Marshall David Sahlins (/ˈsɑːlɪnz/ SAH-linz; December 27, 1930 – April 5, 2021)[1][2] was an American cultural anthropologist best known for his ethnographic work in the Pacific and for his contributions to anthropological theory.

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

His family claims to be descended from Baal Shem Tov, a mystical rabbi considered to be the founder of Hasidic Judaism.

[2] There his intellectual influences included Eric Wolf, Morton Fried, Sidney Mintz, and the economic historian Karl Polanyi.

[8] In the late 1960s, he also spent two years in Paris, where he was exposed to French intellectual life (and particularly the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss) and the student protests of May 1968.

His commitment to activism continued throughout his time at Chicago, most recently leading to his protest over the opening of the university's Confucius Institute[9][10] (which later closed in the fall of 2014).

[11] On February 23, 2013, Sahlins resigned from the National Academy of Sciences to protest the call for military research for improving the effectiveness of small combat groups and also the election of Napoleon Chagnon.

The imprint specializes in small pamphlets on unconventional subjects in anthropology, critical theory, philosophy, and current events.

[17] Sahlins is known for theorizing the interaction of structure and agency, his critiques of reductive theories of human nature (economic and biological, in particular), and his demonstrations of the power that culture has to shape people's perceptions and actions.

Sahlins's training under Leslie White, a proponent of materialist and evolutionary anthropology at the University of Michigan, is reflected in his early work.

General evolution is the tendency of cultural and social systems to increase in complexity, organization and adaptiveness to environment.

At other times, the structure of the conjuncture, a potent or fortuitous mixture of forces, enables people to transform history.

This element of chance and contingency makes a science of these conjunctures impossible, though comparative study can enable some generalizations.

Obeyesekere insisted that indigenous people thought in essentially the same way as Westerners and was concerned that any argument otherwise would paint them as "irrational" and "uncivilized".

A reviewer defined metapersons as "supreme gods and minor deities, ancestral spirits, demons, indwelling souls in animals and plants—who act as the intimate, everyday agents of human success or ruin, whether in agriculture, hunting, procreation, or politics.