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Waiting for Foucault, Still. Marshall Sahlins. Expanded fourth edition. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press (distributed by The University of Chicago Press), 2002. [iv] + 84 pp. (Paper US$10.00)
"To know what other peoples are," writes Marshall Sahlins, "it suffices to take the proper attitudes toward sexism, racism and colonialism. As if their truth was our right-mindedness." Waiting for Foucault, Still is Sahlins's compendium of sharp barbs like this, mostly aimed at the postmodernist movement in American anthropology. Originally written up as notes for an afterdinner "entertainment" for the Fourth Decennial Conference of Social Anthropologists of the Commonwealth at Oxford in 1993, the little pamphlet soon took on a life of its own and was reissued in 2002, replete with fresh one-liners and curmudgeonly reflections on "what's up nowadays in Anthropology-and probably shouldn't be."
Sahlins may or may not be the best writer practicing the anthropological trade, but he is surely the most amusing. As Adam Kuper observes in Culture: The Anthropologist's Account (1999), Sahlins is also one of the key figures in the long-running debate about the nature of "culture" that has dominated American anthropology since Boas. To enjoy Waiting for Foucault, it is helpful to bear this history in mind. Trained in an evolutionary perspective by Leslie White and Julian Steward, the young Sahlins sought to discover what anthropology had to teach Marxism-and vice versa. In 1967 he went to Paris and...