. And so Sahlins spends much time locating his work in the anthropological context in order to feel out the useful and the constraints in that field of research. I shouldn't paint it as too dry and dusty. Sahlins has great, snappy prose when he lets it go. When thinking about how individuals can change history, he writes "For some reason, Napoleon has been a more popular example in discussions of historical agency than Bobby Thompson." Or, take this example from his discussion of Elian Gonzalez and the American passion for domesticity:
Call it, then, historical melodrama. Nationalism is the more easily propagated when the imagined community is recognized as a real family. Actually, the current hip term is méconnaissance. But if we must have French dressing on our theoretical salad, I prefer the Rousseauian pitié: experiencing the pains and pleasures of creatures like ourselves as feelings of our own.
There's much to enjoy here and more to learn from. Sahlins is a master of his art, a singular mind. A gigantic text.
