6 Quotes by Marshall Sahlins

The world's most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization.

One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture.

Parsons famously divided the social science world into a set of component "systems"—notably the social, the cultural, and the psychological—a division that by now seems as arbitrary as it was then influential, especially in its distinction between social structure and the cultural order. Even at the time, it struck some that the project was like analyzing water into its discernible ele­ments of hydrogen and oxygen in order to understand why it runs downhill.

We can reproduce within our own minds the way that the world is put together for other people. This is the extraordinary privilege and adventure of anthropology.

Gifts make friends and friends make gifts.

The world’s most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization.