Marshall Sahlins talk on 'The culture of Material Value and the Cosmography of Difference'

A talk by Professor Sahlins at King's College, Cambridge on 5 June 2013, organized by Alice Taylor and Anastasia Piliavsky for CRASSH and King's College, and filmed by Alan Macfarlane. Watch out for the discussion and, later, an interview of Professor Sahlins the next day,

[@abcrane]

Having read Veblen, Sahlins, Baudrillard, and Galbraith in the last year or so, the culture/morality/economic interfacing in all cultures now all makes sense to me. Now having read Mcgilchrist's Master and His Emissary, I see how the roots of this "interfacing dynamic "at large truly has to do with the unique ways human beings SIMULTANEOUSLY process the literal world (nature, climate, animals, trees, each other) and their symbolic representations of all those "things." I am guessing that what all cultures throughout time and across space have in common is this "symbolic representing" of their world as a way to both understand it and manipulate it (for better or worse.) Maybe Anthropology can be seen as, most fundamentally, a study of the dance and the fight between our direct perceptions (seeing touching, smelling, tasting hearing) the world as it is, and our "symbolization" of it with the rational (or not so rational) mind. Maybe, then, this can once and for all resolve the dispute between formalism and substantivism...that is, so long as the economist/social scientist is them self aware that each makes sense within the context of their application. The formalist is their self a phenomenon of study for the substantivist visionary. But for certain economists, we may need to enlist the assistance of a seasoned Primatologist.

[@anthrosound]

Wonderful upload!

[@EcoMythos]

The word "Rupee" (and Indonesian "Rupiah") come from the Sanskrit word "rupa" -- meaning "similar." Fools gold, copper, nickel -- these are "similar" to gold. And gold is "similar" to sustenance, shelter, recreation ... Just in case you were wondering :)

[@Kurtlane]

The Cogi of Columbian Andes believe in gold being the menstrual blood of Mother Earth. Sounds like the people of Flores, Indonesia believe the same. In general, Marshall Sahlins here is saying things that are on one hand quite obvious, and on the other very revolutionary, in a sense that they reject lots of long-established notions, notions so well established that they have become subconscious and therefore taken for granted without being examined. Bravo!

[@fredwelf8650]

Excerpt from Golub, et al 2016 "A Practice of Anthropology - The Thought and Influence of Marshall Sahlins" "In this period Sahlins also cemented his reputation as a theorist of cultural evolution. Social Stratification’s reconciliation of White and Steward was incomplete. White’s evolutionism was rooted in Victorian notions of improvement and progress, while Steward’s was aligned to the evolutionary synthesis in contemporary biology, focused as it was on non-teleological adaptation to particular environments (Smocovitis 2012). How to reconcile Whitean evolution-as- progress with Steward’s evolution-as-adaptation? These were the issues that Sahlins approached in his essay “Evolution: Specific and General” (1960a) in the small, influential volume Evolution and Culture (Sahlins, Service, and Harding 1960) which exemplified the Michigan approach to evolution. Here, Sahlins argued that societies could be understood in terms of either their adaptation to a specific environment or the general level of complexity they had achieved. Additionally, Sahlins emphasized that all of these processes are historical, and none imply that “primitive” people lack moral worth. With this reconciliation, Sahlins laid claim to a leading role in the shaping of the new evolutionary anthropology." Sahlins seems to stress 'specific evolution' in contrast to general evolution.

[@mrpinguimninja]

I feel like professor Sahlins' discussion here has a lot to do with his books Culture and Practical Reason and, to a lesser extent, Cosmologies of Capitalism

[@guskhalid4873]

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[@eugenetitus9370]

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[@guskhalid4873]

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[@guskhalid4873]

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[@eugenetitus9370]

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[@davidplitt]

Could someone please provide a text for this talk..Thanks

[@EcoMythos]

Not sure I completely understand how division relates to incest. Also, do women not partake in such group identification as well?

[@squatch545]

Is this talk available in text anywhere?

[@squatch545]

***** Thank you so much!

[@syanshih1268]

@@squatch545 can you share with us, thank!

[@joeplant4925]

Actually economy is bondage in every aspect of life.

[@joeplant4925]

Economy is cultural bondage.