Reflecting the decline in college courses on Western Civilization, Marshall Sahlins aims to accelerate the trend by reducing "Western Civ" to about two hours. He cites Nietzsche to the effect that deep issues are like cold baths; one should get into and out of them as quickly as possible. The deep issue here is the ancient Western specter of a presocial and antisocial human nature: a supposedly innate self-interest that is represented in our native folklore as the basis or nemesis of cultural order. Yet these Western notions of nature and culture ignore the one truly universal character of human sociality: namely, symbolically constructed kinship relations. Kinsmen are members of one another: they live each other's lives and die each other's deaths. But where the existence of the other is thus incorporated in the being of the self, neither interest, nor agency or even experience is an individual fact, let alone an egoistic disposition. -- Description from http://www.press.uchicago.edu (Oct. 24, 2011).

This book presents the history of the Gomez, an elite family of Mexico that today includes several hundred individuals, plus their spouses and the families of their spouses, all living in Mexico City. Tracing the family from its origins in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico through its rise under the Porfirio Diaz regime and focusing especially on the last three generations, the work shows how the Gomez have evolved a distinctive subculture and an ability to advance their economic interests under changing political and economic conditions. One of the authors' major findings is the importance of the kinship system, particularly the three-generation "grandfamily" as a basic unit binding together people of different generations and different classes. The authors show that the top entrepreneurs in the family, the direct descendants of its founder, remain the acknowledged leaders of the kin, each one ruling his business as a patron-owner through a network of clienty2Drelatives. Other family members, though belonging to the middle class, identify ideologically with the family leadership and the bourgeoisie, and family values tend to overrule considerations of strictly business interest even among entrepreneurs.