
Marshall Sahlins, a giant in the field of anthropology and a celebrated Press author, died earlier this week at his home in Hyde Park. Best known for his ethnographic work in the Pacific and for his contributions to anthropological theory, he was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and the author of many books. Retired anthropology editor T. David Brent had the honor of working closely with Sahlins throughout his career, and he offered these words of remembrance for a significant author and friend. Marshall Sahlins was a distinguished scholar, a great anthropologist, a treasured author of the University of Chicago Press, and my dear friend. I had the privilege of being the editor for several of his books including Islands of History (1985), Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii volumes 1 & 2, co-authored with Patrick V. Kirch (1992), How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, For Example (1995), Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice-Versa (2004) and What Kinship Is . . . And Is Not (2013). I also helped shepherd his Culture and Practical Reason (1976) into publication just after I joined the Press . . .
Pandemic Participation: Christopher M. Kelty on Isolation and Participation in a Public Health Crisis
Drawing from ideas in his book, The Participant: A Century of Participation in Four Stories, Christopher M. Kelty discusses how participation changes during a pandemic and what it means for the future. I make a provocative claim in The Participant: To treat participation as general—and democracy as a more specific apparatus to which it responds—amounts to asserting that participation is prior to democracy. Participation is not a simple component of democracy, but something problematic enough that things like representative parliamentary democracy, federal constitutions, secret ballots, and regimes of audit and regulation are oriented toward dealing with too much, too little, or the wrong kind of participation. This is not a conventional way of looking at democracy, and it will not fit well with a political theory tradition in which participation plays only a bit part in the great historical drama of democracy. I think, however, there is something to be gained by reversing this relation. Instead, one can view participation as a longstanding problem of the relation between persons and collectives, and see liberal democracy as existing in an intermediate temporality where institutions, theories, constitutions, legal systems are in a process of steady transformation. The apparatus we call “liberal representative . . .
Read more »