Hmm. Hegel seems to be given his due by the pomo-associated psycho-social theorists (Butler, Zizek, Homi Bhabha, etc.), and by Laclau/Mouffe/hegemony types. Though the debt might be more implicit, as you suggest, by Marxist theorists who don't put "post" in front of the Marx part!
My anthro-reference was mostly to the Durkheim/Mauss emphasis on "classification" as necessary condition of social existence, in contrast to the "Geist" tradition. In other words, the way the D/M tradition saw the marking of relations, of identities in opposition to each other, as what was basic to societies rather than the idea that culturally defined communities have intrinsic awareness of their own identity.
But given that the "classification" school distinguishes between "totemism" (symmetrical relations between structurally similar groups) and "ethnicity" (asymmetrical incorporation of structurally dissimilar groups into a single polity), Hegelian-inspired subject/object stuff probably fits in conversantly with the latter.
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>Chas.: Personal note on this. Sahlins was sort of a mentor of mine when I
>was an anthro major/grad. student. I was sort of spoon fed _Culture and
>Practical Reason_ in lectures, where Sahlins changes from materialist to
>structuralist. It was only within the last year that I thought the key
>dialectical question to ask Sahlins ( I asked him on the phone) and
>structuralism is "how does the structure change". Since postmod seems to
>have structuralism as one of its premises, this is a question for postmod
>too; or maybe post mod asks structuralism this, but I haven't found that
>in postmod yet.
>
>Sahlins seems to be moving toward the structure changes in practice. Well,
>we're back to Marx sorta.
>
>I was "interested" when I "returned to anthro" recently and found out
>about this critique of Sahlins hypothesis about the apotheosis of Cook. I
>bought Sahlins _How Natives Think_.
>
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So you got him in the afterglow of his Stone Age Economics-to-CPR conversion? I got him while he was still in the afterglow of his second breakthrough, "history," and how to understand structural change. (See _Islands of History_ for this.)
Yes his historical change-analysis is practice-oriented, though ironically, he and Bourdieu see each other as opposites: MS thinking that PB has absolutely no understanding of culture, and PB thinking that MS has absolutely no understanding of society. (Conjuring one of MS's own favored quips about opposites being alike in all ways but one.)
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>Chas.: Could you elaborate these Sahlins arguments ? He's one of my
>fundamental "chose-a-pensee" , still.
>Are you saying Sahlins is anti-pomo, and his critic is pomo ?
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Well "pomo anthropology" has specific associations within the discipline, referring to a group of anthropologists focused on the actual writing of ethnographies and the immediate circumstances of fieldwork. It's associated with the contributors of the very popular 1980s text, _Writing Culture_ (ed. James Clifford), and somewhat with the journal Cultural Anthropology.
So narrowly, no, Obeyesekere isn't a "postmodern anthropologist," but yes, his critique is associated with that part of the wider academic zeitgeist (Foucauldian, Subaltern/colonial studies, etc.) associated with the "posts."
As for Sahlins, broadly, he's against Foucauldian scholarship to the extent that it focuses exclusively on questions of power. I think he'd officially say (on a tactful day) something like: of course there are important reasons to theoretically examine colonialism, racism, sexism, etc., but when anthropology limits itself to this, it elides important aspects of what other peoples are about. He sees "Power" as the latest incarnation of functionalist black holes ("social solidarity," "material advantage," etc,) which similarly sucked up cultural content.
But the arguments in _How "Natives" Think_ probably reprises lots of the anti-"practical reason" ones from the CPR days. (Which is why he was livid about even having to write the newer book; far as he was concerned he'd argued it all twenty years ago.) The newer book filters the CPR stuff through enormous amounts of retaliatory data on Hawaiian history, while making much of what he considers Ob.'s completely inverted ethnocentrism. (To wit: in the name of anti-ethnocentricism Ob. endows the Hawaiians with the greater measure of bourgeois Western rationality, while western scholars are doomed to slavishly reproduce the same irrational beliefs of their ancestors).
So MS's argument is that Ob. reproduces a 17th century bourgeois rationality. By which he refers to (its been a while! something like:) bourgeois empiricism's "subject" endowed with universal empirical reason, counterposed to a purely natural world, which is mediated by the pleasure/pain principle. (Even the empiricists recognized that a subject couldn't establish any meaningful relation to the pure object world just based on sensory imput, hence that utilist third term, p3, which is what allows the subject to meaningfully organize sensory perception.) The whole thing is based on a bourgeois solipsism casting the individual, in a perpetual state of need, who comes to objectively know the world through its sensory self-satisfactions.
According to MS, Ob. reproduces this idea of "practical rationality" as the thing that unites humans. It's on this basis, independent of specific cultural or historical knowledge, that he can confidently "know" the Hawaiians,too, without knowing their actual culture or history. Ob. persuades his readers partly by appealing to their own (Enlightenment-)inherited cultural understandings on such matters. Thus all of his "Aw c'mon... It's hard to believe the Hawaiians would..." "Wouldn't it make more sense that...?", appealing to this "universal" reason at the expense of any grounded and systematic reference to Hawaiian cultural understandings.
MS asks why, if Ob's argument is that the natives should have been able to determine from self-evident sensory perception that Captain Cook was "human, just like them," then why stop there? Hawaiians view many "natural" things, including foods which they themselves produce and consume, as containing the spirit of various gods. How, with eyes and stomachs, could Hawaiians possibly have believe that? (And how is this different from belief in transubstantiation, which sense-endowed Europeans believe in, even though they can see the bread and wine right in front of them? etc.)
For MS in contrast (and here's the part that will bring back your CPR-reading days), our understanding of the world is mediated by cultural knowledge: people relate their empirical intuitions to these systems of local knowledge rather than to objects as such. That's the activity which unites humans. So Hawaiian empirical judgements of divinity involved a different cultural cosmology and sensory epistemology. Its difference from Western bourgeois empiricism had nothing to do with paying more or less empirical attention to the world. Rather it had different ontological premises, including that divinity and subjectivity can be immanent in the world. The empirical judgements of both groups, the Hawaiians and the Europeans, were mediated by their distinct cultural premises in the encounter between the Hawaiians and Cook, and the fallout for both differed accordingly.
Well--something like that!
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>
>Charles Brown
>
>BA anthro. Mich '72
>
>MA anthro Mich '75
>
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Hey I was a UM undergrad too ('86, ResCollege), though I didn't take much anthro back then. (I remember I once tried out an intro class taught by Conrad Kottak, which pretty much steered me clear of the discipline for years!)
You know Sahlins was an undergrad there too, don't you? It's a small bonding point between us. But one of these days I just know I'm going to blow my cover and he'll find out that, were it not for my zealous nephews in Michigan, I'd have no idea whether Michigan ever makes it to the Rose Bowl or not!
Maureen