Peter Sahlins

I’m a card-carrying historian, having trained with the best (Natalie Davis and Robert Darnton at Princeton University), who taught for three decades at the University of California, Berkeley. I was drawn to French history, but always with a difference: all of my work is about thinking from the margins, making sense of identities by focusing on Others.

My first book, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (1989), a rewrite of my Ph.d. dissertation, toppled the apple cart of received wisdom in looking at how national identity and belonging emerged first in the borderland. My second book, Forest Rites: The War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France (1994), originated as an undergraduate thesis and explored the topsy-turvy world of a peasant rebellion where young men cross-dressed and chased charcoal makers and forest guards out of their forests. I then moved to questions of nationality and immigration in the pre-French-revolutionary world, publishing a book in French with my colleague Jean-François Dubost with the (translated) title, And What if We Made Them Pay? Louis XIV, Immigrants, and a Few Others (1998). I then did a massive study of some 8000 naturalization grants from 1660 to 1819, Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After (1994). And then I moved on …. to animals, still thinking about how we can best make sense of identity by thinking about its Others. 1668: The Year of the Animal in France (2017) looked at Louis XIV’s royal menagerie and the hitherto unnoticed “animal moment” in 1668 when, in media from tapestry and statuary to philosophy and literature, animals were suddenly everywhere.

And now, Neanderthals Among Us: The Making of a Prehistoric Human takes the next step: what our modern obsession with a long-extinct human group reveals about our changing ideas of human uniqueness and our anxieties about racial and gender difference.

What’s next? Follow me to find out!