Reiz 1993. gadā amerikāņu antropologs Maršals Sālins (Marshall Sahlins) tika norīkots teikt runu pēc koferences svinīgā banketa. Šī runa ir iegājusi vēsturē kā lielisks profesionālais humors un asprātīgā veidā pasniegtas 'lauka' problēmas.


"On Materialism"
Materialism must be a form of idealism, since it’s wrong—too.

"Utilitarianism"
A people who conceive life to be the pursuit of happiness must be chronically unhappy.

"In Adam (Smith)’s Fall, Sinned We All"
The punishment was the crime. By disobeying God to satisfy his own desires, by putting this love of self before the love of Him alone that could suffice, man was condemned to become the slave of insatiable bodily desires: a limited and ignorant creature abandoned in an intractable and merely material world to labor, to suffer, and then to die. Made up of “thorns and thistles,” resistant to our efforts, the world, said Augustine, “does not make good what it promises: it is a liar and deceiveth.” The deception consists in the impossibility of assuaging our libidinous desires for earthly goods, for domination and for carnal pleasures. So man is fated “to pursue one thing after another, and nothing remains permanently with him…his needs are so multiplied that he cannot find the one thing needful, a simple and unchanging nature.” But God was merciful. He gave us Economics. By Adam Smith’s time, human misery had been transformed into the positive science of how to make do with our eternal insufficiencies: how to derive the most possible satisfaction from means that are always less than our wants. It was the same Judeo- Christian Anthropology, only bourgeoisfied, and on the whole a somewhat more encouraging prospectus on the same investment opportunities afforded by human suffering. In a famous essay setting out the field, Lionel Robbins explicitly recognized that the genesis of Economics was the economics of Genesis. “We have been turned out of Paradise,” he wrote, “we have neither eternal life nor unlimited means of satisfaction”—instead, a life of scarcity, wherein to choose one good thing is to deprive oneself of another. The real reason Economics is dismal is that it is the science of the post-lapsarian condition. And the Economic Man inhabiting page one of (any) General Principles of Economics textbook is Adam.

"Consciousness of Culture"
The word “culture” has become common fare. For the present generation it does much of the work that was formerly assigned to “psychology” or again “ethos.” We used to talk about “the psychology of Washington (D.C.)” or “the ethos of the university;” now it is “the culture of Washington” and “the culture of the university.” It is also “the culture of the cigar factory,” “the culture of drug addiction,” “the culture of adolescence,” “the culture of the Anthropology meetings,” etc. For a long while I was worried about this apparent debasement of the anthropological object. One day I realized that Economics is still going as a discipline despite that everyone talks about “economics,” and “economies,” Sociology likewise survives all the uses of “social.” And recently I saw the following poster in a hotel elevator: “50 hotels, 22 countries, one philosophy.” You think we got troubles with “culture?” What about Philosophy? Everybody’s got a philosophy. It didn’t kill Philosophy.

"Orientalism"
(dedicated to Professor Gellner) In Anthropology there are some things that are better left un-Said.

"Some Laws of Civilization"
First law of civilization: All airports are under construction.
Second law of civilization: I'm in the wrong line.
Third law of civilization: Snacks sealed in plastic bags cannot be opened, even using your teeth.
Fourth law of civilization: The human gene whose discovery is announced in the New York Times— there's one every day, a gene du jour—is for some bad trait, like schizophrenia, kleptomania, or pneumonia. We have no good genes.
Fifth law of civilization: Failing corporate executives and politicians always resign to spend more time with their families.

"Waiting for Foucault"
“A man of a thousand masks,” one of his biographers said of Michel Foucault, so how seriously can we take the guise he assumed to say that power arises in struggle, in war, and such a war as is of every man against every man. “Who fights whom?” he asked. “We all fight each other.” Critics and exegetes hardly notice Foucault’s connection to Hobbes except to mention the apparently radical disclaimer that his own notion of power is “the exact opposite of Hobbes’ project in Leviathan.” We have to give up our fascination with sovereignty, “cut off the king’s head,” free our attention from the repressive institutions of state. Power comes from below. It is invested in the structures and cleavages of everyday life, omnipresent in quotidian regimes of knowledge and truth. If in the Hobbesian contract subjects constitute the power, the Commonwealth that keeps them all in awe, in the Foucauldian schema power constitutes the subjects. All the same, the structuralism that Foucault abandoned for a sense of the poly-amorphous perverse, this structuralism taught that opposites are things alike in all significant respects but one. So when Foucault speaks of a war of each against all, and in the next breath even hints of a Christian divided self—“And there is always within each of us something that fights something else”—we are tempted to believe that he and Hobbes had more in common than the fact that, with the exception of Hobbes, both were bald.

No: Marshall Sahlins, 'Waiting for Foucault, Still'