Sahlins love

[ailiathena]

I never thought I'd go giggly for a structuralist, but it just goes to show that my brain is being blown open and my prejudices are beginning to spill out.

Marshall Sahlins' lecture "Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-Pacific Sector of 'The World System'" is (at least at this point - I'm only 1/8 of the way through) about the roles of "so-called

Comments

[sanityimpaired]

People trying to discuss the above concepts are frequently accused of racism despite that not being part of the discussion at all. It's almost as if accepting guilt for the actions of your ancestors is required to not be a racist villain in the eyes of the majority.

So it's nice to see these concepts being expressed despite the hostility of the environment towards them.

[ailiathena]

In fact, I'm pretty sure this was inspired by something along those lines. Sahlins, the guy who wrote that, was critical of the West and Western thought and when he wrote about the Hawaiian interaction with Cook he basically asserted that their reasons, peaceful and violent, made sense in their tradition but were not the same way of thinking as the white Europeans. Another anthropologist, Obeyesekere, disagreed and argued that they thought the same way, and that saying otherwise was racist. I don't know Obeyesekere's work enough to comment on him, but I have to say that I agree with Sahlins that assuming that the West has this almost supernatural power to overwhelm every other culture in its path is certainly as ethnocentric and probably as racist as suggesting that the West did not (does not) inflict horrible violence upon other peoples.

I agree, it IS nice to see these concepts being expressed. I hope that they don't lose too much of their meaning in the decontextualization.