Stand-up Anthropology

At the 1993 conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the Commonwealth, Marshall Sahlins was invited to provide “after-dinner entertainment.” His anthropological stand-up routine has been published as Waiting for Foucault, Still, most recently in 2002 by Sahlins’s own Prickly Paradigm Press. 

Sahlins thinks that atheism is the solution to all the world’s problems. He is an enemy on many fronts, but he is a highly amusing enemy. 

“Surely,” Sahlins says, “it is a cruel post-modernist fate that
requires the ethnographer to celebrate the counterhegemonic
diversity of other people’s discourses—
the famous polyphony or heteroglossia—while at the
same time he or she is forced to confess that shis [sic!] own scholarly voice is the stereotypic expression of a
totalized system of power. It seems that imperialism
is the last of the old-time cultural systems. Ours is
the only culture that has escaped deconstruction by
the changing of the avant garde, as it retains its
essentialized and monolithic character as a system of
domination. So anthropologists can do nothing but
reproduce it. Advanced criticism thus becomes the
last refuge of the idea that the individual is the tool
of shis culture” (16).

On the hegemony of hegemony: “‘power’ is the intellectual black hole into
which all kinds of cultural contents get sucked, if
before it was ‘social solidarity’ or ‘material advantage.’ Again and again, we make this lousy bargain
with the ethnographic realities, giving up what we
know about them in order to understand them. As
Sartre said of a certain vulgar Marxism, we are
impelled to take the real content of a thought or an
act as a mere appearance, and having dissolved this
particular in a universal (here econ appearance to truth. . . . following Gramsci
and Foucault, the current neo-functionalism of
power seems even more : as if everything
that could be relevant to power were power” (20-1). Sahlins is awed at “the variety of things
anthropologists can now explain by power and
resistance, hegemony and counter-hegemony,” from nicknames in Naples to fashions in La Paz to the spirituality of middle-glass Bengali women (21-2).

On presentism in anthropology: “if they get their way, and this becomes the principle
of anthropological research, fifty years hence
no one will pay the slightest attention to the work
they’re doing now. Maybe they’re onto something” (26).

On KFC in China: “Why are well-meaning Westerners so concerned
that the opening of a Colonel Sanders in Beijing
means the end of Chinese culture? A fatal
Americanization. Yet we have had Chinese restaurants
in America for over a century, and it hasn’t
made us Chinese. On the contrary, we obliged the
Chinese to invent chop suey. What could be more
American than that? French fries?” (38).

On Foucault and Hobbes: “when Foucault
speaks of a war of each against all, and in the next
breath even hints of a Christian divided self – ‘And
there is always within each of us something that
fights something else’ – we are tempted to believe that he and Hobbes had more in common than the
fact that, with the exception of Hobbes, both were
bald” (40-1).

On cultural relativism: “Cultural relativism is first and last an interpretive
anthropological—that is to say, methodological—
procedure. It is not the moral argument that any
culture or custom is as good as any other, if not
better. Relativism is the simple prescription that, in
order to be intelligible, other people’s practices and
ideals must be placed in their own historical context,
understood as positional values in the field of their
own cultural relationships rather than appreciated by
categorical and moral judgments of our making.
Relativity is the provisional suspension of one’s own
judgments in order to situate the practices at issue in
the historical and cultural order that made them
possible” (46).

And so on.