| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Marshall Sahlins. Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2004. Pp. xii, 334. $30.00.

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.

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