Marshall Sahlins (b. 1930) is an American anthropologist who played a major role in the development of anthropological theory in the second half of the twentieth century. Over a sixty-year career, he and his colleagues synthesized trends in evolutionary, Marxist, and ecological anthropology, moving them into mainstream thought. Sahlins is considered a critic of reductive theories of human nature, an exponent of culture as a key concept in anthropology, and a politically engaged intellectual oppo