:Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa.

Abstract

In this unusual book, Marshall Sahlins is less apologetic toward Thucydides than critically engaged with him and with the long tradition of historiography he began. Sahlins's criticism essentially is that Thucydides devalues the cultural in favor of a supposedly natural human tendency to act out of perceived self‐interest, and that in concentrating on individuals he ignores the institutions and cultural structures that mediate between them and give their actions coherence and meaning. The book, then, is largely a demonstration of what a historiography informed by anthropology might look like. Moving easily between concrete cases and general principles, Sahlins makes a compelling argument that there is no history without culture, and vice versa. Sahlins confronts Thucydides most directly in the first chapter, where he discusses Athens and Sparta, the principals in the Peloponnesian War (431–404 b.c.e.); but with them he pairs two Fijian kingdoms of the nineteenth century c.e., Bau and Rewa, which like the Greek states fought a protracted war that drew in allies on each side. The parallels Sahlins draws are impressive. Both Athens and Bau created hegemonies over “allies” that were based not on domination but on demonstrations of superiority. The reliance of both on naval power had far‐reaching consequences for policy and internal organization. Both were compelled by exponentially increasing costs of hegemony to engage in imperialist adventures to extend the boundaries of their domination; for Athens the result was the catastrophe at Syracuse. (Note that this explanation does not necessarily replace “Thucydidean” self‐interest as a causal explanation but grounds it in economics.) Sparta and Rewa, by contrast, look more traditional within their respective cultures than do their adventurous adversaries, and this, Sahlins argues, is no accident. The pairs Athens and Sparta, Bau and Rewa, were systematic inversions of one another, constituting themselves in a dialectic of mutual opposition. Although the presuppositions here will not convince everyone (do cultures really behave in this Saussurean manner?), the suggestion deserves to be taken seriously. It may be audacious to suggest that Cleisthenes's democratic reforms were motivated this way (and doing so ignores forces internal to Athens), but recent work has dated the Spartan cultural formation as late as the fifth century b.c.e., when the two cities were rivals. Thucydides himself described extensive oppositions between them. These cry out for an explanation beyond a presumed “national character,” and the one Sahlins offers is intriguing.