Apologies to Thucydides
Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa
348 pages
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19 halftones, 9 maps, 13 line drawings
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6 x 9
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© 2004
- Contents
- Review Quotes
Table of Contents
Contents
List of illustrations
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
Introduction
1. The Polynesian War: With Apologies to Thucydides
2. Culture and Agency in History
3. The Culture of an Assassination
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
Introduction
1. The Polynesian War: With Apologies to Thucydides
2. Culture and Agency in History
3. The Culture of an Assassination
Bibliography
Index
Review Quotes
Bruce Kapferer, University of Bergen
"A challenging demonstration of the work of culture--unrelenting in criticism of abstractionism, binarism, and reductionism--and a passionate statement in defense of rigorously analytical, comparative and historically sensitive ethnography that explains the particular in a way which resonates with immediate and general significance. Here Sahlins critically synthesizes major lines of thought in his own discipline--approaches in which he has often taken a leading role--and pushes towards new horizons of understanding. Just when all seemed lost, Sahlins has hit a home run not just for anthropology but for the social sciences generally. This is his best yet."
Claude Calame, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
"Let us embark with Marshall Sahlins on a fascinating journey. In a truly comparative and contrastive method, Sahlins maps the territory between critical history and reflexive anthropology."
Thomas R. Trautmann, University of Michigan
"Brilliant analysis, freshly and amusingly put--this is the work of a master at his best. Marshall Sahlins should apologize to Thucydides, who will never be the same for readers of this intelligent and irreverent study of how history has been constructed over the last two millennia. Squaring the circle of the individual and the collective, history and culture, it is must-read stuff for historians, anthropologists, and, indeed, anyone wishing to know the truth about the Peloponnesian War or the Polynesian War, how the Giants won the National League pennant in 1951 or why Al Gore did not become president of the United States."
Adam Kirsch | New York Sun
"This is only the foundation of Mr. Sahlins’s complex book, which goes on to address questions of historical causation and agency using a wide variety of examples--including, at one point, Elian Gonzales and the 1951 New York Giants. The complete ramifications of Mr. Sahlins’s argument will be appreciated best by anthropologists and historians. Even for the general reader, however, Apologies to Thucydides has much to offer, as an introduction to an unfamiliar culture and as a new perspective on our own."
Simon Hornblower and Charles Stewart | Anthropological Quarterly
"No apologies needed, then, just ’thanks’ to Thucydides for stimulating this creative and insightful investigation of history and culture some 2400 years after his death."
William G. Thalmann | American Historical Review
"A demonstration of what a historiography informed by anthropology might look like. Moving easily between concrete cases and general principles, Sahlins makes a compelling argument that there is no history without culture, and vice versa. . . . As a classicist who has benefited from Sahlins’s previous work, I appreciate this view of Greek history through an anthropologist’s eyes. More generally, this book is a paradigm of how history and anthropology might be brought together, to the mutual enrichment of both disciplines."
Ivan Brady | Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
"When the history of anthropology is written . . . Marshall Sahlins will already have had his place etched in stone in the line-up of the brightest and most influential thinkers in the discipline. . . . Apologies to Thucydides, in many ways a culmination of his earlier works, is unswerving in its dedication to rigorous cultural comparisons, the sine qua non of anthropology. . . . So perhaps we should construct his monument now. Or better, since there will be more from Sahlns down the line, just buy the book. . . . Every future can use a large-minded past and a large-minded practitioner or two. This is a book to build on."
Andrew Hadfield | Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory
"It would be hard to argue that the year’s most ambitious, and in my opinion, the best and most entertaining work, is Marshall Sahlins’ brilliant Apologies to Thucydides. . . . Sahlins’ attempt is to rethink the nature of historical explanation, his lifelong project, one that continues his profound and daring explorations into the ways in which history and anthropology might be thought of as overlapping, rival and complementary disciplines attempting to account for the same types of actions, events and structures."
Federico Santangelo | Anzeiger fuer die Altertumswissenschaft
"This is an important book, and a remarkable one too. It is definitely an important moment of modern reception of Thucydides outside the constituency of classicists; it is a bold and analogical study of ancient and modern history with an anthropological approach. . . . Students of classical antiquity are likely to find the whole book interesting in various respects."
Kerry James | Australian Journal of Anthropology
"The remarkable work under review by Marshall Sahlins, for which he need apologise to no one, has cleared the path of fashionable dead wood and opened the way to a history that includes culture, and it should lead to much further enterprise in the study of Pacific culture and history."
Peter Burke | Journal of Modern History
"It would be a great pity if the readership of these brilliant essays were restricted to anthropologists or to historians of Polynesia. . . . Sahlins has raised questions that all practicing historians need to think about and has offered them some fresh answers."
South Pacific Journal of Philosophy and Culture
"A powerful statement on the enduring kinship of history and culture."
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