No History Without Culture

Abstract

Marshall Sahlins, Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 328 pp. During the first Gulf War, visitors to Colin Powell's office could not fail to notice a quote from Thucydides lodged beneath the glass covering of his desk. It read: "Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men most." When it recently emerged that this passage does not occur in Thucydides, Powell caught a certain amount of flak for naively espousing a fabrication (Sharlin 2004). The Australian news service crikey.com considered his signal quote to be "about as accurate as his WMD presentation to the UN."1 This was perhaps harsh since crikey recognized that the quote faithfully paraphrases Nicias' speech in Book Six (chap. 11) of The Peloponnesian War. Attempting to dissuade the Athenians from invading Sicily, the general contended that: "The best way for us to make ourselves feared by the Hellenes in Sicily is not to go there at all; and the next best thing is to make a demonstration of our power and then, after a short time, go away again" (Rood 2004). Operation Shock and Awe, currently underway in Iraq, sounds like Nicias' second option, although it has overstayed its "short time." Will Gulf War II end catastrophically as did the Athenian adventure in Sicily? According to Thucydides himself: "I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time" [End Page 269] (I.22). Thomas Hobbes, who first translated The Peloponnesian War into English in 1628, drew his idea of a "state of nature" from Thucydides' assessment of the stasis (civil war) on Corcyra (III.83): "And the common course of life being at that time confounded in the city, the nature of man, which is want even against law to do evil, gotten now above the law, showed itself with delight to be too weak for passion, too strong for justice and enemy to all superiority" (Hobbes trans.). In Hobbes' time, The Peloponnesian War offered a framework for thinking about the English Civil War, while in the past century alone scholars have read it as a parable for the American Civil War, World War II, the Vietnam War, and the first Gulf War. His topicality struck an observer of an even earlier war: "Thomas Jefferson, writing to Adams in a rapid and momentous year (1812), commends Thucydides and Tacitus: better than the newspapers" (Syme 1960:54). In Apologies to Thucydides, the distinguished American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins continues this tradition of returning to Thucydides for insights about the contemporary world. Sahlins' Thucydides does not, however, directly address the politics of American imperialism or the current military operation in Iraq. He utilizes the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC), rather, as a counterpoint to a war fought in Fiji between the kingdoms of Bau and Rewa over a twelve-year period (1843-55). Bau, a tiny island measuring only 23 acres, dominated the seas and thrived on trade and taxation while Rewa was more densely populated and richly agricultural. Bau and Athens both operated as theater states (although Sahlins does not adopt this Geertzian concept), which exercised power through impressive display, exemplary ritual— "a politics of demonstration in place of administration" (p. 7). Rewa and Sparta developed in counterpoint to these formidable powers as more introverted polities. In each case, the two inimical polities formed into anti-types of one another through a process that Sahlins, following Bateson, labels "complementary schismogenesis." Any attempt to examine the validity of this formulation runs up against the differences in source materials available for each case. For the Polynesian War Sahlins draws upon the reports of missionaries and others, who visited Bau or Rewa around the time of the Polynesian War. The reports issue from both places more or less equally as far as we could tell. In the case of the Peloponnesian War, virtually all of...