Inaugural Hocart Lecture Marshall Sahlins, SOAS University of London
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 31/05/2016

https://www.soas.ac.uk/ethnographic-theory/
This is an edited version of the Inaugural Hocart Lecture given by Marshall Sahlins (University of Chicago) titled "The Original Political Society" which was given at the Centre for Ethnographic Theory, SOAS University of London on 29 April 2016.
More about this event: https://goo.gl/9uPnL9

Even the so-called egalitarian and loosely structured societies known to anthropology, including hunters such as Inuit or Australian Aborigines, are in structure and practice subordinate segments of inclusive cosmic polities, ordered and governed by divinities, ancestors, species masters, and other such metapersons endowed with life and death powers over the human population. "The Mbowamb spends is whole life completely under the spell and in the company of spirits" (Vicedom and Tischner).  "[Arawete] society is not complete on earth: the living are part of the global social structure founded on the alliance between heaven and earth"  (Viveiros de Castro). We need something like a Copernican revolution in anthropological perspective: from human society as the centre of a universe onto which it projects its own forms--that is to say, from the Durkheimian or structural-functional deceived wisdom--to the ethnographic realities of people's dependence on the encompassing life-giving and death-dealing powers, themselves of human attributes, which rule earthly order, welfare, and existence.. For Hobbes notwithstanding, something like the political state is the condition of humanity in the state of nature; there are kingly beings in heaven even where there are no chiefs on earth.

About the Speaker
Marshall Sahlins is one of the best-known and highly-respected anthropological thinkers in the world. His reputation has been built on his ethnographic work in the Pacific and his influential contributions to anthropological theory.

He is currently Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.

Sahlins is known for theorizing the interaction of structure and agency and for the critique of reductive theories of human nature (economic and biological, in particular). He has also theorized history and demonstrated the power that culture has to shape people's perceptions and actions.

He is the author of numerous books, including Stone age economics (1972), Culture and practical reason (1976), Islands of history (1986) and What kinship is–and is not (2012).

About the Centre for Ethnographic Theory
The SOAS Centre for Ethnographic Theory (CET) is dedicated to re-instate ethnography as the main heuristic in anthropology and return it to the forefront of conceptual developments in the discipline. The centre`s primary purpose is to support the publication of the Journal for Ethnographic Theory HAU and the HAU book series. It will also hold workshops, lectures, conferences and seminars to promote research and teaching in the field of ethnographic theory and to facilitate links between SOAS and other individuals and institutions with an academic interest in ethnographic theory