The cycle continues.

So, last week I'd pretty much decided that there was a whole lot more to life than the book-learning of the academy. People and experiences, I decided, were more important than theory. Beyond that, sleep and time to myself is --how can I put this? -- the bomb. So that was that. Anthropology out; sane, happy, and healthy living in.

But then I happened upon me some Marshall Sahlins. First, for the most part, Sahlins is a crap writer. If a piece of writing were a road trip, then Sahlins takes every detour and stops at every tourist trap on the map. But he makes up for this by breathing anthropology. Here he talks about another anthropologist, from the olden tymes, Leslie White:

Progress in the Neolithic, he claimed, came from the increase in the amount of energy harnessed per capita because of plant and animal domestication. He was not amused when I objected that energy “per capita” was the same as in the Old Stone Age, since the primary mechanical source remained the human body.

On the other hand, I have never repudiated White’s concept of culture as a thoroughly symbolic phenomenon. I never tired of repeating his dictum that no ape can appreciate the difference between holy water and distilled water — because there is none, chemically speaking. That, for me, resolved the contradiction in his own teaching and that of the many human scientists who separate culture from practical activity, as if the symbolic dimension of economic behavior were an afterthought of the material. The “economic basis” of society is culturally constructed. Even our supposedly “rational choices” are based on another, meaningful logic that, for example, makes steak a more prestigious food than hamburger, or women’s clothes different in significant ways from men’s. It turns out that materialism is a form of idealism, because it’s wrong, too.

Sahlins writes about culture so well, he makes it look easy. It would take most mortals at least two pages to write what he did in two paragraphs.

And you know what? Sanity and stress free living are really really nice. I might even live longer this way. But it's lonely. I miss anthropology. I miss my colleagues and community. Nothing beats being in a room full of people who share your world view, along with your liquor and love of bad movies. And more and more I'm thinking that maybe reading the crappy, convoluted, and erudite writings of social scientists is what makes me tick.