Culture in Practice: Selected Essays (review)

It may be interesting to speculate about why a discipline like structural anthropology, which contributed so prominently to the intellectual climate of the latter part of the last century, should lie relatively dormant now. Picking through this large volume of selected essays by one of structural anthropology's leading practitioners, Marshall Sahlins, one gets the impression of a field of study that tried to reconcile at least two distinct disciplines, using the methodology of a third.

First, there is ethnography, the attempt to objectively study societies and their cultures in operation; this book presents many exemplary pieces of ethnographic research. Second, there is political philosophy—the attempt to explain how societies and their cultures operate—which, in the case of much of Sahlin's work, ultimately derives from Marxism. Finally, there is the application of linguistics—the attempt to objectively classify the cultural operation of societies—more specifically here, the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent school of French semiotics. Although Sahlin's involvement with structural anthropology is highlighted by a glowing endorsement from Claude Lévi-Strauss (perhaps the most prominent exponent of the field), it is interesting to observe the fluctuations of intellectual fashion in this "intellectual autobiography" spanning the activity of some 30 years.

Divided into three sections, the first set of essays, "Culture," from the 1960s and 1970s, is marked by an emphasis on "cultural construction or symbolic order" (p. 37), frequently referencing the Saussurean principle il n'y que le différences. The second set ("Practice") documents Sahlin's more overtly political writing of the late 1960s, flavored by the general mood of revolutionary intellectual struggle and reactions to the Vietnam War. The final set ("Culture in Practice"), written in the 1980s and 1990s, is more concerned with the fate of indigenous peoples and the "hegemonic forces of a globalizing capitalism," marking a shift toward historical ethnography and comparative anthropology.

To return to our original question about the current reputation of structural anthropology, its decline may be due (at least in part) to the decline in value of Marxist political philosophy and Saussurean structural linguistics, components that elevated the subject in the 1960s and 1970s. For the optimistic belief in the rational scientific manipulation of human culture and society is now as defunct as the equally optimistic belief in a rational explanation of the languages, signs and symbols by which such societies function. Allied to this loss of faith is the more profound malaise one can sense in contemporary intellectual activity that, it seems, has been stripped of its main purpose—to direct the improvement of, rather than simply observe, the human condition. What is left then is ethnography, in something like its original form: that is, the observation of cultures, especially cultures other than our own, about which we can still be remarkably ignorant. This is an ignorance that, as Sahlins points out, allows the brutal logic of corporate progress to invade and mutilate other fragile worlds. The fact that we still have so much to learn from our quieter fellow humans is demonstrated by a small example cited toward the end of the book. Discussing the "Relativity of Subject-Object Distinctions" (p. 563), or how the relation between person and environment is understood in different cultures and how this can determine the way we treat other humans and the environment, the author notes Godfrey Lienhardt's discussion of the Dinka people's relations to external "powers." He quotes:

The Dinka have no conception which at all closely corresponds to our popular modern conception of the "mind" as mediating and, as it were, storing up experiences of the self. There is for them no such interior entity to appear, on reflection, to stand between the experiencing self at any given moment and what is or has been an exterior influence upon the self.

Memories, for example, are for the Dinka not interior to the remembering person but act upon them externally: "Their world...