NYT
September 21, 2008
Leslie A. White In the pre-’60s at the University of Michigan, rebellion consisted of listening gleefully to the anthropologist Leslie White going mano a mano with God. White was one of those maverick intellectuals and politicians, like Thorstein Veblen, Charles Beard and Robert La Follette, who came out of the rural American heartland to off the pieties-and powers-that-be. Some of these intellectuals were village atheists from the beginning. Others, like White, only shook off the idiocies of rural life when they went to the city and the university.
We never knew White was a member of the Socialist Labor Party in the ’30s and early ’40s, contributing articles to The Weekly People under the name John Steel. Nor could you have guessed from his so-Americanized version of Marxism: a theory of cultural evolution based singularly on technological progress. Progress in the Neolithic, he claimed, came from the increase in the amount of energy harnessed per capita because of plant and animal domestication. He was not amused when I objected that energy “per capita” was the same as in the Old Stone Age, since the primary mechanical source remained the human body.
On the other hand, I have never repudiated White’s concept of culture as a thoroughly symbolic phenomenon. I never tired of repeating his dictum that no ape can appreciate the difference between holy water and distilled water — because there is none, chemically speaking. That, for me, resolved the contradiction in his own teaching and that of the many human scientists who separate culture from practical activity, as if the symbolic dimension of economic behavior were an afterthought of the material. The “economic basis” of society is culturally constructed. Even our supposedly “rational choices” are based on another, meaningful logic that, for example, makes steak a more prestigious food than hamburger, or women’s clothes different in significant ways from men’s. It turns out that materialism is a form of idealism, because it’s wrong, too.
Marshall Sahlins is an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago and the author most recently of “The Western Illusion of Human Nature.”