A Study On The Cultural Theory Of Marshall Salins

Based on the explanation of the content of Marshall Sahlins’ s cultural theory and the essence of his critique of historical materialism, this article gives an analysis on those inadequacies of his views. Early works of Marshall Sahlins interpret the cultural materialism by means of the new cultural evolution theory, which has a viewpoint that compared with culture, nature remains the priority. There has been a shift on the later thoughts of Marshall Sahlins. He believes that utilitarian culture should be fell within the ambit of Practical reason, which is also his criticism object. Then, he proposes cultural reason(symbolic reason) as a new concept, which means that it is culture or symbol that dominates practice, not the other way round. He advocates the use of symbolic reason on explaining all the practical and cultural phenomenon. Marshall Sahlins points out that historical materialism will have a guaranteed tendency of natural development, because natural sectors and cultural sectors are non-symbolic and uncoordinated.I believe that Marshall Sahlins confuses the theory of historical materialism and economic determinism, and it is a distortion of historical materialism. However, as a method of how to interpret the theory of culture, Marshall Sahlins’ s theory is reasonable to some extent, and it will be of great reference for us to be more sensible about our native culture.