Marshall Sahlins

Marshall Sahlins was an American anthropologist known for influential work in economic anthropology and for his later contributions to the study of history and cultural structure. In Stone Age Economics (1972) he argued, against assumptions of universal scarcity, that many hunter-gatherer societies constituted the original affluent society by limiting their wants rather than maximizing production, achieving a comfortable subsistence with relatively little labor. In later decades Sahlins became a prominent participant in a sustained scholarly dispute with anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere over the death of Captain James Cook in Hawaii, defending a structuralist interpretation of Cook's death in indigenous Hawaiian cultural terms against Obeyesekere's charge that Sahlins had projected a Western myth of the deified explorer onto Hawaiian thought, a debate that became one of the most closely watched controversies in the discipline.