Was Marshall Sahlins right when he said: 'Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization.'

ChatGPT said:

Sahlins' statement — "Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization." — is provocative, and in many respects, profoundly insightful. He was not denying material scarcity, but rather questioning the conceptual framework through which we understand poverty, especially in industrial-capitalist societies. Let's unpack it.

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1. Poverty as Relational, Not Absolute

Sahlins challenges the common Western conception of poverty as the absence of material goods or insufficient access to basic needs. In anthropological context, particularly in his influential 1968 essay “The Original Affluent Society,” he argued that many hunter-gatherer societies lived with relative ease and satisfaction despite having very little in terms of accumulated goods. These societies met their needs with minimal labor and lived within ecological and social limits that made the notion of “poverty” meaningless in the way we now understand it.

In this view, poverty is not about how much you have, but how what you have compares to what others have — and to what you're told you should have. It's a matter of social stratification, not raw material lack. A person with few possessions in an egalitarian society may not be “poor,” but someone with far more in a competitive, hierarchical society may feel destitute if they are relatively deprived.

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2. The Invention of Civilization

Sahlins’ last phrase — “the invention of civilization” — points toward the anthropological thesis that social inequality and class-based poverty emerged with state formation, property accumulation, and stratified societies. In other words, it was with the advent of agriculture, surplus, and sedentary civilization that some could hoard while others went without. Poverty, in this context, arises not because nature fails to provide, but because human systems introduce institutionalized scarcity — artificial forms of deprivation sustained by hierarchical social relations.

This aligns with insights from thinkers like Pierre Clastres, David Graeber, and James C. Scott, who emphasize that inequality is not inevitable or natural, but an artifact of particular socio-historical developments.

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3. Poverty as Ideology

By calling poverty a “social status,” Sahlins is also gesturing toward ideology: how societies construct and legitimize hierarchies. Poverty in modern civilization is often moralized — the poor are seen as lazy, undeserving, or failed individuals, rather than as participants in a system designed to produce winners and losers. Thus, poverty is not just a condition, but a judgment, a means of exclusion and control.

This is where Sahlins’ insight resonates with Foucault (power produces the categories by which people are classified and governed) and with Bourdieu (social status reproduces itself symbolically as well as materially).

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Was He Right?

In a strict material sense, some might object: there are forms of real deprivation — famine, disease, displacement — that exist independently of society’s relational constructs. But Sahlins' point isn't to deny physical suffering or need; it’s to shift the framework from one of material lack to one of social construction. He’s not saying people never go hungry; he’s saying poverty as we define and institutionalize it is not a universal human condition, but a product of civilizational arrangements and ideologies.

So yes — in terms of anthropological insight, sociological critique, and moral clarity, Sahlins was deeply right. He identified that poverty is not a fact of nature but a configuration of power, a mirror of civilization’s inequities rather than an absence of things.

If there’s a critique to be made, it’s that this framing can risk obscuring real material deprivation if taken too glibly. But when read attentively, Sahlins invites us not to ignore suffering, but to ask: why do we tolerate a world that generates poverty so systematically? And what would it take to un-invent it?