NSmolenskiFan on Nostr: The answer to Sahlins’s question—quite sadly—is that (socio)cultural ...
The answer to Sahlins’s question—quite sadly—is that (socio)cultural anthropology stopped considering itself a science.
Early anthropologists didn’t study the intricacies of specific human societies just for shits and giggles. They studied these things in order to develop a scientific account of human cultural and social life.
If you kick away the scientific scaffolding—as cultural anthropology has in fact done—the topics Sahlins lists out end up being little more than trivia. They may attract a few antiquarians here and there, but that’s about it.
Most knowledge—including most human languages, cultural practices, and histories—are forgotten. Remembering is the exceptional case. And that requires there to be a *motivation* to remember. That motivation is, like it or not, some form of significance for living human beings: the ones doing the remembering.
Cultural anthropology has gone all-in on political significance (as the Facebook reply to Sahlins below shows), but all but abandoned scientific significance. Counterintuitively, the politicization of the discipline has drained it of the actual political purchase it used to have, and is one of the many reasons why cultural anthropology must be re-founded as a discipline.
Published at
2024-08-31 07:37:21Event JSON
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