SCIENCE science.org 6 MAY 2022 • VOL 376 ISSUE 6593 587PHOTO: GEORG BERG/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
By Jonathan SpencerI
n the last decade of his long and extraor-
dinarily creative life as an anthropologist,
Marshall Sahlins, who died aged 90 in
2021, found a new voice on social media.
On Facebook, he railed with his custom-
ary sharp wit, mostly against the state of
US politics but also sometimes against the
state of US anthropology. One of his posts,
from 2017, which he titled “Where have all the
cultures gone?” and described as an “emeri-
tus rant,” spread virally, generating endorse-
ments and attacks in equal
measure. In the post, Sahlins
asked what had happened to
anthropology as “the encom-
passing human science” and,
more specifically, why had a
new generation apparently
turned its back on the accumu-
lated knowledge of human di-
versity that had once been the
discipline’s stock in trade? The
New Science of the Enchanted
Universe, completed with the
help of friends and family in
Sahlins’s final months, is in
many ways the continuation of
that argument, albeit recast in
a more conventional scholarly
form, with considerable erudi-
tion (and no little humor).
The New Science, which
takes its title in a mildly ironic homage to
the philosopher Giambattista Vico, was origi-
nally conceived of as the introductory volume
in a trilogy. The other two volumes, on “En-
chanted Economics” and “Cosmic Politics,”
will presumably never appear. Although this
is a loss, there is no doubt that Sahlins’s New
Science can stand alone as a characteristically
feisty final statement from one of the greatest
anthropologists of the past century.
The book is animated by a strong central
premise: that most human beings for most of
our known history inhabited cultural worlds
in which nonhuman entities—spirits, gods,
or Sahlins’s preferred terms, “metapersons”
and “metahumans”—played a constant and
decisive part in human affairs. Our ability toacknowledge and understand this state of af-
fairs is inhibited, often fatally, he argues, by
the intellectual biases that have accompanied
the world-historical shift from “immanent”
understandings of divinity in the world to
“transcendental” perspectives that displace
divinity to another world with less direct en-
gagement in everyday human affairs. That
shift, which saw the birth of universalist re-
ligions, was characterized by the philosopher
Karl Jaspers as the “Axial Age,” a term that
has spawned its own subfield in the history
and sociology of religion.Sahlins is not, however, especially inter-
ested in the historical and sociological argu-
ments about the tension between immanent
and transcendental tendencies in the history
of the world religions. His use of the Axial
Age argument is rather more limited and,
one suspects, strategic: He uses it to group
together examples from ancient history and
more recent ethnography, from pre-Axial civ-
ilizations, and from classic accounts of what
are now thought of as Indigenous peoples.
The ancestor whose spirit animates the
bulk of the book is not Jaspers but rather the
inventive but little-known British anthropol-
ogist-archaeologist A. M. Hocart. Indeed, the
main lineaments of Sahlins’s argument in
The New Science, and many of the strongest
examples he discusses, were set out earlier in
a 2016 lecture, published as “The Original Po-
litical Society” ( 1 ). That lecture was the first—
and thus far only—Hocart Memorial Lectureand was republished in a brilliant collection
of essays on kingship, co-written with Sahl-
ins’s protégé, the late David Graeber ( 2 ).
Hocart had argued that humans lived
with gods before they lived with kings and
that the beginnings of complex adminis-
trative orders lay in complex ritual orders,
which only later became adapted to the
process we would recognize as government.
This provides the blueprint for Sahlins’s
delineation of the main features of his en-
chanted universe, the world as lived and un-
derstood by most humans most of the time.
Sahlins’s account runs across
four thematic chapters on
human finitude, immanence,
metapersons, and what he
calls the “cosmic polity.”
The book’s examples come
from classic work by earlier
anthropologists and histori-
cal cases taken from Sahlins’s
wide and sometimes surpris-
ing reading, supplemented by
more recent work from Mel-
anesia and Amazonia. Those
two regions have been the fa-
vored sites of what has become
known as the “ontological
turn” in recent anthropology,
a call to recognize the strong
ontological claims implicit
in other peoples’ accounts of
their worlds. Sahlins echoes
the common rhetorical claim in this more
recent literature that other anthropologists
fail to take other people’s claims about the
world seriously. He does not, however, fol-
low some other anthropologists who have
been gleefully finding evidence of immanent
reenchantment in the most unlikely of mod-
ern settings ( 3 ).
Famous for his aphorisms, Sahlins once
claimed there were two certainties: “‘In the
long run, we all die and we are all wrong.
A good career is when the former happens
before the latter.” Readers will relish the op-
portunity that The New Science provides to
test that generalization. jREFERENCES AND NOTES- M. Sahlins,HAU 7 , 91 (2017).
- D. Graeber, M. Sahlins, On Kings (HAU Books, 2017).
- B. Meyer, P. Pels, Eds., Magic and Modernity(Stanford
Univ. Press, 2003).
10.1126/science.abo6935
ANTHROPOLOGYHidden influences
Beliefs about the vital roles played by spirits and gods have
long been underappreciated, argues an anthropologist
The New Science of
the Enchanted Universe
Marshall Sahlins,
with the assistance of
Frederick B. Henry Jr.
Princeton University Press,- 208 pp.
INSIGHTSTrobriand Islanders view their ancestors’ interventions as key to successful harvests.The reviewer is at the School of Social and Political
Science, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9LD, UK.
Email: [email protected]