For the past twenty or more years, Sahlins has conducted a scathing critique of ethnocentric Western theories that have tried to pass themselves off as universal. He wishes to protect the difference of the other from well-intentioned but ultimately colonizing forms of Western universalism. But Sahlins’s position also diverges from postmodern theories in that he believes in cultural holism and identity and seeks, through a comparative, cosmopolitan methodology, to install the anthropologist in the seat of knowledge. What we have noted as the Hegelian turn in Sahlins’s thought is mirrored in the inversion that sees his cultural relativism flip over into anthropology’s universal understanding and his defense of native cultural particularity turn into the greater need for a cosmopolitan transcendence of parochial limits. The survival of native cultures, and hence of cultural differences and cultural relativism, guarantees the central epistemic role of the (Western) anthropologist who traverses these “emic” differences in order to arrive at an “etic” understanding of the totality the differences make.
