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tags: science, publication
image: https://i.imgur.com/FfgnhVL.jpg
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# Hidden influences

Beliefs about the vital roles played by spirits and gods have long been underappreciated, argues an anthropologist

By Jonathan Spencer[^1]

> [](https://www.alamy.com/traditional-milamala-dance-of-trobriand-islands-during-the-festival-of-free-love-kwebwaga-papua-new-guinea-image339530988.html)
> -- Trobriand Islanders view their ancestors' interventions as key to successful harvests

In 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 miled 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 mant, 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 tumed its back on the accumu lated knowledge of human di versity that had once been the disciplines stock in trade? The New Sciece 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 endi tion (and no little humor).

The New Science, which takes its title in a mildly ironic homage to the philosopher Glambattista 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 nonhuman entities-spirits, gods, or Sahlins's preferred terms, "metapersons" and "metahumans"-played a constant and decisive part in human affairs. Our ability to acknowledge 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 arga- 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"[^2].

:::info
[The New Science of the Enchanted Universe](https://www.amazon.com/New-Science-Enchanted-Universe-Anthropology/dp/0691215928)

Marshall Sahlins with the assistance of Frederick B. Henry J Princeton University Press. 2022 208 pp
:::

That lecture was the first and thus far only-Hocart Memorial Lecture and was republished in a brilliant collection of essays on kingship, co-written with Sahlins's protégé, the late David Graeber[^3]. 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 be 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 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 modem settings[^4].
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 provides to test that generalization.

### REFERENCES AND NOTES

[^2]: M. Sahlins, HAU7.91 (2017)
[^3]: D. Graber M. Sahins. Ch Kings (HAU Books, 2017)
[^4]: B.Meyer P. Pels, Eds, Magic and Modimity(Stanford Univ Press, 2003).
[^1]: The reviewer is atthe School of Social and Political Science. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9LD UK Email jonathan spencered.ac.ok

10.1126/science abo6935

MAY 2022 VOL 376 ISSU 6593 587