The new science of the enchanted universe: An anthropology of most of humanity By MarshallSahlins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022. 208 pp.

The late Marshall Sahlins has left us a treatise that seeks no less than to redirect cultural anthropology toward a truer understanding of how “most of humanity,” since the beginning, has thought about its place in the world. Running throughout the book is a contrast between two types of societies and perspectives. One is the oldest and most widely distributed: “immanentist” peoples think that all that they do involves the volition and actions of supernatural or “more than human” beings. The cosmos is immanent in everyday life; therefore, in distinguishing between “spiritual” and “material” realities, we fundamentally misrecognize how these peoples see and live the world. On the other hand, “transcendentalist” people find gods to be distant from everyday life. The analytical problem is that Western thinkers, not only (but certainly including) anthropologists, study all societies using the tools and assumptions of transcendentalist ones. To repair this, argues Sahlins, we must reconfigure our language (and thereby our way of thinking) such that we study immanentist societies on their own terms. For example, to speak of a people “believing” something contrasts with people “knowing” another thing, implicitly distinguishing false from true beliefs. So doing misrepresents “the native's point of view” and violates a fundamental tenet of an anthropological approach. We might add that it also conceals the quite specific history of the verb to believe, explored by Smith (1991) in his foundational study of “religion,” and also points to Needham's (1972) somewhat forgotten exploration of “belief, language and experience.” (We should not forget the affinities between the Boasian cultural account and the British approach, well exemplified by the later work of Evans-Pritchard [1956].) At work, and thus at fault, here is the “axial age,” the period roughly from 800 to 300 BCE, when some societies came to understand the world in a new way, as articulated by a world-splitting divide between the natural and the supernatural, the latter the realm of a remote god or gods, not of this world but acting on it from afar. To make the argument about a global, initial distribution of an immanentist perspective, Sahlins first builds up a set of similarities drawn from ethnographies of native people in Melanesia, the Amazon, North America, and elsewhere. He takes the very breadth of their distribution as proof that they indicate how most people have lived in the world for most of human history. These immanentist societies are small scale and egalitarian, such as the Achuar of the Upper Amazon, the North American Naskapi and Cree peoples, the Arctic Inuit, the Trobriand Islanders of Melanesia, the South African Thonga, the Dinka and Nuer peoples of the Sudan, and a number of societies in Papua New Guinea and the Indonesian archipelago. Sahlins's second step is to take the “risk” and generalize from these cases to the world of immanentist societies—a risk and a reach that Sahlins attributes to Edmund Leach, who championed generalization by induction over the “butterfly collecting” that he attributed to cross-cultural comparison (pp. 14–15). For example, Sahlins asserts that “supreme gods—more often plural than singular—are universal in the cultures of immanence, no matter how ‘egalitarian’ or loosely organized the human society itself” (p. 107). This generalization carries theoretical import. The fact that some egalitarian societies contain hierarchical views of the cosmos, what Sahlins calls the “cosmic polity,” disproves the Durkheimian claim that the religious order is modeled on the social order. He adds that Durkheim and others made this error because they were misled by their postaxial, transcendentalist perspective. These arguments build on and extend two long-standing themes in Sahlins's writings. One is that human motivations are broader than the reductive forms of economism or nationalism would admit. A second is the Boasian focus on cultural orders as shaping everyday experience and ways of life—not as reflecting an ontologically determinant order such as society (as per Durkheim) or production (as per Marx). Combining these two themes has proved a powerful way to both insist on the cultural breadth of humanity and mount critiques of dominant Western assumptions about human nature. What distinguishes The New Science from earlier works? Sahlins himself likens his approach to that of James Frazer, with the proviso that while Frazer was a transcendentalist, Sahlins, even if carrying out the same sort of accumulating example after example—the “among the” approach—does so by developing his own distinctive immanentist view. But the approach leaves us with a dualist perspective: we sort peoples into one or the other of these two perspectives. Is this the whole story of most of humanity? Perhaps we need a stronger sense of radical change and cultural transformations. In recent decades, we cultural anthropologists have been focused on tracing the cultural logics of debates and interpretations. People engage in culturally transformative encounters, often emerging from precisely the same sources of dissonance over questions of power and being that Sahlins identifies. What if we reconfigured the opposition between immanence and transcendence to characterize these reconfigurations? Could we broaden the argument's scope to include that large portion of humanity where people manage distinct relationships to distinct logics and create new ways of thinking about the world? In some societies, people pursue an immanentist relationship to many of their everyday activities, for example, assuring the fertility of crops and curing illnesses. They may call on the grain and the illness themselves to desist from harming them. Yet they also call on a transcendentalist order based in Islam or in Catholicism, or another transcendent source of power. These combinations of perspective produce strongly felt dissonances to which we must listen. The “native's point of view” is often plural and contested. The New Science is replete with the quips and asides that have always made reading or listening to Sahlins a both enjoyable and stimulating experience. We can all be grateful to the friends and family who helped carry the project through.

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