Marshall Sahlins

Marshall Sahlins is the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of Chicago. Trained at the University of Michigan and Columbia University (Ph.D., 1954), his main ethnographic experience and many of his writings concern Pacific Island peoples, their cultures, and their histories. Most particularly, he has worked extensively in the Fiji Islands and on the history of Hawai'i. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy and a former fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, he is the author of a number of books, including several on the nature of culture and the cultural varieties of history. Co-founder and Executive Director of Prickly Paradigm Press, he has also contributed two works to this pamphleteering enterprise, Waiting For Foucault, Still and The Western Illusion of Human Nature. Professor Sahlins taught at the University of Michigan from 1956 to 1973, and then at the University of Chicago until his retirement in 1997.