Think Like an Anthropologist

The Original Affluent Society’, by Marshall Sahlins

Nature and culture are not hard-wired, binary distinctions. They are concepts with particular histories

Without its social histories, ethical life would not be ethical; without its natural histories, it would not be life

Structural linguistics got it right on several counts, Lévi-Strauss argued. First, it focuses on what he calls the ‘unconscious infrastructure’ of language, something about which the speakers themselves may have no clue. Second, it locates meaning not in terms themselves – ‘cat is cat’ (meow) – but in relations between terms – ‘cat, not dog’ (meow, not woof). Third, such relations are situated within a system; it is ordered and structured. And finally, it seeks to locate general laws

What it means, E-P explains, is that the Azande make a strong distinction between how something happens and why it happens; witchcraft is what links how and why together

Belief in witchcraft is quite consistent with human responsibility and a rational appreciation of nature.

The attribution of misfortune to witchcraft does not exclude what we call its real causes but is superimposed on them and gives to social events their moral value

SAE, then, is a language structure that predisposes its speakers to objectify subjective experiences, such as those of time

‘we always assume that the linguistic analysis made by our group reflects reality better than it does’.1

In his most famous essay, ‘The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language’, published in 1939, Whorf argued that the structure of the language we speak shapes the ways in which we perceive and act within the world.