Marshall Sahlins’ anthropological lessons and Hawaiian society

relativism and ethnocentrism in debate

Abstract

In this bibliographic essay I discuss the historical-anthropological contributions of Marshall Sahlins from an ethnography of Hawaiian society. The objective is to indicate how the author, who dialogues directly with History and Anthropology, shows us how fruitful and necessary this dialogue is for a good anthropological and ethnographic discussion. Here, several issues are discussed, starting from chapter 1 of Islands of History by Sahlins, such as racial relations, social structure, models of culture, the relativization of anthropological work and others. The cardinal concepts worked are ‘structure’ and ‘relativism’, being methodologically, employed in a strictly bibliographic dialogue. At the end of the article, I expand the proposed discussion from other contexts and authors, focusing on an Anthropology of History.