Marshall David Sahlins (1930–2021).

A virtuoso of defamiliarization, Sahlins regarded Western European peoples as a relentlessly exotic lot and undertook (Sahlins 1996, 2008c) an archaeology of their "native anthropology." Increasingly skeptical toward views of anthropology as natural science, Sahlins invoked Franz Boas's ([1887] 1940) distinction between "physicalist" commitment to general law and "cosmographic" engagement with objects "for their own sake" - which latter Sahlins now pronounced the more objective epistemology of culture; thus, a transition from "cultural physicist" to "cosmographer" (Sahlins 2000a, 19, 22-23). Marshall David Sahlins (1930-2021) (Sahlins 2000a, 13) But Sahlins increasingly rejected White's evolutionism as theoretically and empirically deficient, notably in relation to "the success of the Vietnamese in the face of American might" in the late 1960s (Sahlins 2008a, 281). [Extracted from the article]