Marshall Sahlins, the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, will deliver a lecture titled "Sentimental Pessimism and Ethnographic Experience: Why Culture is Not a Disappearing Object" at Cornell University Friday, Nov. 1, at 4:30 p.m. in Room 165 McGraw Hall. The lecture is free and open to the public and is part of the University Lectures series.

One of America's premier anthropologists, Sahlins first rose to prominence as an ethnographer and historian of Polynesia. His theories on the history of European contact in Polynesia have sparked lively debates, recorded in the pages of several national news magazines. His first book, Social Stratification in Polynesia, remains a standard in the field, as does Moala: Culture and Nature on a Fijian Island. Other influential works include Evolution and Culture (which he co-edited with Elman Service), The Use and Abuse of Biology, Culture and Practical Reason and Stone Age Economics, a collection of essays. His most recent book is How 'Natives' Think: About Captain Cook, for Example.

Sahlins conducted his undergraduate work at the University of Michigan and his graduate work there and at Columbia University. He taught anthropology at both institutions before joining the faculty at the University of Chicago in 1973. He has been a visiting lecturer at universities in Europe and Asia, and his field research has taken him to Turkey, Fiji and New Guinea. He has been a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1976.

In a recent letter to Steve Sangren, Cornell professor of anthropology, Sahlins wrote that his Cornell lecture will focus on the ethnographic experience of three anthropologists, Rena Lederman, Epeli Hau'ofa and Terry Turner.

"[They] found that their initial forebodings about the cultural futures of the peoples they studied, that these peoples would be swallowed up in the new global order, turned out to be inaccurate over the longer run," Sahlins wrote. "Instead, each of the three was able to document an important, novel process of cultural recuperation. Hence culture lives, if in new terms -- which provide a great opportunity for a renewed anthropology."

Sangren said Sahlins' talk "should have broad appeal to social scientists, historians and scholars in literary studies interested in issues of historiography, anthropology, colonialism and representation of others times and peoples."