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A L S O A V A IL A B L E F R O M R O U T L E D G E

A nthropology: T he Basics
Peter Metcalf FIFTY KEY
9780415331203
A N TH RO PO LO G ISTS
A rchaeology: T he Basics, second edition
Clive Gamble
9780415359757

S ociology: T he Basics
Ken Plummer
9780415472067

Social and Cultural Anthropology: T he Key C oncepts, E dited by

second edition
Nigel Rapport and Joanna Overing Robert Gordon, A n drew P. Lyons,
9780415367516
and Harriet D . Lyons
Archaeology: T he K ey Concepts
Edited by Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn
9780415317580

Fifty Key Thinkers on H istory, second edition

Edited by Mamie Hughes-Warrington
9780415366519

Fifiy Key Sociologists: T he Form ative Theorists

Edited by John Scott
9780415352604

Fifty Key Sociologists: T he Contem porary Theorists

Edited by John Scott
9780415352598

R Routledge
Taylor &Francis Croup
LONDON AND NEW YORK
 CONTENTS

First published 2011

by R outledge
2 Park Square, M ilton Park, Abingdon, O xon, 0 X 1 4 4PJM Alphabetical list of contents vi
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada Chronological list of contents x
by R oudedge Contributors xii
270 M adison Avenue, N e w York, N Y 10016
Introduction xvin
Routledge is an imprint o f the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2011 R o b e rt Gordon, A ndrew P. Lyons, and H arriet D . Lyons, Fifty Key Anthropologists 1
selection and editorial matter; individual contributors, their
contributions
Appendix i Some key anthropological terms 267
T he right o f R o b ert Gordon, A ndrew Lyons, and H arriet Lyons to be
identified as authors o f the editorial material, and o f the authors for their
Appendix 2 Timeline 274
individual chapters, has been asserted, in accordance w ith sections 77 Index 277
and 78 o f the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Typeset in Bem bo by Taylor & Francis Books
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All rights reserved. N o part o f this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
no w know n or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any inform ation storage or retrieval system, w ithout
permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library o f Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Fifty key anthropologists / edited by R o b e rt Gordon, A ndrew Lyons,
and H arriet Lyons,
p. cm. (Routledge key guides)
Includes index.
1. Anthropologists-Biography. I. Gordon, R o b ert J., 1947-11. Lyons,
A ndrew P. (Andrew Paul) III. Lyons, Harriet.
G N 20.F54 2010
301.0922 - dc22

ISBN 13: 978-0-415-46104-7 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-0-415-46105-4 (pbk)
ISBN 13: 978-0-203-83879-2 (ebk)

V
GAYLE RUBIN (1949-)
research attempts to paint her as a supporter o f paedophilia, a pressing
issue for many, regardless o f political affiliation. W ords from R ubins
writings that are likely to elicit a strong reaction are placed in quotes
to draw the reader to the authors idea about what is wrong. There
is often no distinction made between consensual sex between persons
who might be quite close in age and the forcible abduction o f chil
dren by adults. Many attackers insist that their ow n thoughts and
feelings about sex are in harmony with nature, whereas R ubins per
spective is outside o f nature, ergo unnatural. These critics thus rely on
the same stigmatizing mechanisms that R ubin so brilliantly elucidates.
R ubins influence is rather remarkable in that it extends well
outside the field o f anthropology. Feminism, queer theory, sexology,
and gender studies all draw from her work. Equally powerful is her
influence within the larger community that she studied as well as those
individuals whose sexual identities are under fire. Numerous indivi
duals have told this author that her keen wit, character, and unwa
vering support played a significant and positive part in their fives.
It is instructive that Gayle R ubin has chosen a subject that elicits so
m uch vilification. The ideologies which she considers in her w ork are
firmly in place; sexual minorities, o f which she herself is a member,
are widely reviled. The experience o f living as queer in any form
in the U nited States, indeed in many western and non-western
countries, can be a sobering, often painful, sometimes fatal experi
ence. That we have the beginnings o f an attempt to challenge and
document the degree o f pain combined with a adroit analysis o f its
causes is notable.
Selected readings
Rubin, G. (1975) T he Traffic in W om en: N otes on the Political
Econom y o f Sex, in Toward an Anthropology o f Women, R . R eiter (ed.),
pp. 157210, N ew York: M onthly Review Press.
(1982) The Leather M enace, Body Politic April: 33, 34.
(1991) T he Catacombs: A Temple o f the Butthole, in -Radical Sex,
People, Politics, and Practice, M. Thom pson (ed.), pp. 119-41, Boston, MA:
Alyson Publications.
(1993a [1984]) Thinking Sex: N otes for a Radical Theory o f the
Politics o f Sexuality, in The Lesbian A n d Gay Studies Reader, H. Abelove,
M. A. Barale, and D. M. Halperin (eds.), pp. 344, N ew York:
Roudedge; originally published in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female
Sexuality, C. Vance (ed.), London: R oudedge and Kegan Paul.
(1993b) Misguided, Dangerous and W rong: A n Analysis o f Anti-
Pornography Politics, in Bad Girls and Dirty Pictures, A. Assiter and
C. Avedon (eds.), pp. 1840, London: Pluto Press.
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MARSHALL SAHLINS (1930-)
(2000) Sites, Setdements, and U rban Sex: Archaeology and the Study
o f Gay Leathermen in San Francisco 195595, in Archaeologies of Sexuality,
R . A. Schmidt and B. Voss (eds.), pp. 62-88, London: Roudedge.
(2002) Studying Sexual Subcultures: the Ethnography o f Gay
Communities in U rban N orth America, in O ut in Theory: The Emergence of
Lesbian and Gay Anthropology, E. Lewin and W . Leap (eds.), pp. 17-68,
Urbana: University o f Illinois Press.
DAVID L. R . H OU STON
M A R S H A L L S A H L IN S (1 9 3 0 -)
Marshall David Sahfins was bom on December 27, 1930 in Chicago,
Illinois, where, at the time o f writing he was still the remarkably
productive Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor o f
Anthropology Emeritus at the University o f Chicago. Though his
name has become indelibly finked to that institution and city, he
earned his PhD at Columbia University (1954) and his Bachelors and
Masters degrees at the University o f Michigan, where he also taught
for a num ber o f years before his return to Chicago in 1973. Among
his major early intellectual influences were the evolutionary theories
o f Leslie W hite at Michigan and the views o f economic historian
Karl Polanyi and environmental anthropologist Julian Steward (both
at Columbia). Their ideas were reflected in Sahfinss early writings
o f a historical materialist and n e o - e v o l u t i o n i s t bent. After a period
in Paris in the late 1960s, however, he experienced something o f a
mid-career conversion to a cultural theory that eschewed any strict
determination by material or biological constraints. The major influ
ence on him at that time was the s t r u c t u r a l i s t m ovement inspired
by Claude Lvi-Strauss, though Sahfins has also acknowledged
ideas from French classical historians such as Georges Dumzil.
Despite this changing theoretical trajectory, throughout his career he
has consistently maintained a left-wing political stance, both speaking
out against the Vietnam W ar in the 1960s and becoming one o f the
few senior anthropologists to take a strong public stand against the
invasion o f Iraq in 2003, to take just two widely spaced examples.
Indeed he has even drawn astute parallels between present-day
American imperialism and its counterparts in the earlier histories of
Europe and the Pacific.
His political stance may explain why he appears distinctly ambiva
lent about another stream o f French theory that was emerging during
his time in Paris, the power/knowledge approach most famously
exemplified by Michel Foucault. Sahfins has often expressed his
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MARSHALL SAHLINS (1930-)
distaste for views that seemingly reduce culture to relations o f power
(as in certain strains o f postmodernism and postcolonialism that imply
resistance is either futile or the product o f the pow er it opposes). This
is not to say that he belittles power and oppression as factors in
human history but rather that he retains a belief in some forms of
transformative human action and political opposition.
Unusually, Sahlinss PhD dissertation was based not on ethno
graphic fieldwork but on library research. Published as his first book,
Social Stratification in Polynesia (1958), it applied the comparative
and evolutionist frames o f his Michigan and Columbia training to
documentary sources in order to formulate an explanation for the
variations o f kind and degree o f hierarchy in traditional Polynesian
societies. By the time the book appeared, Sahlins had undertaken
field research on the Fijian island o f Moala, work that resulted in a
monograph o f that title (1962). In between these two publications he
co-edited a volume with Elman Service, Evolution and Culture (1960)
and shortly after the Fiji monograph produced one o f his most semi
nal essays, Poor Man, R ich Man, Big-Man, C hief (1963), in which
he famously contrasted the simple modes o f Melanesian leadership
systems with the supposedly more advanced and complex Polynesian
ones. These writings represent the highpoint o f his evolutionism a
historically nuanced version but evolutionism nonetheless.
A co-edited volume o f essays on economic anthropology dedicated
to Polanyis memory came out in 1965, and this interest continued
with a collection o f his own papers, Stone Age Economics (1972). Its
best known essay, The Original Affluent Society, questioned con
ventional evolutionary thinking about the hardship and privations o f
hunter-gatherer existence, arguing that Australian Aborigines in fact
derived a frill subsistence lifestyle from less time and effort than most
other forms o f social organization and technological development.
By now, the influence o f the Paris sojourn was beginning to make
itself felt, culminating in Sahlinss first clearly structuralist book,
Culture and Practical Reason (1976). R ather than seeing culture as
a succession o f ways in which people have adapted to nature over
time, he was starting to articulate nature and history, as phenomena
that have always been culturalized. Another outcome o f this re
orientation was his stinging critique on sociobiology, Use and Abuse of
Biology (1977), which dissected the bourgeois economism and con
servative ideology underpinning that theory.
While these theoretical interventions gained public attention,
behind the scenes Sahlins was spending time in archives in Fiji,
Hawaii, and N ew Zealand, preparing a major revision o f Pacific
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MARSHALL SAHLINS (1930-)
historiography. Paradoxically, the products o f this areal specialization
have come to the attention o f a wider audience than the more gen
eral works and have consolidated his reputation as one o f the leading
anthropologists o f his day. The new approach was signaled by two
talks given in 1979, a distinguished lecture to the Association
for Social Anthropology in Oceania that expanded into the brief
monograph Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities (1981), and a
keynote address to the Congress o f the Australian and N ew Zealand
Association for the Advancement o f Science, The Stranger-King:
Dumezil among the Fijians (1981). The latter provided a term for his
approach, processual structuralism, while Historical Metaphors laun
ched his most controversial analytical case study, a detailed reworking
o f the literature surrounding the initial welcome and subsequent
killing by Hawaiians o f Captain C ook in 1779. Cooks reception by
the locals as an embodiment o f one o f their pre-em inent deities,
Lono, had previously been seen as an interesting and exotic footnote
in most commentaries on his explorations. Sahlins now turned it into
the central point for understanding this cultural encounter, one in
which Cooks arrival, conduct on land, departure, and return all fitted
within Hawaiian cosmology as expressed through the annual ritual
cycle o f Makahiki w hen an agricultural god was killed with promise
o f future resurrection. Instead o f seeing the reception o f C ook/Lono
as just another instance o f irrational natives deferring to Westerners
military pow er or succumbing to the allure o f their shiny trinkets,
Sahlins, powerfully demonstrated the logic by which Hawaiians
encompassed the strangers and recruited them to the service o f their
own culture. The essay on Fiji meanwhile reinforced the message
by posing the idea that Polynesian systems o f leadership depended on
periodic intrusions by outsiders and their eventual domestication by
locals. This essay was reprinted along with others in a new collection,
Elands of History (1985).
M uch o f the remainder o f the decade o f the 1980s was spent by
Sahlins in preparing a detailed historical ethnography o f a Hawaiian
valley, Anahulu (1992), a project undertaken in collaboration with an
archaeologist, Patrick Vinton Kirch. H e also engaged in clarifying and
elaborating the argument proposed in Historical Metaphors, often in the
context o f replying to critics who questioned his grasp o f the histor
ical sources or o f Hawaiian culture. By and large, he managed to bat
away most o f the objections convincingly.
The best-known critique o f his thesis, however, was to come from
an unexpected direction. Gananath Obeyesekere o f Princeton
University is an anthropologist o f Sri Lankan origin, well respected
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MARSHALL SAHLINS (1930-)
in the discipline for his research on Buddhism and its place in South
Asian cultures. Like Sahlins, he is a senior scholar and emeritus pro
fessor but until 1992 he was not known for any interest or expertise
in Oceania. In that year he m ounted a double-pronged assault on
Sahlinss interpretation o f the encounter between Cook and the people
o f Hawaii. The more important o f these was a book, The Apotheosis
of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific, in which he
claimed historical accounts showed that the Hawaiian motives for
treating C ook as Lono were explicable purely in universal rational
and utilitarian terms, not in terms o f a local cultural logic. Sahlins in
short had bought into a longstanding Western fantasy about how
Westerners were perceived by natives. The other prong o f
Obeyesekeres assault was an essay denying the veracity o f Western
accounts o f cannibalism in the Pacific, again attributing the stories to
fantasies and projected fears about savages. As an academic whose
primary expertise lay elsewhere, Obeseyekere based his critique on
published and secondary sources, claiming that even a scholar w ithout
Sahlinss specialized knowledge could see the holes in his argument.
Sahlinss riposte was the book How Natives Think: About Captain
Cook, For Example (1995). Once more he demonstrated his unsur
passed command o f the primary source material and his ability to
defend his theoretical position. These strengths later enabled him
to demolish Obeyesekeres denial o f the reality o f cannibalism in two
brief articles published in Anthropology Today (2003).
In recent years, Sahlins has issued a magisterial overview o f his
approach to culture and (or as) history, Apologies to Thucydides (2004),
as well as a stream of essays arguing forcefully against the imposition
o f ethnocentric cultural logics on non-W estem cultures, especially in
respect o f debates over (under) development and dependency. In so
doing, he stands in an anthropological tradition that questions not
only the spread o f a hegemonic Western monoculture but, more
profoundly, even the very existence o f such a homogeneous world
system. Sahlins tries to practice what he preaches and has revived the
old form o f political consciousness-raising - the pamphlet. H e pub
lishes and edits a pamphlet series appropriately called Prickly Paradigm
which seeks to promote public debate on pressing issues by making
publicly accessible longer essays on contentious issues o f the day.
In the restless refashioning o f his theoretical repertoire, Sahlins has
become perhaps the best-known practitioner of a new kind o f his
torical anthropology, one that he has done more than anyone else to
create. The impact o f his rethinking o f Cooks encounter with
Hawaii, as well as the subsequent controversy generated by
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MARSHALL SAHLINS (1930-)
Obeyesekeres critical attack, have helped propel his ideas into spheres
well beyond the usual territory for an anthropologist. These include
cultural studies, philosophy, history, comparative literature, and
literary theory.
Selected readings
Obeyesekere, G. (1992a) The Apotheosis o f Captain Cook: European
Mythmaking in the Pacific, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
(1992b) British Cannibals: .Contemplation o f an Event in the
Death and Resurrection o f James Cook, Explorer, Critical Inquiry 18(4):
630-54.
(1993) Anthropology and the Cook Myth: A Response to Critics,
Social Analysis 34: 7085.
(1994) H ow to W rite a C ook Book: Mythic and O ther Realities in
Anthropological W riting, Pacific Studies 17(2): 136-55.
Sahlins, M. (1958) Social Stratification in Polynesia, Seattle: University o f
Washington Press.
(1962) Moala: Culture and Nature on a Fijian Island, Ann Arbor:
University o f Michigan Press.
(1963) Poor Man, R ich Man, Big-Man, Chief: Political Types in
Melanesia and Polynesia, Comparative Studies in Society and History 5(3):
285-303.
(1972) Stone Age Economics, Chicago: Aldine-Atherton.
(1976) Culture and Practical Reason, Chicago: University o f Chicago
Press.
(1981a) Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early
History o f the Sandwich Islands Kingdom, A nn Arbor: University o f Michigan
Press.
(1981b) T he Stranger-King: Dumezil among the Fijians, Journal of
Pacific History 16(3/4): 10732. (Reprinted in M. Sahlins [1985] Elands of
History, Chicago: University o f Chicago Press.)
(1985) Elands o f History, Chicago: University o f Chicago Press.
(1992) Anahulu: The Anthropology o f History in the Kingdom of
Hawaii. Vol. 1: Historical Ethnography, Chicago: University o f Chicago Press.
(1993) Goodbye to Tristes Tropes: Ethnography in the Context of
M odem W orld History , Journal o f Modem History 65(1): 125.
(1995) H ow Natives Think: About Captain Cook, For Example, Chicago:
University o f Chicago Press.
(1999) W hat is Anthropological Enlightenment? Some Lessons o f the
Tw entieth Century, A nnual Review o f Anthropology 28: i-xxiii.
(2000a) Culture in Practice: Selected Essays, N ew York: Zone Books.
(2000b) O n the Anthropology o f Modernity; or, Some Triumphs
o f Culture over Despondency Theory, in Culture and Sustainable
Development in the Pacific, A. H ooper (ed.), pp. 4461, Canberra: Asia
Pacific Press.
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EDWARD SAPIR (1884-1939)
(2000c) Sentimental Pessimism and Ethnographic Experience; or,
W hy Culture Is N o t a Disappearing O bject, in Biographies o f Scientific
Objects, L. Daston, (ed.), pp. 158-202, Chicago: University o f Chicago
Press.
(2002a) Waiting for Foucault, Still, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
(2002b) An Empire o f a Certain Kind, Social Analysis 46(1): 9598.
(2004) Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice
Versa, Chicago: University o f Chicago Press.
MICHAEL GOLDSMITH
E D W A R D S A P IR (1 8 8 4 -1 9 3 9 )
Edward Sapir, the most distinguished linguist among the first
generation o f Franz B oass students, was bom January 26, 1884, in
Lauenberg, Pomerania. His parents, Eva Segal and Jacob David Sapir,
were Lithuanian Jews. His fathers profession o f cantor took the
family to England and eventually to the U nited States. In 1890,
the family setded in Richm ond, Virginia, but Sapir grew up on
N ew York Citys Lower East Side. H e used a city-wide Pulitzer
scholarship for promising immigrant children to attend Columbia
University where he received a BA in 1904 and an M A in 1905, both
in Germanics. His PhD in Anthropology, under the tutelage o f Boas,
was awarded in 1909.
Sapirs initial professional positions were interspersed with field
work. In 1907-8, he was a research fellow at the University of
California. From 1908-10, he held a Harrison fellowship at the
University o f Pennsylvania, before moving to Ottawa as the first
director o f Canadas Division o f Anthropology, under the auspices of
the Geological Survey o f Canada, a position he held for fifteen years.
In Ottawa, Sapir built up collections at the Victoria National
Museum and assembled a staff to survey the Aboriginal cultures and
languages o f the Dominion. Diamond Jenness and Marius Barbeau,
both British-trained, held permanent positions, but Sapir also hired
fellow Boasians Wilson Wallis, Paul Radin, Alexander
Goldenweiser, and Harlan Smith on short-term contracts for field
work. These m en formed the core o f the emergent professional
anthropology in Canada.
In 1910, Sapir married his distant cousin, Florence Delson, with
w hom he had three children. Florence died in 1924 after some years
o f illness. Family difficulties coincided with cutbacks in research
funding during W orld W ar I. Sapir, like Boas, was a pacifist who
placed the priorities o f science above those o f national politics.
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EDWARD SAPIR (1884-1939)
During these years, Sapir frequented Ottawa literary circles, published
poetry and literary criticism, and transposed his fascination with
psychoanalysis to the anthropological problem o f personality and
culture.
In 1925, Sapir was called to the University o f Chicago as the
superstar expected to revitalize the Department o f Anthropology,
which became independent o f Sociology in 1929, and to link
American Indian ethnography and linguistics to Rockefeller
Foundation-sponsored interdisciplinary social science. H e served as
the key mediator between Chicago sociology and psychology,
establishing collaborations especially with interactional psychologist
Harry Stack Sullivan and political scientist Harold Lasswell. He
developed a cohort o f students at the intersection o f linguistics and
anthropology but increasingly wrote for interdisciplinary audiences.
H e married Jean Victoria McClenaghan in 1926 and had two
m ore children.
In 1931, despite warnings o f anti-Semitism, Sapir could not resist
the invitation to move to Yale University where the Rockefeller
Foundation underwrote a research and training program for invited
foreign fellows on the impact o f culture on personality. Sapir soon
clashed w ith the Institute o f H um an Relations, however, and found
his position increasingly stressful. H e trained students both in linguis
tics and in personality and culture. After his first heart attack in 1937
forced cancellation o f a planned sabbatical in China, his health dete
riorated rapidly. Boas read his presidential address to the American
Anthropological Association in the fall o f 1938, and he suffered a fatal
attack on February 4, 1939.
Throughout his career, alongside his academic appointments and
interdisciplinary commitments, Sapir continued to prepare grammars,
dictionaries, and texts o f American Indian languages, based primarily
on his first-hand fieldwork. H e worked on more than thirty
different languages, taking full advantage o f opportunities to interview
Native representatives visiting Ottawa, to explore other languages
spoken by his primary informants, and to make brief visits to
Algonquian and Iroquoian communities located within easy distance
o f Ottawa, often in the company o f fellow Boasian Frank Speck.
His most linguistic-intensive fieldwork was with Southern Paiute,
Nootka, and Navajo. His principal consultants, Tony Tillohash,
Alex Thomas, and Albert Chic Sandoval, respectively, led him to
consider the psychological reality o f sound patterns. H e invented the
concept o f the phonem e independently o f European linguistic
developments in 1925, combining his preoccupation with language
215