Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa - Softcover

"This book is a paradigm of how history and anthropology might be brought together, to the mutual enrichment of both disciplines." (American Historical Review) "Marshall Sahlins's complex book... [addresses] questions of historical causation and agency using a wide variety of examples-including, at one point, Elian Gonzales and the 1951 New York Giants. The complete ramifications of Sahlins's argument will be appreciated best by anthropologists and historians. Even for the general reader, however, Apologies to Thucydides has much to offer, as an introduction to an unfamiliar culture and as a new perspective on our own." (New York Sun)"

Thucydides' classic work on the history of the Peloponnesian War is the root of Western conceptions of history - including the ethnocentric idea that Thucydides' historiography was universally valid, applicable to all societies at all times. Here, however, Marshall Sahlins takes on Thucydides' history with a groundbreaking book that shows how different cultures develop different modes of historical production. Ranging from the Peloponnesian War to the nineteenth-century fight over the Fiji Islands to Bobby Thomson's "shot heard round the world" for the 1951 Giants to the history-making of Napoleon, he demonstrates again and again the necessity of taking culture into account in the creation of history - with apologies to Thucydides, who too often did not.