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Esperando Foucault, Ainda
Com aforismos e textos curtos marcados por ironia e irreverência, Marshall Sahlins dispara reflexões sobre o conhecimento antropológico contemporâneo e as ciências humanas de modo geral, nesta fala oferecida à Associação de Antropólogos Sociais da Commonwealth em Oxford, em 1993. O autor questiona as proporções alcançadas pela noção de poder no pensamento contemporâneo, devido à influência de Michel Foucault. A explicação de fenômenos sociais por meio de suas relações de poder é, para Sahlins, uma abordagem reducionista, mas amplamente difundida nas ciências humanas dos dias de hoje. Não há como negar a atualidade desse debate.
"Relativismo, globalização, identidade, modernidade, pós-estruturalismo, pós-modernidade, história... [aqui] tudo parece estar -- divertidamente -- em questão e, definitivamente, fora do lugar." (Lilia Moritz Schwarcz)
Tradução: Marcelo Coelho de Souza & Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
"Relativismo, globalização, identidade, modernidade, pós-estruturalismo, pós-modernidade, história... [aqui] tudo parece estar -- divertidamente -- em questão e, definitivamente, fora do lugar." (Lilia Moritz Schwarcz)
Tradução: Marcelo Coelho de Souza & Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
128 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
7 people are currently reading
305 people want to read
About the author
Marshall Sahlins
53 books152 followersMarshall David Sahlins was an American cultural anthropologist best known for his ethnographic work in the Pacific and for his contributions to anthropological theory. He was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
May 7, 2021
At first, the chapters of this after-dinner 'entertainment’ look mostly disconnected except for the common theme: Cultural Anthropological witticisms for the tired old working-class of academia. (yes, anthropologists, sue me!) However, it only took a few pages to shatter that illusion.
As the pamphlet progresses, there is to be found an even deeper cogency under-girding the chapters beautifully. Sahlins, as seems to be his style, starts off with deconstructing the God-complex of the West with biting commentaries: for example, the European Renaissance birthing “modern civilisation” is as much of an invention as the “current nostalgia for culture amongst the erstwhile colonial peoples.”
But worry not, my dear Kens and Barbies, this putrid air of scholarly inauthenticity hanging over the phrase “invention of tradition” will only stink up the Global South; you, of the first-world, have rightfully earned your complacent delusion!
Above all, however, this pamphlet underlines the functionalist paradigmatic themes of the social sciences: currently heralded by the classic acid-bath of Gramscian-Nietzschean-Foucauldian notion of power, that reduces the actual substance of the institution to its conjectured purposes and consequences.
...the successive eras of functional explanation of cultural forms—first, by their supposed effects in promoting social solidarity, then, by their economic utility, and lately, as modes of hegemonic power.
Post-structuralism, post-modernism, and other kinds of “after-o-logical” theories allow culture and society to attain a life of its own, a totalising unity that terrorises the individuals who occupy the space within. There is literally nothing new as far as Western theory is concerned, or Foucault! The ancient simplistic dualism of nature/culture shows up still in the latest, most advanced notions of societal constraint, such as Althusserian interpellation or Foucauldian power. All the structures having been erased as such in favor of their instrumental effects, the subject is the only thing left with any attributes of agency or efficacy.
Either society is no more than the sum of relations between enterprising individuals as Bentham and Thatcher would have it; or individuals are nothing more than personifications of the greater social and cultural order, as in certain progressive theories of the construction of subjectivity by power that amount to the death of the subject.
Such is the case with the Right/Left political divide which Sahlins so hilariously calls Subjectology and Leviathanology, respectively! There is an inflation effect in social science paradigms, which quickly cheapens them.
Unlike in natural sciences, paradigms are not outmoded because they explain less and less, but rather because they explain more and more—until, all too soon, they are explaining just about everything. Power for example is not outmoded because of standard methodological reasons but because everything turns out to be the same: power. Paradigms change in the social sciences because, their persuasiveness really being more political than empirical, they become commonplace universals. People get tired of them. They get bored.
Come to think of it, maybe all of it was just said in jest? But Sahlins, even when jesting, is a bit difficult for me to follow -- mostly because I am a noob in anthropology. But what do I know! I belong to a generation that has been lobotomised by a world that exists in “post”-everything. What I do know, however, is that I will revisit this little piece of delight again and again...
P.S. Discovering Marshall Sahlins has been the happiest thing that has happened to me in 2021! (oh boohoo, YOUR life is sad)
As the pamphlet progresses, there is to be found an even deeper cogency under-girding the chapters beautifully. Sahlins, as seems to be his style, starts off with deconstructing the God-complex of the West with biting commentaries: for example, the European Renaissance birthing “modern civilisation” is as much of an invention as the “current nostalgia for culture amongst the erstwhile colonial peoples.”
But worry not, my dear Kens and Barbies, this putrid air of scholarly inauthenticity hanging over the phrase “invention of tradition” will only stink up the Global South; you, of the first-world, have rightfully earned your complacent delusion!
Above all, however, this pamphlet underlines the functionalist paradigmatic themes of the social sciences: currently heralded by the classic acid-bath of Gramscian-Nietzschean-Foucauldian notion of power, that reduces the actual substance of the institution to its conjectured purposes and consequences.
...the successive eras of functional explanation of cultural forms—first, by their supposed effects in promoting social solidarity, then, by their economic utility, and lately, as modes of hegemonic power.
Post-structuralism, post-modernism, and other kinds of “after-o-logical” theories allow culture and society to attain a life of its own, a totalising unity that terrorises the individuals who occupy the space within. There is literally nothing new as far as Western theory is concerned, or Foucault! The ancient simplistic dualism of nature/culture shows up still in the latest, most advanced notions of societal constraint, such as Althusserian interpellation or Foucauldian power. All the structures having been erased as such in favor of their instrumental effects, the subject is the only thing left with any attributes of agency or efficacy.
Either society is no more than the sum of relations between enterprising individuals as Bentham and Thatcher would have it; or individuals are nothing more than personifications of the greater social and cultural order, as in certain progressive theories of the construction of subjectivity by power that amount to the death of the subject.
Such is the case with the Right/Left political divide which Sahlins so hilariously calls Subjectology and Leviathanology, respectively! There is an inflation effect in social science paradigms, which quickly cheapens them.
Unlike in natural sciences, paradigms are not outmoded because they explain less and less, but rather because they explain more and more—until, all too soon, they are explaining just about everything. Power for example is not outmoded because of standard methodological reasons but because everything turns out to be the same: power. Paradigms change in the social sciences because, their persuasiveness really being more political than empirical, they become commonplace universals. People get tired of them. They get bored.
Come to think of it, maybe all of it was just said in jest? But Sahlins, even when jesting, is a bit difficult for me to follow -- mostly because I am a noob in anthropology. But what do I know! I belong to a generation that has been lobotomised by a world that exists in “post”-everything. What I do know, however, is that I will revisit this little piece of delight again and again...
P.S. Discovering Marshall Sahlins has been the happiest thing that has happened to me in 2021! (oh boohoo, YOUR life is sad)
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March 13, 2021Sosyal antropologlar birliği için hazırlanmış bu kitap Marshall Sahlins gibi bir deha ile tanıştırıyor bizi. Türkçe’ye kıvanç güney’in çevirisiyle periferi yayınları tarafından şık bir baskıyla kazandırılmış. ismindeki ironi, “godot’yu beklerken” kitabına yaptığı vurgudan ibaret.
Sahlins, kitabını “risale” olarak sunuyor. Toplantıdan eğlenmek ve bir takım kişi ve fikirleri hicvetmek amacıyla söyledikleri genişletilmiş aslında. Zaten hitap ile başlıyor.
Eric Hobsbawm’ın temel teoremlerden birisi olan “icat edilmiş gelenek” Sahlins tarafından çok güzel bir şekilde özetlenmiş:
“on beş ve on altıncı yüzyıllarda bir grup yerel entelektüel ve sanatçı bir araya gelip kendi atalarının yarattığını iddia ettikleri ama tam olarak anlayamadıkları eski bir kültürün öğretisini yeniden canlandırarak geleneklerini ve kendilerini yeniden icat etmeye başlamışlardı; tam olarak anlayamıyorlardı çünkü bu kültür yüzyıllar boyunca kaybolmuş ve yazılı olduğu diller yok olmuş ya da unutulmuştu.” (s.13)
Özeti aslında şu, bir zamanlar bir grup insan, dinin sosyokültürel çöküşünün ardında bıraktığı o korkunç boşluğu doldurmak için milliyetçiliği icat ederler. Bununla yetinmezler, milli değerleri yaratmaya başlarlar. İskoçların eteği, Türklerin efsanevi Orta Asya mitini yaratması gibi, Almanlar Töton hayallerine, Baltık ülkeleri Vikinglere, İtalyanlar roma hayallerine, İspanyollar kahraman Qonquistatörlere sığınırlar. ve bunlara dair binlerce yazınsal ürün üretilmeye başlar. Çünkü insanlara güçlü bir milli kimlik ve ulus bilinci için tekil ve kahraman bir geçmiş sunulması gerekiyordu. Bu elbette bireyler için moral pompalamaktan öteye geçemez ama bilimsel anlamda çok zararlıydı. zira ciddi bilimsel literatür birden bire fantastik edebiyata dönüşüverdi. Kayıp kıtalar, kahraman atalar, milli diller üzerinde tartışılmaya başlandı. Bu aslında hala devam ediyor.
Çeşitli aforizmalar da kitabın sayfalarını süslüyor, örnek:
“yaşamı mutluluk arayışı olarak algılayan bir halk kesinlikle müzmin mutsuzlardan oluşuyor olsa gerek.” (Sahlins, a.g.e, sf: 26)
Sahlins’in aslında antropolojinin yumuşak karnına tekmeler attığı bu kitapta, bir fikir daha vurgulanıyor. Antropologlar ilkel toplumları incelemeye giderken “ilkel” algılarını da beraberlerinde götürdüler. Sonuç: batı gözünden ilkel böcekler.
İnsanlığın tarihini çizgisel olarak ele almak sosyal-bilimin temel hatasıydı zira bulunduğumuz konumu fildişi kuleye dönüştürdü. Aslında dikkat çekici bir detay, fukuyama’nın da düştüğü gibi, bugünü ulaşılabilecek en iyi konum olarak görmenin yanlışlığı. Zira, antropoloji, ilkelin bilimi gibi addedildiğinde; aslında atalarımızın bizden daha az erdemli olduğunu iddia etmese bile, farklı bir türmüş gibi görerek kendi konumumuzu kutsar.
Atalarımız evrimin gereğini yerine getirmekten fazlasını yapmadılar. Onlar ne asr-ı saadette yaşadılar ne de Hobbes’vari tasvirle korkunç bir anarşi vardı.
Yalnızca sosyologların, atropologların değil yediden yetmişe herkesin okuması gereken küçük bir risale.
M. Baran
2009
Şu adresten erişebilirsiniz bu yoruma:
https://agacingovdesi.com/2021/03/13/...
Sahlins, kitabını “risale” olarak sunuyor. Toplantıdan eğlenmek ve bir takım kişi ve fikirleri hicvetmek amacıyla söyledikleri genişletilmiş aslında. Zaten hitap ile başlıyor.
Eric Hobsbawm’ın temel teoremlerden birisi olan “icat edilmiş gelenek” Sahlins tarafından çok güzel bir şekilde özetlenmiş:
“on beş ve on altıncı yüzyıllarda bir grup yerel entelektüel ve sanatçı bir araya gelip kendi atalarının yarattığını iddia ettikleri ama tam olarak anlayamadıkları eski bir kültürün öğretisini yeniden canlandırarak geleneklerini ve kendilerini yeniden icat etmeye başlamışlardı; tam olarak anlayamıyorlardı çünkü bu kültür yüzyıllar boyunca kaybolmuş ve yazılı olduğu diller yok olmuş ya da unutulmuştu.” (s.13)
Özeti aslında şu, bir zamanlar bir grup insan, dinin sosyokültürel çöküşünün ardında bıraktığı o korkunç boşluğu doldurmak için milliyetçiliği icat ederler. Bununla yetinmezler, milli değerleri yaratmaya başlarlar. İskoçların eteği, Türklerin efsanevi Orta Asya mitini yaratması gibi, Almanlar Töton hayallerine, Baltık ülkeleri Vikinglere, İtalyanlar roma hayallerine, İspanyollar kahraman Qonquistatörlere sığınırlar. ve bunlara dair binlerce yazınsal ürün üretilmeye başlar. Çünkü insanlara güçlü bir milli kimlik ve ulus bilinci için tekil ve kahraman bir geçmiş sunulması gerekiyordu. Bu elbette bireyler için moral pompalamaktan öteye geçemez ama bilimsel anlamda çok zararlıydı. zira ciddi bilimsel literatür birden bire fantastik edebiyata dönüşüverdi. Kayıp kıtalar, kahraman atalar, milli diller üzerinde tartışılmaya başlandı. Bu aslında hala devam ediyor.
Çeşitli aforizmalar da kitabın sayfalarını süslüyor, örnek:
“yaşamı mutluluk arayışı olarak algılayan bir halk kesinlikle müzmin mutsuzlardan oluşuyor olsa gerek.” (Sahlins, a.g.e, sf: 26)
Sahlins’in aslında antropolojinin yumuşak karnına tekmeler attığı bu kitapta, bir fikir daha vurgulanıyor. Antropologlar ilkel toplumları incelemeye giderken “ilkel” algılarını da beraberlerinde götürdüler. Sonuç: batı gözünden ilkel böcekler.
İnsanlığın tarihini çizgisel olarak ele almak sosyal-bilimin temel hatasıydı zira bulunduğumuz konumu fildişi kuleye dönüştürdü. Aslında dikkat çekici bir detay, fukuyama’nın da düştüğü gibi, bugünü ulaşılabilecek en iyi konum olarak görmenin yanlışlığı. Zira, antropoloji, ilkelin bilimi gibi addedildiğinde; aslında atalarımızın bizden daha az erdemli olduğunu iddia etmese bile, farklı bir türmüş gibi görerek kendi konumumuzu kutsar.
Atalarımız evrimin gereğini yerine getirmekten fazlasını yapmadılar. Onlar ne asr-ı saadette yaşadılar ne de Hobbes’vari tasvirle korkunç bir anarşi vardı.
Yalnızca sosyologların, atropologların değil yediden yetmişe herkesin okuması gereken küçük bir risale.
M. Baran
2009
Şu adresten erişebilirsiniz bu yoruma:
https://agacingovdesi.com/2021/03/13/...
September 22, 2020
This little book gave me a little crisis reading it. This little book which was actually a 30 minute after-dinner 'entertainment' in an anthropology summit from 1993 took me six hours to finish.
As much as I'm more than ever absorbed to the narratives of power structures put forth by people like Nietzsche, Gramsci, Althusser and Foucault, I feel maybe this is all a joke?
I can only quote Lucretius at this point, I guess, which aptly placed in the epigraph of Levi-Strauss' Tristes Tropiques,
"Nec minus ergo ante haec quam tu cecidere, cadentque."
Maybe this sums up everything that has to do with wise apes? Again If I do that, would I be accused of lobotomy? So funny and serious.
It surely needs to be revisited again and again for the time being.
As much as I'm more than ever absorbed to the narratives of power structures put forth by people like Nietzsche, Gramsci, Althusser and Foucault, I feel maybe this is all a joke?
I can only quote Lucretius at this point, I guess, which aptly placed in the epigraph of Levi-Strauss' Tristes Tropiques,
"Nec minus ergo ante haec quam tu cecidere, cadentque."
Maybe this sums up everything that has to do with wise apes? Again If I do that, would I be accused of lobotomy? So funny and serious.
It surely needs to be revisited again and again for the time being.
March 13, 2014
I read this book while struggling towards a PhD in cultural anthropology. I laughed, I cried, I thought that it was everything true and good and meaningful about anthropology. It alluded to an intellectual authenticity that I lusted after in grad school. Now, having escaped that particular indulgent morass of bitterly crushed dreams and alcoholic tendencies, I can look back and say that this is also everything that is wrong with the Ivory Tower. Except for the bit about Orientalism. That is definitely right.
February 1, 2008
Marshall Sahlins as after dinner entertainment. Delicious.
July 23, 2022
Traduzido da quarta edição de 2002, é uma coleção de pequenos textos: aforismos, mas também chistes e verbetes. Algumas piadas são internas à Antropologia, outras ao pós-estruturalismo. Um verbete sobre relativismo é muito elucidativo. Outro sobre objetividade, também.
May 13, 2021
This is a witty eclectic read which gives a quick glimpse in 100 pages into the adventure of anthropology. Anthropology is different from Physics or Quantum mechanics in that it does not take the familiar and point out that it is foreign or that it can be in two places at the same time. Anthropology takes the strange and makes it familiar. Elsewhere Sahlins brings up an anthropology joke where a chief tells the carpenter that he cant offer him a raw woman or a cooked man as Christianity as spoiled our feast. Anthropologists put together how the world is for other people. The hunter according to Sahlins is more widespread as ever in late modernity. Man the hunter is with new technology snow mobiles, fishing vessels and airplanes all harnessed for Paleolithic purposes. Man the hunter gatherer then is not obsolete neither is at an obsolete way of life. It touches on post structuralism of Foucault which is poly amorphous, Marxist influence and spiritual becomes the subject but only as a normal sensibility of the real. I thought of myself as an anthropologist till a friend educated in the West pointed out to me that in India studying other cultures is part of Sociology. Reading this little book with lots of references that echo with the history of ideas makes me want to join the tribe of anthropologists. But this little book is not just for anthropologists, literary types or historians I would think think even those in techno science would find it intriguing to unravel the possibilities of taking the strange even shocking and make it familiar.
February 4, 2013
This book came out of a speech that Sahlins gave back in 1993 as an after-dinner entertainment at an anthropology get together at Oxford. Some of it is quite funny, some not so, but Sahlins’s learning and experience in theory and in field work shine through. The sarcasm is reminiscent of his writings during the Obeyesekere dispute (i.e., when the two slugged it out in public about what each thought actually led to Captain Cook’s demise). Not an essential read, but fun for students of Sahlins and anthropology in general.
March 27, 2018
What happens when an eminent anthropologist has an anarchist-leaning mother, a comedian for a brother, an activist history (he helped to invent the idea of the 'teach in'), and a long-standing complaint about the industrial scholarship of the contemporary humanities? You get this book.
There are zingers here and witty aphorisms, but you're more likely also to find short, page long reflections on the ways in which questions of great urgency - power, identity, culture - are lazily deployed and fashionably worn. What make these reflections so cutting is that, unlike a reactionary thinker who would dispute the importance of such concepts, Sahlins respects them and so demands a scrupulous use of the analytic mind. Many thinkers who I respect come in for critique - from James Ferguson and James C. Scott to Edward Said and Michel Foucault - but this is a reflection on the academic culture within late capitalism that consumes to exotify and commodify thought, rather than a critique on their core ideas, and there is a deep historical consciousness at play here that suggests the point is not even a critique of those people but of us, their inheritors. As the reflections continue, some become quite long to the point of miniature essays a few pages long each, and I felt that not only was this a chance to bring a few witticisms out of the academic drawer, but it was also an attempt for Sahlins to reconcile with his colleagues and peers.
The value for this one is greatest if you've been a graduate student, teacher, professor, or academic in the social sciences and humanities.
There are zingers here and witty aphorisms, but you're more likely also to find short, page long reflections on the ways in which questions of great urgency - power, identity, culture - are lazily deployed and fashionably worn. What make these reflections so cutting is that, unlike a reactionary thinker who would dispute the importance of such concepts, Sahlins respects them and so demands a scrupulous use of the analytic mind. Many thinkers who I respect come in for critique - from James Ferguson and James C. Scott to Edward Said and Michel Foucault - but this is a reflection on the academic culture within late capitalism that consumes to exotify and commodify thought, rather than a critique on their core ideas, and there is a deep historical consciousness at play here that suggests the point is not even a critique of those people but of us, their inheritors. As the reflections continue, some become quite long to the point of miniature essays a few pages long each, and I felt that not only was this a chance to bring a few witticisms out of the academic drawer, but it was also an attempt for Sahlins to reconcile with his colleagues and peers.
The value for this one is greatest if you've been a graduate student, teacher, professor, or academic in the social sciences and humanities.
December 11, 2022
I’ve read this book as it was published in a Brazilian collection which decided to publish it as it had been previously conceived: as a book containing notes from here and there, thoughts about this and that: using different styles of font, letters and colours. It took me some time to get used to said structure but it happened around page 15 and I really enjoyed the whole experience of fragments afterwards.
I’ve liked many of the author’s insights specially the ones about the invention of tradition and how tradition itself is a means of power and a leftover from all colonised thought.
There are some discussions about power and how we are still waiting, after so long, for someone to move over that (since Foucault) and how the meaning or better, the grasp for the meaning of power, has become an academic way out of discussing things which really matter. In a way, we’re all waiting for Foucault or whatever happens after him (since, ironically, we haven’t even understood all the concepts of power he’s written about).
I’ve liked many of the author’s insights specially the ones about the invention of tradition and how tradition itself is a means of power and a leftover from all colonised thought.
There are some discussions about power and how we are still waiting, after so long, for someone to move over that (since Foucault) and how the meaning or better, the grasp for the meaning of power, has become an academic way out of discussing things which really matter. In a way, we’re all waiting for Foucault or whatever happens after him (since, ironically, we haven’t even understood all the concepts of power he’s written about).
February 13, 2021
a few "bangers," as they say, mostly in the form of sarcastic remarks about what Sahlins calls the Foucault-Gramsci-Nietzsche complex - the academic jargon that sees power and (inevitably) resistance everywhere, and so always threatens to reduce itself into merely a new form of functionalism - and more importantly, always supplies ever new topics for the social scientist to study. the speech From Leviathanology to Subjectology is worth reading as a stand-alone piece on the agent/structure problem.
February 2, 2026
As in his previous work ('How Natives Think'), Sahlins criticizes postmodernism and poststructuralist authors (such as Foucault).
While he does a good job on that end, he stills negates materialism and marxism as means to explain and change reality.
I thought Sahlins was a CIA operative, but after reading this book I've no doubt: he really believed in the academy (which is pretty cringe if you ask me).
While he does a good job on that end, he stills negates materialism and marxism as means to explain and change reality.
I thought Sahlins was a CIA operative, but after reading this book I've no doubt: he really believed in the academy (which is pretty cringe if you ask me).
August 2, 2020
Easy to read, thought provoking and intellectually earnest
October 7, 2021
Very fun. I wish I could be half as witty as Sahlin had been
April 21, 2012
If you've been disillusioned by most of what's being written (represented...lol) as anthropology today, tired of finding power in your noodles and sock drawer, and weary of polysyllabic subalterns lurking in the pantry, Marshall Sahlins is the cure you've been looking for.
March 13, 2007
Seems to be a lecture from an Anthropology professor formerly of the University Chicago.
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January 1, 2016Decent
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews