Two or Three Things that I Know about Marshall Sahlins

Philip Swift (University College London)

As a certain anthropologist liked to repeat: Plus ça change, c’est plus la même chose. Long ago
in 6 BC (Before Covid; or 2013 in the Gregorian calendar), a then relatively obscure bureaucrat
called Dominic Cummings penned an essay on the malaise in British education, as he perceived
it. Of teaching and learning in universities, he cast a particular suspicion on the humanities for
its anti-scientific ‘tribalism’, its fuzzy terminology, and fatal attraction to faddish French
theorising. To make matters worse, he said, Marx, Freud, Durkheim, and Boas – the social
science’s original Gang of Four – all utterly ‘rejected the idea of their disciplines being based
on an evolved universal human nature’ (Cummings 2013: 131). To resolve this conflict of the
faculties, Cummings agitated for an ‘“Odyssean” education’ capable of synthesizing the
findings from the natural and the social sciences.1
Now, at first glance, this idea seemed timely: a trans-disciplinary vision of a migratory
understanding, that would establish connections between otherwise isolated islands of
knowledge. But what we actually got from Cummings was something more sedentary and
much less adventurous: Homer’s crafty, polymathic mariner recast as a project manager in a
Silicon Valley start-up. Here was an Odysseus who imagined himself to be an intellectual
outlier, a practitioner of ‘disruptive innovation’ which was, for all that, merely the
recapitulation of much of what passes for common sense in this late capitalist moment; for this
was also an Odysseus who had long since given in to the siren call of scientism.
Thus, in this particular Odyssean scheme, Cummings’ frequent and appreciative citations of
E.O. Wilson’s idea of ‘consilience’ made it quite clear that a discipline like history or
anthropology would come to occupy a subordinate position. The basic idea – also known as
‘vertical integration’ – being that the social sciences are meant to quietly fall in line behind the
more privileged and powerful modes of naturalizing explanation. As a consequence,
anthropology, for example, can no longer be a generator of genuine insights about humanity,
but is only of service in so far as it can confirm the contributions of the higher-order sciences,
such as cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, biology, and behavioural genetics. It is as
if, as the paramount framer and fabricator of values, natural science becomes something like
the structural equivalent of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, while anthropology should consent to
being merely his Uber driver, who has to take him wherever he wants to go.
But not much of this is, in fact, half as new as otherwise advertised. Wilson’s proposal for
synthesizing the sciences goes back at least as far as the 1970s. As to the notion that the

1
Anyone familiar with British politics will know, of course, that Cummings went on to become the principal
architect of the pro-Brexit campaign during the referendum, and subsequently, the chief adviser to the prime
minister Boris Johnson. With respect to Odysseus, Cummings is rather similar to him, in being a ‘many-minded’
strategist. Except that where Odysseus once blinded the cyclops during his long journeyings, Cummings went on
a long car journey in order to ‘test’ his own eyesight.

1
wayward social sciences, and the most primitive rebel among them – that uncultivated culprit,
anthropology – have long been denying the reality of an evolved, universal humanity, the
accusation is pretty ancient. (Recall, for example, Derek Freeman’s critique – he was, himself,
an anthropologist – of Mead’s anti-naturalizing arguments about Samoan adolescence (see
Freeman 1984)). It accords with the popular view of anthropologists as Otherness junkies, who
deny human nature just for the hell of it, and long to turn back the clock – as Geertz (1994:
454) once winkingly put it – to the ‘good old days of widow burning and cannibalism’.
But the argument about anthropology being in fundamental denial about ‘human nature’ is
also fundamentally misplaced. Steven Pinker (2003) once managed to spin out this fantasy into
a whole book. No one, he began reasonably, believes that ‘genes are everything, and culture is
nothing’. But, he went on to complain, almost everyone now seems to believe, to the contrary,
that ‘culture is everything’ (Pinker 2003: ix). Hence the point of Pinker’s book, conceived as a
sort of heroic one-man battle against the phalanx of modern thought, and all those who believe
in ‘an absolute separation of culture from biology’ (2003: 28).
The mystery is why this kind of hokum ever found an audience, since no serious
anthropologist – Margaret Mead included – ever argued that biology and culture were
absolutely unconnected. (Where anthropologists may hesitate is with regards to the universality
of so-called human nature; a point I will come back to.) As an anthropologist argued long ago,
biology, ‘while it is an absolutely necessary condition for culture, is equally and absolutely
insufficient’ because it is ‘completely unable to specify the cultural properties of human
behavior or their variations from one human group to another’ (Sahlins 1977: xi).2
Yet again, perhaps the question of how this kind of cockamamie idea – to use a term favoured
by a certain anthropologist – of how this entirely bogus notion gained traction at all, is not so
much of a mystery after all, since almost nobody nowadays reads anthropology, but very many
people read books by authors like Steven Pinker. Such books, packaged as the radical, so often
turn out to be so many conveyors of the common-sensical, or intellectual business as usual.
Plus ça change indeed.
I thought that the writing was on the wall – truly – when the philosophy section in many
British bookshop chains was replaced by a section given the new label of ‘Smart Thinking’.
Henceforth, Pascal and Plato became bookends to Pinker and Jordan Peterson. But ‘smart
thinking’ is merely the latest manifestation of what we might call – with apologies to Lévi-
Strauss – la pensée sausage: the sausage machine of popular scholarship, mechanically
pumping out the same range of products, which, once reheated, get served up as subversive.
Such scholarship is merely confirmatory of our common sense. Assuredly self-centred, it
makes us feel better about ourselves, without our having to think outside ourselves. To quote
William James (somewhat out of context), to read this stuff is to obtain the quiet satisfaction
of recognition: ‘You are where you ought to be mentally; you have obeyed your categorical
imperative; and nothing more need follow on that climax of your rational destiny.
Epistemologically, you are in stable equilibrium’ (James 2000: 88).

2
For a brief critique of this cockeyed critique of anthropology, see Swift (2013). With regards to Mead, at least,
it’s perhaps worth observing that she received (posthumously) the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her efforts
to demonstrate ‘that varying cultural patterns express an underlying human unity’. See King (2019: 341).

2
 But thinking otherwise – because others may well think differently – has for long been the
destiny of anthropology, and, as such, to read anthropology is to discombobulate own’s own
epistemological equilibrium, to decentre categorical imperatives, for the very reason that
anthropology proves epistemology to be more mutinous – because more mutable – than we
might suppose.

With the passing of Marshall Sahlins, anthropology has lost one of its most spirited advocates
of this position. 3 He was, also, one of the most eloquent public defenders of the idea of
anthropology as the study of the constitutive role of the symbolic in culture – such that, what
‘we’ take to be the common-sensical is, in important respects, culturally configured. It was a
position from which he never shifted, and one that he defended with great gusto for over five
decades. For Sahlins, any account of social action was inadequate if it side-lined culture, or
turned the symbolic into a spin-off or side-effect of more important processes. He was, in short,
an opponent of any explanation that would make symbols into ‘symptoms, direct or mystified,
of the true force of things’ (1981: 7).
In terms of his own theoretical stance, Sahlins combined the classic American
anthropological concern with the primacy and relativity of culture along with a structuralist
sensibility – fostered by a year spent at the Laboratoire of Lévi-Strauss in 1968-9. But Sahlins
practised structuralism with a particular inflection. Lévi-Strauss’ avowed interest (Lévi-Strauss
1966: 130) was in the study of superstructures – symbolic orders or schemes of concepts – but
it was just as much a consequence of his position, Sahlins argued, that the symbolic started
from the very ground up (see Sahlins 1976: 56-7; cf. 2000: 18). Hence, material organisation
and relations of production were themselves embedded in the order of culture. On this basis,
then, Sahlins could claim that he, and Lévi-Strauss both, were advocates of an
‘infrastructuralism’ (Sahlins 2012).
But Sahlins the infrastructuralist was a number of other things as well. He was also a Marxist,
a Benedictine and, by his own admission, a card-carrying Cartesian. Sahlins’ Marxism (two
parts Karl to one part Groucho) was twinned with a commitment to the Boasian axiom that –
as Ruth Benedict put it – the seeing eye is ‘conditioned by…tradition’ (cited in Stocking
1982: 145). As for his Cartesianism, it was, he said (à la Groucho) ‘Hocartesian’, in that he
held to Hocart’s principle that anthropological understanding would fail to make progress so
long as we ‘persist in dividing what people join, and in joining what they keep apart’ (Hocart,
cited in Sahlins 2017: 23). Hence the ethnographic imperative: the empirical – and, indeed,
ethical – obligation to take seriously the words (and worlds) of others.
Sahlins was equally a brilliant stylist – one of the very best in all of anglophone anthropology.
He could also be extremely funny. His brother Bernie, as is well known, was a major figure in
the American comedy club scene. The story goes that the fame of Lévi-Strauss became such
that, when he once booked a table at a San Francisco restaurant, the knowing waiter asked him,
‘Which one are you, the jeans or the books?’ (Lévi-Strauss and Eribon 1991: 30). One can well
imagine Marshall Sahlins in the same situation, being asked whether he was the comedian or

3
I should say that I didn’t know Sahlins as such. But I was lucky enough to attend a number of his lectures and
presentations. And I did once play a minor role in getting an old paper of his (on the anthropology of dual kingship
in ancient Greece) in to print. See Sahlins (2011).

3
the anthropologist. In truth, he was both. But his humour – and what Ian Hacking (1999: 207)
called the ‘relentless pun-machine’ that Sahlins would crank up in his compositions – all of it
was deployed in the service of a serious purpose.
Quite often, I think, that purpose was ironic. It was a means of looking at one’s own culture
as if from outside. We might call it ‘exo-exegesis’ – interpretation as a mode of estrangement.4
If ‘there is culture anywhere in humanity’, he noted drily, then ‘there is culture even in America’
(1977: xiii). And to contemplate that culture from an external position, as Sahlins did (see e.g.,
1976: 166-204), was fundamentally and epistemologically subversive; a strategy for unsettling
the seeming objectivity of our own ‘Western’ perspectives, since there are always other places
where people do things differently; other ontologies that may be orthogonal to our own. As
Geertz memorably said of the effects of Ruth Benedict’s method of cultural critique: ‘The Not-
us (or Not-U.S.) unnerves the Us’ (1988: 106).

For Sahlins, culture was the crux, the everything of anthropology (which is, incidentally, not
the same as saying – pace Pinker – that everything is culture). We hear a lot, nowadays, about
‘cancel culture’; in so far as Sahlins consistently opposed epistemologies of cultural
elimination (see 1976: 83), he was, we might say, cancel culture’s original critic.
In this regard, he liked to quote from Sartre’s Search for a Method, in which Sartre
condemned the acid bath analysis associated with a certain kind of Marxist explanation,
whereby the particulars are treated as so many dissoluble, hence disposable, coverings for class
interests, or other such workings of the Universal (see Sahlins 1976: 78-79; 1977: 14-15; 1999:
406-407, etc.). The explanatory operation thus ‘consists in taking the actual cultural content for
the “mere appearance” of a more profound and generic function’ (Sahlins 2000: 507).
Examples of this operation in action are legion, since it is the standard procedure for a wide
range of explanatory frameworks, which only differ in their determination of what constitutes
the underlying ‘generic function’ in question. Whether these be genetic imperatives (in the case
of evolutionary psychology and Wilsonian ‘consilience’), biological necessities (as in the
functionalism espoused by Malinowski), or the maximisation of self-interest that is a key part
of the expository machinery of rational choice theory. It is, then, not difficult to guess the
effects of these acidic analytics on the symbolic properties of culture; socio-cultural forms, in
all their particular meaningful and material configurations, simply melt away.
Thus, recall Malinowski’s functionalist theory, according to which culture comprises a vast,
adaptive apparatus for the fulfilment of physiological needs (see, e.g., Malinowski 1945: 42-
43). As Sahlins demonstrated at length, the functionalist reduction can in no way account for
the specificity, the ‘rich reality’, of cultural practices (1976: 76-77). And, once custom is
subordinated to function, bang goes the goal of realizing the ‘native’s point of view’. As Sahlins
quipped, ‘Malinowski could “see things as the natives saw them” provided…they agreed to see
things his way’ (1976: 83). The corrosive chemistry of explanation takes a farcical turn – the
chemical, as it were, becomes the comical – in Malinowski’s anthropological distillation of the
concept of marriage: its symbolic contents, he said, are of ‘secondary importance’ compared
to its ‘real essence’ which consists of the visible and public expression of ‘the fact that two

4
See Sahlins’ remarks on how anthropological understanding involves the adoption of an external viewpoint, or
an ‘exotopy’, in Bakhtin’s terms (2004: 4-5).

4
individuals enter the state of marriage’. All of which once led Lévi-Strauss to remark, that if
anthropological understanding amounts only to the production of this kind of tautologous
knowledge, ‘Why then bother going to distant places?’ (1977: 13).
A similar kind of dissolution of the particulars was attendant on the theory of cultural
materialism pioneered by Marvin Harris (e.g., 1977). Here, the intractable ‘riddles of culture’
could be explained once it was shown that they comprised various adaptive solutions to
problems posed by the local environment in which a particular social collective found itself. In
this manner, then, the dietary rules in Leviticus made sense in terms of the environmental
constraints of ancient Palestine. Thus, of the biblical injunction against eating creatures in the
waters without fins or scales, Harris observed that such species ‘were unlikely to be
encountered in significant numbers on the edge of the Sinai Desert or in the Judean hills.’ But,
replied Sahlins archly, ‘are we to suppose, then, that water dwellers with fins are in the desert?’
(1978: 49; italics original).
Such are the trifling results, we might say, when an anthropological theory abandons not only
thick description, but fin description as well. The point was, of course, that in bypassing the
symbolic altogether – in this case, by reducing the theological to the ecological – such
reductionism was redundant as explanation.
Sahlins raised the same objections to Harris’ ecological explanation of Aztec human sacrifice
(Harris was here extending an argument originally made by Michael Harner). The riddle of
Aztec sacrifice had a rational solution, according to Harris, because cannibalism provided an
essential source of protein. But again, Sahlins argued, that in explanatory strategies of this type,
the gain in intelligibility stands in inverse proportion to the ‘ethnographic reality’. That is, we
are required to believe that the whole elaborate panoply of sacrifice, everywhere symbolically
coded and cosmologically choreographed, was simply a means, as Sahlins put it, for the Aztecs
to obtain the ‘Daily Recommended Allowance of amino acids’ (1978: 45). But protein alone is
surely not enough to account for the protean formations of culture. In the light of Sahlins’
infrastructuralist insistence, we can see that material practice – from the matter of marriage to
the question of cannibalism – is not some kind of naked configuration, fitted out afterwards in
cultural clothing; practice is symbolic from the very start.

Now, during the course of a storied career, Sahlins made many luminous contributions to
anthropological theory – producing new views on anthropological conceptions of the economy,
powerful historical analyses of the nexus between structures and events, and important studies
of kinship and kingship, among much else.
It might be thought odd, therefore, to ignore all this work (to say nothing of Sahlins’ anti-war
activism)5 in favour of a focus on critiques he made of arguments that not many people – within
the guild of anthropologists, at least – take that seriously any more. The ‘science of culture’
being ‘essentially a reformer’s science’, as Tylor famously maintained, it was probably to be
expected that ideas along the lines of Malinowskian functionalism or cultural materialism
would have been filed away as the quaint relics of the ‘crude old culture’ of a former
anthropology (Tylor 1958: 439). And yet, although anthropologists, as the custodians and

5
Among his other efforts, Sahlins was principal instigator of the ‘teach-ins’ during the Vietnam War. See, e.g.,
Sahlins (2009).

5
principal theorists of the culture concept, may well have long since dismissed these ideas of
culture, culture – at least, our culture – clearly had other ideas. The theories themselves didn’t
simply fade away. Instead, they became canonized.
The notion that our relation to the world is essentially utilitarian, and, concomitantly, that
culture could ultimately be explained by nature, in many ways became the standard ‘average
social science wisdom’ (Sahlins 1976: 167), because it was, in large measure, already of a piece
with our common-sense conceptions. Hence, when Steven Pinker, in his book, The Blank Slate,
points out that Sahlins got it wrong when he anticipated that sociobiology would turn out to be
a theoretical flash in the pan (Pinker 2003: 135), he neglects to mention what Sahlins went on
to say. It was that, although sociobiology might well ‘disappear as science’, it would
nevertheless end up reinforcing our folklore, to be ‘preserved in a renewed popular conviction
of the naturalness of our cultural dispositions’ (1977: xv). And so it came to pass, this
reaffirmation of the ‘endemic Western association of reality and utility’ (Sahlins 1995: 155).
Where Marvin Harris could say that culture is our ‘primary means of optimizing health and
well-being’ (Harris 1994: 68), Pinker concurs in referring to culture as a battery of
‘technological and social innovations that people accumulate to help them live their lives’
(2003: 65). But here, as elsewhere, in this narrowly instrumental conception of culture, the
symbolic becomes nothing more than a sort of Swiss Army Knife; a handy contraption for
getting to grips with the ‘gritty realities of life’, in the words of the economist Thomas Sowell,
which Pinker quotes with approval (see Pinker 2003: 67).
But if culture is a kind of technology, then that is because, in the first instance, technology is
cultural. Not in the fatuous sense that, say, the making of robots is somehow an exclusively
Japanese capability, but in the more extensive, ‘infrastructuralist’ sense that human technical
acts and activities of production are inherently symbolic, and thus cannot be adequately
explained by appealing to some prior, or otherwise unmediated, level of ‘needs’, or adaptive
responses of the organism. For, as Sahlins contended, the supposition that the capacity of a
technology (or, indeed, pretty much any cultural practice whatsoever) exists in order ‘to satisfy
a material (biological) requirement’ is so utterly abstract that it can tell us pretty much nothing
in respect of the empirical particulars; the distinct form that a technology takes or the uses to
which it is put (Sahlins 1976: 207). Sahlins sets this out in an especially dazzling passage on
the arbitrary nature of utility in the cultural system of capitalism:

An industrial technology in itself does not dictate whether it will be run by men or by
women, in the day or at night, by wage laborers or by collective owners, on Tuesday or
on Sunday, for a profit or for a livelihood; in the service of national security or private
gluttony; to produce hand-fed dogs or stall-fed cattle, blue collars or white dresses; to
pollute the rivers and infect the atmosphere or to itself slowly rust away like the Singer
sewing machine posed majestically in front of the house of an African chief (1976: 208).

But to intimate, in this way, that cultural forms are not determined by the bare facts of existence
is not to imply that culture is completely unmoored from the reality of biology. As I suggested
earlier, a writer like Pinker would confront us with a wholly concocted quandary: the confected
anthropological conviction that culture must be everything, or else it is nothing. We are

6
presented with a forced and phoney choice between cultural properties and genetic propensities.
As Lévi-Strauss’ wisecracking waiter might well have said: ‘Which is it, the jeans or the genes?’
Of course, put in these stark terms, the answer has to be both – which is what Pinker affirms,
and no anthropologist of any standing has ever denied (see, e.g., Geertz 1993: 50; Sahlins 1977;
Descola 2013: 76-77; 84-86, etc.). In some absolute sense, of course, the laws of basic physics
and biology quite obviously define the limit conditions of human existence. No society,
observes Sahlins, can subsist only on miracles (1976: 168). But beyond this issue of bare
survival, the nature of these constraints on culture are minimal (1976: 209). As Louis Menand
remarks, in a withering critique of Pinker’s position, it is a truism that ‘every aspect of life has
a biological foundation’ but only in the elementary sense that, ‘unless it was biologically
possible, it wouldn’t exist.’ Thereon in, he continues, from the point of view of explanation,
everything is ‘up for grabs’ (Menand 2002).
It follows from this that no amount of explanatory gymnastics will get you from genetics
towards an adequate account of culture; to anywhere at all close to a reasonable explanation of
the material organisation and symbolic structure of either the Kabyle house or the Kabuki
theatre. (At which point: Enter the anthropologists and their colleagues.)

And yet, having waved away Sahlins’ anthropological objections to sociobiology, Pinker
makes it quite clear which discipline is in the driving seat. ‘In the study of humans, there are’,
he states, ‘major spheres of human experience – beauty, motherhood, kinship, morality,
cooperation, sexuality, violence – in which evolutionary psychology provides the only coherent
theory’ (2003: 135; my italics). (So much for the anthropologists and their colleagues.) It is
surely a pity that – according to Pinker’s list, at least – evolutionary psychology has yet to
effectively explain the ‘major sphere’ of the sense of humour, because his assertion is laughable.
To ignore the rest, and focus only on beauty and sexuality, Pinker might have learned a thing
or two, had he only read some anthropology. Specifically, Sahlins’ analysis of the cultural
particulars of love in Hawaii (1987: 1-31). But an approach such as Pinker’s is not interested
in the specifics or the contemplation of variations, because the ‘experience’ of beauty is – along
with all the rest – taken to be a hardwired human universal.
Something like this view was the commonplace conception during the Enlightenment. Thus
did Voltaire remark that ‘Morality is the same in all civilised nations’ (cited in Berlin 1980:
197), while Hume could rule that human beings ‘are so much the same in all times and places
that history informs us of nothing new or strange’ (quoted in Forster 2018: 76).
Indeed, on the basis of this foundational faith in a ‘universal human nature’, Pinker feels able
to claim, apparently with a straight face, that the masterminds of the Enlightenment were, all
of them, ‘evolutionary psychologists’; as if these thinkers were merely a prologue to Pinker
and his discipline (Pinker 2019: 10). In which case, it would appear that the Enlightenment was
the original era of ‘Smart Thinking’.
But while the cosmopolitanism which underwrote the Enlightenment notion of human nature
was undoubtedly noble in its aspirations, it came with a caveat; for it was seriously restricted
in its applications. That is, human nature may well have been understood as one, but the
universal distribution of right reason and, what Kant called, ‘rational natures’ was another thing
altogether. These were just assumed to be singularly European dispositions, and if all those

7
others, elsewhere on earth, were to receive the benefits from this dispositional dispensation,
they would be required to do so on ‘our’ terms.
It was for these reasons that Kant argued that the lives of the ‘happy inhabitants of Tahiti’,
dwelling in their ‘peaceful indolence’ could serve no discernible existential purpose, unless
and until they be ‘visited by more civilised nations’; otherwise, they might as well be replaced
with ‘happy sheep and cattle’, for such was the uselessness of their existence in the historical
scheme of reason (see Noyes 2015: 241; Sikka 2013: 59-60, 157).
Sahlins, of course, taught us a thing or three about reason and history in Polynesia, and –
contra Kant – it involved tempers and temporalities, ‘ideas, actions and ontologies that are not
and never were our own’ (Sahlins 1995: 14). But it was Herder who was among the first to
observe that the supposedly open programme of Enlightenment humanism was based, in fact,
on a much more blinkered vision. Namely, the assumption that Western European standards
must be the measure for everyone else’s; what Herder termed the dangerous ‘delusion of
occupying a pivotal point’ (cited in Mack 2010: 58; cf. Berlin 1980: 186). To be sure, Herder
did not deny that human beings everywhere are endowed with the ‘same basic capacities’, as
Sikka puts it (2013: 158). But, beyond this basic level, what one saw, both geographically and
historically, was a massive distribution of differences; a multiplicity of cultural formations and
dispositions, organized according to ‘different relations and with different compensations’
(Herder, quoted in Sikka 2013: 158).
In other words, human understanding was far richer and more diverse than the Humean
understanding of it. To assume otherwise was to collude in a kind of cognitive imperialism, a
counterpart to the colonial variety which, during Herder’s lifetime, was expanding in all
directions, when European cannons (and canons) were being brought to bear on the far-flung
regions of the earth. Hence, Herder’s critique of universalism was an anti-imperialist gesture;
the critical recognition, as John Noyes elegantly frames it, that ‘philosophy needs to stop
pretending that it has access to a privileged realm of logical thought that can be radically
separated from the experience of cultural location’ (Noyes 2015: 20). Or, as Sahlins summed
it up: ‘Different cultures, different rationalities’ (1995: 14).

At this late capitalist moment, the situation of anthropology vis-à-vis that of the publicists of
‘consilience’ and advocates of other such schemes of epistemological takeover, is similar to
that of Kant’s imaginary Tahitians, in relation to their European colonizers. For anthropology,
up to now, has apparently led a largely otiose existence. It will find its true purpose only when
it is colonized by sciences of the harder variety; a distressing process for those who have to
undergo it, perhaps, but a scientific kindness in the long run. Anthropology awaits the coming
of its 21st century Odysseus.
Yet, as Sahlins tirelessly argued, to give in to assimilative thinking of this sort is to fatally
trade away the concept of culture, and the operations of the symbolic along with it. After which,
the wide varieties of human modes of existence will just be explained away as so many
expressions of more dubious determinations: needs, self-interest, or selfish genes. This is not
only a bad bargain, but it also makes for terrible translations. Whatever else it was, Aztec
human sacrifice was surely more than just an opportunity to get a square meal.
Universalizing assumptions about human nature, asserted Herder, are all too often just ‘a
cover for our favourite whims, idolatry, blindness, and laziness’ (quoted in Forster 2018: 77).

8
And, so it goes in the case of Cummings’ model of an Odyssean education. Therefore, it seems
fitting that this millennial incarnation of Odysseus should appear in the guise of our latest
preoccupations. For Cummings’ Odysseus is a peddler of genetic explanations, an IQ
enthusiast, and a wide-eyed subscriber to the claims of cognitive science. He is, that is, a
utilitarian Odysseus entirely in keeping with our times: a Ulysses of the practical utilities. But
he is also, we are told, an avid reader of the works of Steven Pinker, of Sun Tzu, and of
Thucydides (See Cummings 2013: 2, 8, 77, etc.).
Not much of this should come as a surprise. But the inclusion of Thucydides is especially
telling. For, as Sahlins argued, this ancient Greek historian has become, in certain circles,
something like the patron of a ‘universal practical rationality’, because Thucydides held to the
view that, as Sahlins characterises it, ‘under similar conditions people will always act pretty
much the same way’ (2004: 3). The current appeal of Thucydides owes, in other words, to his
hard-nosed notion of the universality of self-interest, in which culture doesn’t count for very
much.6
But with all due apologies to Thucydides, anthropologists have always had their Herodotus,
for whom culture was rather more consequential. In a famous passage of his Histories (3.38),
Herodotus tells of how the Persian king, Darius, called to his court some Greeks and asked
them how much money it would take for them to eat their dead fathers. Not for any money,
they replied, horrified. Upon which, Darius summoned some Indians, called the Kalliatai,
whose custom was, to the contrary, that they ate their dead fathers, and asked them at what
price they would be prepared to cremate them instead, which the Indians found just as shocking.
All of which goes to show, concludes Herodotus, that ‘nomos is king of everything’ (nomos
pantōn basileus); nomos in Greek meaning ‘law’, ‘custom’ – in a word, culture (see
Humphreys 1987). Culture is king. It is anthropology’s sovereign concept, and (Sahlins taught
us this too) reports about its death have been greatly exaggerated. Le roi est mort, vive le roi!

References

Berlin, Isaiah. (1980). Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas. London: Chatto
and Windus.

Cummings, Dominic. (2013). ‘Some Thoughts on Education and Political Priorities’.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/interactive/2013/oct/11/dominic-cummings-
michael-gove-thoughts-education-pdf

Descola, Phillipe. (2013). The Ecology of Others. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

6
It is true that, as Simon Hornblower and Charles Stewart have suggested (2005), the actual Thucydides was not
quite so uninterested in cultural difference as Sahlins makes out. On the other hand, however, it seems equally
true that Thucydides, for Sahlins, operates as a kind of conceptual character, which allows him to consolidate a
number of academic positions and popular presuppositions (the supposed centrality of self-interest being one such
presumption).

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Forster, Michael N. (2018). Herder’s Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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