Sahlins’s essential theoretical position is that historical processes
and individual actions intersect in a world of symbolic systems
that anthropologists call culture. It is impossible to segregate the
flow of human existence from the cultural realm. Human actions
cannot be reduced to utilitarian principles because the utility of
any human actions is calculated in terms of cultural systems.
Sahlins asserts that
the distinctive quality of man [is] not that he must live in a material world, circumstance he shares with all organisms, but
that he does so according to a meaningful scheme of his own
devising, in which capacity mankind is unique. It therefore
takes as the decisive quality of culture . . . not that this culture
must conform to material constraints but that it does so according to a definite symbolic scheme which is never the only
one possible. Hence it is culture which constitutes utility.
(1976a:viii)
Thus, in his criticism of E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New
Synthesis (1975), Sahlins rejects the idea that human behaviors—
such as aggression or mating patterns—are the evolved consequences of natural selection that impart adaptive advantage. In
an extended discussion of kin selection, Sahlins argues that
while “systems of kinship and concepts of heredity in human societies, though they never conform to biological coefficients of
relationship, are true models of and for social action” (1976b:25),
in human societies, “kinship is a unique characteristic of human
societies, distinguishable precisely by its freedom from natural
relationships (1976b:58). Culture, Sahlins insists, “is the indis-
pensible condition of this system of human organization and reproduction. . . . Human society is cultural, unique in virtue of its
construction by symbolic means” (1976b:61).
This does not imply that those symbolic structures are unchanging or that the individual actor simply implements prefabricated, culturally defined behaviors like a computer executing a
program. Rather, Sahlins argues,
History is culturally ordered, differently so in different societies, according to meaningful schemes of things. The converse
is also true: cultural schemes are historically ordered, since to
a greater or lesser extent the meanings are revalued as they are
practically enacted. The synthesis of these contraries unfolds in
the creative action of the historic subjects, the people concerned. For on the one hand, people organize their projects and
give significance to their objects from the existing understandings of the cultural order. . . . On the other hand, then, as the
contingent circumstances of action need not conform to the
significance some group might assign them, people are known
to creatively reconsider their conventional schemes. And to
that extent, culture is historically altered in action. (1985:vii)
A recent example from American social history illustrates
Sahlins’s point. On August 18, 2002, the New York Times altered
its policy and allowed gay unions to be publicized on what had
been called the “Wedding” pages. This decision followed the
state of Vermont’s recognition of civil unions, a New York Times
editorial in favor of recognizing same-sex unions, and discussions between the Times’ top management and representatives of
the Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation (GLAAD) and
National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. The decision
required some editorial changes: the section was retitled “Weddings/Celebrations,” and in same-sex unions the individuals
had to be identified in the accompanying photo captions (“Mr.
Brown (left) is a securities broker, while Mr. Jones (right) is a producer of off-Broadway plays”), but these changes were minor.
Interestingly, this new example of American culture simultaneously reflected historical processes (changes in American attitudes about homosexuality), the change and continuity of
structural forms (the new unions were recognized according to a
symbolic code based on analogous heterosexual weddings), and
those historical processes and structural forms were enacted by
human actors—the newspaper management, the representatives
of gays and lesbians, and the couples who sent in their announcements.
Sahlins argues that “although in theory structure is supposed to be a concept antithetical to history and agency, in practice it is what gives historical substance to a people’s culture and
independent grounds to their action. Without cultural order
there is neither history nor agency” (1999:412). Of course, this
does not mean that culture is static:
The relationships generated in practical action, although motivated by the traditional self-conceptions of the actors, may in
fact functionally revalue those conceptions. Nothing guarantees that the situations encountered in practice will stereotypically follow from the cultural categories by which the
circumstances are interpreted and acted upon. Practice, rather,
has its own dynamics—a “structure of the conjuncture”—
which meaningfully defines the persons and the objects that
are parties to it. And these contextual values, if unlike the definitions culturally presupposed, have the capacity then of
working back on the conventional values. Entailing unprecedented relations between the acting subjects, mutually and by
relation to objects, practice entails unprecedented objectification of categories. (Sahlins 1981:35)
Sahlins’s theoretical concerns are firmly rooted in the historical ethnography of Oceania. For example when Native Hawaiians initially interacted with Europeans, they did so in reference
to traditional customary relationships that in precontact settings
would serve to reproduce cultural patterns. Thus, when Hawaiians first gave gifts of small pigs and banana plants to Captain
Cook, those objects were presented as offerings to deities
(Sahlins 1981:37–38). In time, however, such offerings were reconsidered as transactions between native chiefs and ship officers and quickly developed into a form of trade. Echoing Marcel
Mauss—and his own writings in Stone Age Economics—Sahlins
writes, “Trade does not imply the same solidarities or obligations” as offerings to divinities; rather, “trade differentiates the
parties to it, defines them in terms of separate and opposed, if
also complementary, interests” (1981:38). In the process, the relationships between people and the objects they exchange are reassessed and recalculated, resulting in “novel relations to each
other” produced in the interplay of structure and practice
(Sahlins 1981:52):
The engagement of different categories of Hawaiian society—
women, men and chiefs—to the foreigners . . . was traditionally motivated: the interests they severally displayed in the
European shipping followed from their customary relationships to each other and to the world as Hawaiians conceived it.
In this sense, Hawaiian culture would reproduce itself as history. Its tendency was to encompass the advent of Europeans
within the system as constituted, thus to integrate circumstance as structure and make of the event a version of itself. For
again the pragmatics had its own dynamics: relationships that
defeated both intention and convention. The complex of exchanges that developed between Hawaiians and Europeans,
the structure of the conjuncture, brought the former into uncharacteristic conditions of internal conflict and contradiction.
Their [i.e., Hawaiian men, women, and chiefs] differential connections with Europeans thereby endowed their own relationships to each other with novel functional content. This is
structural transformation. The values acquired in practice return to structure as new relationships between its categories.
(Sahlins 1981:50)
These theoretical concerns run through Sahlins’s writings of
the past thirty years—distinct from his earliest writings but recurrent in his work since at least the early 1970s. And Sahlins’s position is exemplified in his writings on the death of Captain Cook.