Producing Culture: A Reading of Marshall Sahlins’ Culture and Practical Reason
I hope you'll save yourselves some time in reading this instead of the whole dusty tome that is Culture and Practical Reason. I highly recommend always reading the Introduction and Conclusion chapters first when faced with any text. This applies especially when you don't plan to read in its entirety due to constraints of time, effort, delight or the enticing call of a nice Valpolicella. Enjoy!
Introduction
This paper will function as analysis of Marshall Sahlins’ seminal work Culture and Practical Reason (1976). I will proceed to outline Sahlins’ main issue and discuss his arguments, supplying with what I deem to be interesting points and references, but keeping a firm focus on Sahlins’ own points and writings.
Terms
I will use (historical) materialism, Marxism and utility or praxis theory interchangeably, as does Sahlins. I regard idealism, “cultural order” and symbolic structure as near-synonyms as well. I do not distinguish between terms such as the West, bourgeois or capitalist society, either.
I will use (historical) materialism, Marxism and utility or praxis theory interchangeably, as does Sahlins. I regard idealism, “cultural order” and symbolic structure as near-synonyms as well. I do not distinguish between terms such as the West, bourgeois or capitalist society, either.
The Main Point
The point of departure for Sahlins’ work is the theoretical debate between idealism and materialism. Arguably, this dualistic distinction has existed at least since Plato’s contrasting of phenomenon to idea, continuing up through European thought for over 2000 years, manifesting clearly in Cartesian dualism. Sahlins argues that much if not all of Anglo-Saxon anthropological debate centers on the relationship between utilitarianism and culture, whether cultural order is the codification of actual and pragmatic action and so determined by material circumstances and action; or conversely, whether human action in the world is mediated by cultural design (Ibid.:55).
Which shall we as anthropologists use best to describe human culture, a focus on material production or cultural order? Praxis structured by symbolic schemes and culture or vice versa? These two cannot be dialectic and the answer does not lie in between, maintains Sahlins (Ibid.). I find this starting point to be lacking, as Bourdieu had already synthesized these two analytical viewpoints in a mix of French structuralism and practice theory: “Structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures” (Bourdieu 1972:72).
Too easily Sahlins brushes away the idea of a synthesis, positioning himself in the symbolist camp; his main opponent being the utility theory’s presumption that culture is the product of individuals pursuing their best interests through rational actions (Sahlins 1976:vii). Instead, Sahlins argues that although there might be a materialist “base” for culture, such as natural constraints, the quality of culture is that is always adapts to these constraints with a specific cultural scheme that is never the only one possible, never determined exclusively by material forces (Ibid.:viii). The reason why (Western) society believes itself based on material rationality is because our symbolic structure is hidden within consumption; a point Sahlins uses both a whole chapter and the conclusion to illustrate.
Marxism and Anthropology
Before formulating his main points and critique, Sahlins sees the need to outline the debate between anthropological analysis and historical materialism, doing so through the examination of the two schools of structuralism, British and French.
Sahlins argues that the materialist (that is, Marxist) view of culture and history cannot be transferred without friction to understanding tribal culture. Why? Firstly, if we could simply transfer the conclusions of Marx’ study on 19th century European culture to tribal societies, we wouldn’t have learned anything about human culture in our anthropological studies all around the world. There would have been no surprises in cultural variation and over a hundred years of thought and fieldwork wouldn’t have mattered:
“On the contrary, anthropology (...) would reveal itself as a grand intellectual distraction, bourgeois society scratching its head” (Ibid.:2).
But we were surprised, there was cultural variety and tribal societies were difficult to describe with a materialist analysis. Even Marx and Engels themselves had their cautions about the universality of the materialist interpretation in archaic societies, when the producers were not alienated from the forces of production, but rather part of a “natural bonds of blood” governing economic action (Ibid.:2).
The main issue between Marxist materialism and British structuralism is precisely this:
“The relevance of the Marxist analytic frame to a society that does not know an organizational distinction between base and superstructure; that is, where the two are formally the same structure” (Ibid.:3).
In tribal societies, since the “natural bonds of blood”, that is, kinship, structure production, how could we separate culture from material production?
Marxism and British Structuralism
In tribal societies, argues Sahlins, there exists a totality ordered by kinship. Economy, polity, ritual and ideology are not separate systems functioning autonomously as in the West. Social relationships are not assigned to a certain sphere, be it economical or political – they are totalized in one system (Ibid.:6). In primitive societies, there is no superstructure as there are no institutions. It is “multifunctional” and all activities, which in the West are ordered in institutions, constitute a holistic system among “the primitives”. Kinship is not is superstructure understood as a specialized institution. It is the sole design of tribal cultures and the main relations of production, jural-political and ritual relations all take place within this same scheme (Ibid.:6).
So, in using Marxist analysis, British anthropologists have tried to adapt and shape the logic of historical materialism to a generalized cultural order it was simply not made for. Sahlins argues that British anthropologists, citing Worsley as an example, try to fit Marxist analysis to tribal society by seeing kinship as an expression of economic activities. For example, as a practical measure for organizing labor in the fields, the sharing and dividing of food, determining demographic limits on household size and the like (Ibid.:8). The dynamics of the tribal lineage structure was seen as following obviously from objective conditions of production (Ibid.:8).
By fragmenting kinship into component systems, the totality of one society, the tribal, is “made to fit” the divisions of another, the West. Making kinship equal to practical reason is a logical transformation of Marxism, trying to fit a generalized cultural order (Ibid.:7). But this is seeing it all backwards and missing the totality of the tribal system, argues Sahlins:
“Tallensi farmers are not related as father and son by the way they enter into production; they enter thus into production because they are related as father and son” (Ibid.:9)
Kinship and lineage are not relations of objective cultures, but sui genesis and symbolic attributions: It is no more in the ecological nature of agricultural production that father and son cooperate than “mother and daughter, mother's brother and sister's son, or Don Quixote and Sancho Panza” (Ibid.9). It might be true that demographic economic forces act on societies in truth; but as Sahlins argues, the only effect of the pressure would be that the society had to act. The response could be intensification of production, segmentation or many other paths; different societies react differently, determined by culture:
“Economic force as such has no social significance or effect. There can be no predicative relation between the indifference of the material function to the form of its realization” (Ibid.:13).
We see here that the specifics of culture cannot be determined by counting social organization as a practical measure. There quite simply is not a 1:1 relation. Natural forces might account for movement, but they would not specify to where, with what means, how fast etc. This point is one of Sahlins’ main critiques of utility theory and ecologic anthropology.
Sahlins concludes that the use of Marxism by British anthropologists fail because the attempted use of historical materialism in analyzing a generalized tribal system morphs the analysis into economistic and technological determinism (Ibid.:17).
Marxism and French Structuralism
The issue of a lack of divide between super- and infrastructure is however only one aspect of the “deeper controversy” between Marxist materialism and French structuralism, what Sahlins is really interested in. He writes that the French see symbolic order in material activity, whereas a Marxist reading of cultural theory subordinates social norms to an instrumental logic of work (Ibid.:3). The main problem is outlined by Sahlins as the relation between productive action in the world and the symbolic organization of experience (Ibid.:3).
Structuralism is systemic thought; circumstances are given significance and effect by the system in place. Action takes meaning as examples of a cultural scheme, which forms the specific context for any action. Any event is a symbolic relation, between this context and the existing symbolic order (Ibid.:21). It's not that material forces are without real effect, but they have no specific effect beyond that of integration in a pre-existing symbolic scheme:
“Change begins with culture, not culture with change” (Ibid.:22).
This is opposed to materialist theory, where the act in itself generates cultural form and significance through the process of man working on what is essentially ‘real’; “human self-creation trough labor” (Ibid.:22). Utility theory would have us believe that the construction of culture is the product of some concrete activity, shaping to adapt to the actuality of the material world we inhabit.
In a materialist analysis, then, the existing culture loses its constituting function, functioning only as what Sahlins terms a “dead hand”; the analysis positions itself in initial creation, the creation of culture from external forces, seeing history or existing symbolic schemes merely as residue. On the other hand, (French) structuralism tends to favor the conservative and paradoxical concept “that history begins with a culture already there” (Ibid.:23)– that every new act, force or situation is incorporated into existing schema. Sahlins argues this structuralist trait stems from the origin of the discipline: Created in meeting a so-called “primitive” society capable of perpetually absorbing new events without changing the existing system of cultural order – allowing for the persistence of structure (Ibid.:23).
The critique of structuralism by Marxists is precisely this immobility of the structure, ignoring any knowledge of change of events. But in structuralism, distinctions between infrastructure (the material) and superstructure (culture) don’t really make sense; “the so-called infrastructure is appears as the manifestation of a total system of meanings in action upon the world, a process that predicates also the meaning of practical experience as a relationship in that system” (Ibid.:39). In this, the infrastructure also embodies the superstructure as any cultural order produced by material forces also implies a cultural ordering of these very forces (Ibid.).
We must also bear in mind, that there is some dynamic in (structuralist) structure, argues Sahlins. Structural contradiction leads to slow, but sure change. The build-up of inconsistencies in the system from successfully incorporating new circumstances can lead to a change of structure from within, accommodating the future in the present: “Before a new [formula] has finished ousting the old ones, another new one is arising to supplant it” (Ibid.:46, quoting Hocart 1952).
Here again, Bourdieu was very aware of changes in structure, writing about his structuring structures 4 years before Sahlins. The habitus, or embodied symbolic structures of a society, shift and adapt to current life, producing and reproducing over the course of generations, turning history into nature (Bourdieu 1977:78). The structure might seem without history, but “each agent (…) is a producer and reproducer of objective meaning” (Ibid.:79). For Bourdieu, the structure might be solid, but never rigid. But Sahlins chooses to ignore Bourdieu in favor of older French structuralism.
Summing up his views on the lack of history in structural analysis, he writes: “In the end, the principles of classification by which a society deals with events are themselves specific and historical; they cannot be read out directly from the given qualities of the world but must be empirically discovered” (Sahlins 1976:47). Sahlins here tackles the critique of structuralism’s lack of history; in no analysis will we be able to “read” history from a current society or culture. There simply is no general theory of cultural systems from which we can deduce history. Furthermore, Marx himself saw differences in the way bourgeois and primitive society react towards history and their mode of organization, argues Sahlins.
More specifically, primitive societies lacked the structural differentiations that give bourgeois society its dialectic movement, according to Marx. These differentiations are “the separation of the means of production from the producers, of the producers from the products, of production from the “needs” of the producers and of the individuals from the collectivity” (Ibid.:49, quoting Marx 1973).
To conclude using Marx’ own terms: There exists no alienation from the means of production or commodity fetishism in primitive societies, accounting for their stability. They are “natural”, without historical movement or natural forces (Ibid.:50).
Summing up
Sahlins concludes that the debates between Marxism and both British and French structuralism “imply cultural discontinuity. One structures itself by events and another structures events by itself” (Ibid.:50). The divide between British structuralism and Marxism is the lack of super- and infrastructure in tribal societies. The debate between Marxism and French structuralism goes deeper, however, touching on the key opposition between material action and symbolic order. Which one structures the other?
It seems Marxism and anthropology are destined to remain apart, as each is the truth of a different social order. We might also say very simply, that the analysis is centered on different societies, that anthropology and Marxism have different empirical objects.
Two Societies – Or?
According to Sahlins, Lévi-Strauss keeps to his side of the (struturalist) line, arguing that the class differentiations of “hot” (complex, moving) societies power movement and that the egalitarianism of “cold” (traditional, static) societies guarantee stability (Ibid.:51). To the West in general and to the social sciences, our society appears as a system giving people license to do the best with what they have, that we see the nature of man as a restless desire for power, society ordered only as an aggregate of individual action. In the west, “Organization is the socialized realization of desire” (Ibid.:52) and society is a set of relationships formed by the pursuit of private interests.
When comparing historical materialism to the two structuralisms, Sahlins sees a distinction between the West and the Rest, but he doesn’t agree (Ibid.:54). We see ourselves as radically different in the West because we ignore the symbolic qualities of our own institutions. We believe ourselves to be without a specific culture, instead thinking ourselves apart, above and beyond. Sahlins argues that the real issue between Marxism and anthropology is the relation between praxis and symbolic order, and that this issue is best studied through anthropology, because anthropology is a Western science of other cultures, in itself a contradiction.
Lévi-Strauss interestingly makes the point that practices do not follow directly from praxis, but that there is always a mediator; “the conceptual scheme by the operation of which matter and form, neither with any independent existence, are realized as structures, that is as entities which are both empirical and intelligible” (Ibid.:56, quoting Lévi-Strauss 1966).
Lévi-Strauss also stresses that anthropologists study superstructure, not infrastructure. But as Sahlins writes, in analyzing the organization of material production, we find ourselves in the economic base as well, dissolving the classic dichotomy of the “material” and the “conceptual” (Ibid.:56). Sahlins argues that the material causes must be the product of a symbolic system, since the general determinations of praxis are always subject to the specific formulations of culture (Ibid.:57). Moreover, since culture is a symbolic system, it maintains a fundamental autonomy.
Studying Culture
Sahlins uses a very lengthy discussion of the debate between materialism and idealism in anthropology to expose the lack of consensus in (his) present. It all comes down to a defense of symbolist analysis and focusing on culture in analysis. If we don’t study the symbols and the system in cultural practice, argues Sahlins, culture is eliminated as the anthropological object:
“Without distinctive properties in its own right, culture has no title to analysis as a thing-in-itself. Its study degenerates into one or another of two common- place naturalisms: the economism of the rationalizing individual (human nature); or the ecologism of selective advantage (external nature)” (Ibid.:82)
For Sahlins, the real issue with theories aligning themselves along the lines of the
material, utility, practical reason etc., is the disappearance of culture as the distinctive object of anthropology (Ibid.:101). If culture does not warrant any special understanding distinct from a biological explanation, as in ecological functionalism, culture simply disappears from analysis, argues Sahlins (Ibid.:87). He sees this juxtaposition of praxis vs. cultural order as introducing schizophrenia to anthropological study: The rational individual driven by inner forces, acting to achieve his own ends in the face of constraining cultural conventions (Ibid.:85). Normative structure stands in opposition to pragmatic action, making culture merely the backdrop; a medium and environment for action:
“It is a medium in the sense of a set of means at the disposition of the subject, through which he achieves his self-appointed ends. And it is an environment, not merely as a set of constraints external to the individual, but as something upon which he works his intentions and in so doing orders the properties of his milieu” (Ibid.:85)
That is, we continually formulate and reformulate our cultural order according to our best interests and that society is the means and our individual lives the end. But a society build solely on individualism has never existed, as the individual itself lives on social ideas (Ibid.:87, quoting Dumont 1970).
Western Society as a Culture
In rebuking the basis of bourgeois society as rational individualism lies what I would argue is Sahlins most important point: That the West is no different from the Rest in the use of symbolic structure. When looking at the production and movement of items and goods from a strictly monetary perspective, as that of exchange-value, the cultural code of properties governing utility is ignored, the economy appears as the consequence of practical action rather than the product of social organization (Ibid.:166). That is, we’re forgetting Western symbolic order, the very rules and order that govern schemes of appreciation, value and production.
For us in the West, the perception is that the economy takes place in an arena of pragmatic action, the formal outcome being society itself, a rational pursuit of material happiness (Ibid.:167). However, as anthropologists, we know that the rational and objective schemes of a given group are never the only ones possible, and that cultural orders may vary even in very similar material circumstances (Ibid.:168).
Of course nature acts on us in objective ways, says Sahlins. We cannot neglect to produce food or shelter, to survive. But the point is, that we don’t merely survive, we survive in very distinctive ways, reproducing ourselves as specific types of people, social classes and groups - not just as biological organisms (Ibid.:168). Within the very vide limits of viability, that of physical-natural necessity, any human group has the potential for a great range of rational economic actions, the adaption being very specific and not pre-determined by environment alone.
So, argues Sahlins, production is not just practical logic with material effectiveness, it’s cultural intention. And the material process of human existence is made to be a meaningful process of social being, in short, culture. When giving a cultural account of production then, we must first note that the social meaning of an object and its value in exchange cannot be deduced from its physical properties, because it's culturally produced in a symbolic system. No physical thing has any being in society except by the significance, we give to it (Ibid.:170).
All production also requires consumption, else the object does not complete itself as a product – a house in which no-one lives is not a house, it’s a merely a building. Thus we must consider use-value, which cannot be natural, as humans do not produce “shelter” but different types of houses; a castle being different from a peasant’s hut, for example. This determination of use-value is a process of dialectically categorizing and defining objects in terms of ourselves and ourselves in terms of objects (Ibid.:169).
This leads to the understanding that bourgeois society also has a culture, arbitrary symbolic codes of objects and socially produced meaning (Ibid.:170. Totemic symbolism is still prevalent in capitalist society; we use the varieties of manufactured objects as totemic categories in social classification. In this, exchange and consumption have become our means of social communication (Ibid.:177). Because exchange-value and consumption depend upon utility in a capitalist economy, the social significance of the objects become highlighted, making them differentiated from other objects and thus useful as totemic categories. Also, in producing objects, we solidify thought; the object becoming a human concept outside itself "as man speaking to man through the medium of things" (Ibid.:178).
Sahlins novel and interesting argument is that goods are the object codes for valuation of persons, events and situations in capitalist society. Production becomes the reproduction of culture through a system of objects. When we produce, we objectify social categories and in so doing, we make them constituting categories in society: the differentiation of the category differentiates the social classes of the goods system. Therefore, capitalism is not just rational production. Bourgeois society also has symbolic order and specific cultural form (Ibid.:185).
Interestingly enough, the anthropologist Eric Wolf has made a somewhat similar critique, although from a decidedly Marxist point of view. He argues, through the use historical examples ranging from Greek mercenaries in Persian armies to Iroquois importation of British cloth, that we must not look at societies, cultures or populations as being isolated socio-cultural systems, but rather as being in constant dialogue and connection with Others in the world (Wolf 1983:5-6). He criticizes the capitalist and liberal West for writing its own history as unbroken line of progress from Ancient Greece to the expansion west of the US and the present, counting ourselves end products of rational action – having shed the proverbial yoke of irrational thought and cultural constraints.
For Wolf, the separation of social sciences from politics and economy, keeps us from studying interconnectedness and the “embeddedness” of social relations to only individuals acting towards other individuals: “they predispose one to think of social relations not merely as autonomous but as causal in their own right, apart from their economic, political, or ideological context” (Wolf 1983:9). Wolf opposes the dualistic, Western way of looking at us, the developed and free versus the Other, underdeveloped and in servitude. In this his argument is even related to the Orientalism of Edward Said (1979); namely the argument that the West sees and defines itself in relation to a culture of opposites, the quintessential Other being a gap or list of deficiencies. The west is rich, the east is not; the west is democratic; the east is not; in the west the people are free, in the east they are not. But as Sahlins attempts to show us, the divisions are not so clear.
When objects form a scheme of communication based on unconscious codes, it is precisely the type of totemic thought normally reserved for primitive societies. In the West, we tell people apart from their appearance, making a cohesive society of total strangers where much information is available at a glance – as they say, clothes make the man. Likewise, in totemic thought there is no time between observation and interpretation, no mental process other than that meaning follows sign (Ibid.:203, quoting Lévi-Strauss 1966). Rationality, on the other hand, implies time elapsed, thought-over comparison and the weighing of alternatives.
This implies, argues Sahlins, that even in the West, rationality takes a backseat to symbolic order and totemism.
Discussion
Sahlins maintains the symbolist ground firmly in Culture and Practical reason. Anthropologists must study culture and symbolic order in order to understand society and the people living in it. Material aspects cannot be separated from the social, as if the first referred to satisfaction of natural needs and the second referred to governing relations among people (Ibid.:205). We cannot divide cultural components into subsystems, but must look at that complex whole with the same holistic analysis. How else would we see the relations between analytical objects, we mark as distinct? The reason why we wish to analytically distinguish cultural domains such as symbol order and production builds on a model from our own society, that we cannot immediately transfer to others. There is a unity in cultural order based on meaning, which defies simple functionality: “[N]o functional explanation is ever sufficient by itself; for functional value is always relative to the given cultural scheme” (Ibid.:206).
This same point is argued by Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger, stating: “It is one thing to point out the side benefits of ritual actions, and another thing to be content with using the by-products as a sufficient explanation” (Douglas 1966 [2003]:30). This would be treating Moses like an enlightened public health administrator, rather than as the spiritual leader, he was. Ritual action cannot be sufficiently explained by rational action.
It follows then that no cultural form can be deduced from a set of material forces as a dependent variable. This does not mean however, that culture simply "walks on the thin air of symbols" (Sahlins 1976.:206), with no consideration to material forces and constraints. But the effects of these constraints cannot be read from their nature, since “the material effects depend how these constraints are integrated in culture. Any exterior force might be significant, but any social existence of this force is determined by its integration in the cultural system; there is no other logic than that of culture. The problem with historical materialism, argues Sahlins, is that it takes (individual) practical interest as the intrinsic starting point for analysis, as if it were inherent in production and inescapable in culture.
Sahlins concedes that the material process of production seems factual and fixed by nature - while symbolic logic is invented, flexible and by its very definition, arbitrary. But all material logic is practical interest and this interest in production is symbolically constituted: the material means of the cultural organization and the organization of material means are both cultural. Do use Sahlins’ own examples, why else aren’t dogs eaten in the West or skirts worn by men? (Ibid.:207). The material forces in production constitute only a set of possibilities, where humans decide what to make of them. So, argues Sahlins, there are not two logics in production; logic is the product of thought, itself informed by meaning and social content – material forces in themselves are lifeless and their motions and consequences are always social and symbolic (Ibid.:207).
Having so seen that material forces become so under the watchful eye of culture, Sahlins argues that ecology works in culture as a set of limit conditions. Material forces exist as negative determinations, stating only what can't be done and allowing anything that's possible: Nature is only raw material, given meaningful form and content by human minds - like a block of marble to a sculpture, argues Sahlins (Ibid.:210). Certain things you cannot do with a piece of marble - but it is more important, that the sculptor decides what the statue will look like.
In the same vein, Douglas maintains that culture mediates the experience of individuals, acting as a “textbook reference” for action: When deformed babies are born among the Nuer, this is a natural event. But the Nuer treat these babies as birth-mistakes, baby hippopotamuses born to humans. They are gently layed in the river “where they belong”, re-establishing social categories of how humans look. (Douglas 1966 [2003]:40). In this way, specific cultural form follows exactly from a natural event, and could not have been deduced. Seeing how Westerners react to the birth of twins, we could never have anticipated, for instance, that some West African tribes kill babies at birth, to maintain the cultural order that only one human may come from one womb (Ibid.:41).
Food on the plate is, well, food. But food on my shirt is dirt. It’s the same food, the same material, existing only in different symbolic contexts. Culture shapes and mediates the ways we interact with our environment, ordering experience and giving specific form to material events and forces.
Conclusion
In Culture and Practical Reason, Sahlins also objects to the presumption that the West is funded on material rationality. Objects and persons of capitalist production are also united in a system of symbolic valuations. Capitalism too is a symbolic process. In all societies functions a symbolic process that imposes a classificatory “grid” on culture in total (Ibid.:211). The only thing differentiating the West from the “rest” is our belief that we are unique; the illusion that Western economy and society are pragmatically constructed based on material rationale. It's just that the production of goods is the main site of symbolic production and communication in the West. It’s not that our economic system isn’t symbolically determined, just that we use economic symbolism in structuring our society (Ibid.:211).
The processes are the same in both primitive and complex societies; only the structures of symbolic integration are different.
In the West, the logic of production is a differential logic of cultural meaning. The grid is reproduced since 1) objects are different and 2) the goods must sell, so they must have a preferred utility, real or imagined for somebody. In this, by being different and always "for" somebody, they are classificatory. Bourgeois society produces social distinction through contrast in an object and differences in exchange-value.
Since economic relations permeate all social relations in bourgeois society, the economy “produces not only objects for appropriate subjects, but subjects for appropriate objects” (Ibid.:216), acting as the classificatory grid for Western society.
Material production is Western society’s symbolic grid, whereas kinship fulfills this role in primitive society. We are no less symbolic and use no less totemic thought in the West. If we as anthropologists want to understand society, we must study culture first and foremost, as it governs all other relations in society like a symbolic grid, forming a veritable key to understanding human action.
The myth of rational production is a lie; it is the production of symbols, classification – in short, the production of culture.
Bibliography
Bourdieu, Pierre
1977: Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press.
Douglas, Mary
1966 (2003): Purity and Danger. New York, Routledge
Drummond, Lee
1979: Culture and Practical Reason by Marshall Sahlins [Review]. Ethnohistory vol. 26 (1), pp. 81-83
Sahlins, Marshall
1976: Culture and Practical Reason. Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press
Said, Edward
1979: Orientalism. Vintage Books.
1979: Orientalism. Vintage Books.
Wolf, Eric
1983: Introduction. In Europe and the People Without History. University of California Press
Marxism, Materialism, Sahlins, Structural Anthropology, Symbolism, Theory, Totemism
