The New Science of the Enchanted Universe: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity, by Marshall Sahlins
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I n the final years of his life, before his death in April 2021, Marshall Sahlins remained unsatisfied with the state of the discipline of anthropology.To address this situation, he set out to write a three-part magnum opus.As he explains in the preface to The New Science of the Enchanted Universe, this volume was to be the first in the series, setting out the ontological stakes: most of the planet, he argues, still lives in an immanent "regime" where the divine is intrinsic and constitutive to all human affairs.Yet, with a mix of hubris and condescension, most anthropology today studies those peoples with transcendentalist, disenchanted categories, understanding their cultures as a caricature of Euro-American worlds.Sahlins' project, therefore, was to lay the groundwork for a revolution in the discipline.His intent was to write a second volume on "Enchanted Economics," and a third and final volume on "Cosmic Politics," but he passed away as he was putting the very final touches on the first contribution.His historian son and a former graduate student tidied up the manuscript and brought it to print about a year after his death.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".