2. Culture in Practice collects the academic and
political writings from the 1960s through
the 1990s of anthropologist Marshall
Sahlins.
More than a compilation, Culture in Practice
unfolds as an intellectual autobiography.
The book opens with Sahlins's early general
studies of culture, economy, and human
nature. It then moves to his reportage and
reflections on the war in Vietnam and the
antiwar movement, the event that most
strongly affected his thinking about cultural
specificity. Finally, it offers his more
historical and globally aware works on
indigenous peoples, especially those of the
Pacific islands.
http://www.zonebooks.org/titles/SAHL_CUL.html

3. • Part I
Culture between 60s-70s
Consceptual exercises and comparisons between cultures
• Part II
Practice
US War in Vietnam – Antiwar movements
• Part III
Culture in practice
More historical and more grounded ethnographically.
* Cultural integrity of the indigenous peoples.
http://www.zonebooks.org/titles/SAHL_CUL.html

4. Catherine Gallagher
Forms of endangered specificity.
New Criticism
“not interchangebility was an aesthetic reation to the domination of the market
economy.”
Leslie White
Culture is an independent, self moving order, of which human action could only be
the expression. Culture was determining, individual subjects determined.
Discourse
the process through which social reality comes into being.

5. White;
The symbol is the origin and the basis of human behaviour.
Ferdinand de Saussure and John Locke
Ideas determine how people classify and relate to objects in different ways.
White was a convinced technological determinist. He advocates that when the people
hold an axe a simple social order is formed.
However here an axe turn into a symbolic phenomenon, so;
Sybolicity < Technological determination

6. A comparison between American and Britsh anthropologists;
Structural functionalists,
Culture is the expressive and customary means by which a social system is maintained.
Social antropologists,
Cultural phenomena is only contingent in relation to the systematic character of the
social structures.
Radcliffe Brown,
Culture is an abstraction. It is without emprical presence or effects.
Brown and White,
Culture concept encompasses any kinds of human practice, everything organized
symbolically.

7. However, for too many culture still has predominantly aesthetic or intellectual signification.
White didn’t agree with them because there are contradictiıns between the material and
symbolic. The problem was the superstracture included the economic basis.
Lévi Strauss,
Everything could be reduced to behavior, utilitarian behavior, symbolism was lost.
Levi-Strauss (The Savage Mind) with due homages to Marx; there is always a mediator
between praxis and practice, namely the conceptual scheme by the operation of which
matter and form, neither with any independent existence, are realized as structures, that is
as entities which are both empirical and intelligible (1966:130)

8. In 1950s and 1960s there was an ongoin anthropological positivism. In the chain of this
lawful generalizations , one culture can only be an instance, Sahlins says.
Boas,
He also oppose these arguements.
Cosmography,
A multivalent distinction that invoke venerable oppositions to science and history,
objectivity and subjectivity, classicisim and romanticism.
Cosmographic disposition, anthropology came to know as cultural relativism.
Relativizm,
The practices must be placed in their own context and positional values in order to be
understood.

9. Vietnam War,
Antiwar movement in University of Michigan in 1965.
Transformed a cultural physicist to a cosmographer.
Teach in,
Instead of holding classes outside of the university, teach out, they occupy the buildings all
nght in order to discuss the war.
The social formation doesn’t determine the individuality of the leaders it gives itself, thus
their individuality determine powers over its own destiny.

10. According to Shlins the rest ( after 70s) is history.
Cultures are relative and historical forms of life with particular validity without some
universal necessity.
Anthropology uses its objects as its methods and it is a different science because it
examines the reasons behind human things, not causes.
Anthropologist recapitulates symbolic operations by which customs are produced. Method
recapitulates truths, here is identity as a human translation of a material process.

11. In conclusion,
In his introduction, Sahlins evaluates the notion of culture historically, and covers the
movements that affect culture approaches from1960s to 1990s.
He examine the concept of culture through social sciences according to anthropologists and
sociologists.
The role of individual is questioned. History, societies and specificity of cultures are
evaluated in relation to eachother.