What statues and culture have in common and abstract economy and politics have not

Marshall Sahlins, in "Culture and Practical Reason", Chicago University Press, 1976.

“Shortly before the events of May 1968, I had the opportunity to witness an informal debate between an American member of the Russell Tribunal – passing through Paris from Copenhagen, where he had learned of the structuralist vogue from French colleagues – and a Parisian anthropologist. After a long period of question and discussion, the American summed up his views in this way: “I have a friend”, he said, “who is doing a sociological study of the equestrian statues in Central Park. It’s a kind of structuralism. He finds a direct relation between the cultural status of the rider and the number of legs the horse has off the ground. One leg poised has a different historical and political connotation from a horse rearing on hind legs or another cast in flying gallop. Of course the size of the statue also makes a difference. The trouble is”, he concluded, “people don’t ride horses anymore. The things in a society that are obsolete, out of contention, those you can structure. But the real economic and political issues are undecided, and the decision will depend on real forces and resources.”
The Parisian anthropologist thought about that a moment. “It is true,” he finally said, “that people don’t ride horses anymore. But they still build statues.”
Something more was implied than that the past was not dead – because, as has been said of the American South, it is not even past. It was also intended that economics and politics have modalities other than the “real” competition for power. [..] The competition does not evolve absolutely, on an eternal and formal rationality of maximization; it develops according to a system of cultural relationships, including complex notions of authority and submission, hierarchy and legitimization. And among other means, it is by a literal concretization of this code into statues that history is made to act within the present, at once directly and through its dialectical reappropriation and revaluation.” (p 19-20)

A wonderful story-style assertion on why anthropology, discourse analysis and cultural theory may exist, must exist and do exist.