#50 Biblio-files: Co-op Legends - Marshall Sahlins

This week on Open Stacks, the inaugural episode of our occasional Biblio-files series, featuring Co-op friends and legends, beginning with prolific author, esteemed anthropologist and professor, and publishing partner of the Co-op, Marshall Sahlins. 

Sahlins at home in conversation with Co-op Director Jeff Deutsch.

Take a look at some of Sahlins' writing, courtesy of libcom, including from this work on abundance and scarcity in primitive societies:

It is becoming fashionable to make sympathetic references to or reflect nostalgically and sometimes guiltily concerning primitive peoples. But this is not enough to achieve a correct understanding of their way of life, its advantages and its limitations. Such attitudes exhibit many prejudices and are often reconciled with the mythology of the noble savage, poor but happy, because he knows how to be satisfied with what he has. This lesson is aimed at our insatiable yet unhappy proletarians. The primitive is posited as the Other, the person that modern man would want to be, although this is not possible or even, basically, desirable. The Paleolithic is seen as a different way of life and not as a moment of human history. Historical explanations are, on the other hand, few and far between. Is it not perhaps racist to place the “savage” at a lower level than ours on the scale of evolution?

When the Western, that is, capitalist, ideology and lifestyle are in crisis, when “nature” sells at a higher price the more endangered it is and perhaps, above all, when primitive peoples have been so persecuted and devastated that they are no longer disturbing, we can indulge in their rehabilitation. This attitude, which blames industrialism, progress, history, and excess (or abuse) does nothing but obscure the future communism with its nostalgia.

As mentioned in his interview with Jeff, Sahlins' brother, Bernard, was also a Co-op member and lauded figure around Chicago, celebrated for his contributions to the city's comedy scene by way of co-founding Second City. Read a bit of that history here.

 Prickly Paradigm Press has a multitude of pamphlets. Take a look at Sahlins' own Waiting for Foucault, Still, available as a PDF via their site, and pick up paper copies of other titles in store and online.