Status Updates From Thukydides’ten Özür Dileyer...

What a book! At one moment, a critical revision of Foucauldian subject mystification gives way to an illustration of Sartre on Flaubert; in the next, "For some reason, Napoleon has been a more popular example in discussions of historical agency than Bobby Thompson." Unpredictable, critical, and brilliantly self-aware.

"There is an awful lot of culturological terrorism going on these days, in the humanities and social sciences both, the complement it seems of the popular academic notion that culture is basically power."
Righto. I am an anti-power campaigner myself.

127-37 extended baseball analogy.
......
I guess it's better than the cricket

Anthropologists love Herodotus with his 'ethnographic inquiries'. Thucydides 'did not need these particulars': he had naked human nature, and a lesson, as he says, to last forever.
"In a historiography without anthropology our accounts are reduced to the implicit common sense of the historian's own tribe -- ethnocentricity taken for universality."
But Thu became our model for 'scientific history', rather than Hdt.

Puts the Peloponnesian War side by side with the Polynesian War, for purposes of... being cheeky (he says); also, to see "...what difference anthropology might make, and more particularly, what difference a concept of culture could make to our inherited historiography."
Marshall Sahlins is wise and witty, and 84. Still, he published a book 2 years ago; and I have his list to read.

I adore this book. It's cheeky and funny.