The New Science of the Enchanted Universe

One of the strong endorsements for this book states that the author has never published a book that didn’t change how anthropologists think about the way humans live. This is certainly true, and shows how far anthropology has come since its culturally imperialistic origins in the late 19^th century resulting in such works as the 12-volume Golden Bough by Sir JG Frazer and Primitive Culture by Sir Edward Tylor which I used as sources for my 1984 book Survival?. ‘Primitive’ was contrasted with modern in a scheme of evolutionary progression and emergence from superstition. Since that time, anthropology has become much more participatory, but this book goes even further in pointing out that most of humanity has lived in immanent and enchanted cultures, while the modern West lives in an alienated, secular and disenchanted cosmos of its own making.

After a comprehensive introduction, the four chapters cover human finitude, immanence, metapersons, and the Cosmic Polity. Sahlins’ vision has much in common with that of Thomas Berry (‘a communion of subjects’) and Brian Swimme, though their work is not mentioned here. He identifies the essential change dating back as far as the Axial Age as ‘the translation of divinity from an immanent presence in human activity to a transcendental “other world” of its own reality, leaving the earth alone to humans, now free to create their own institutions by their own means and lights.’ (p. 2) This transformation is one of divinity ‘from an immanent infrastructure to a transcendent superstructure.’ Immanent cultures are surrounded by a host of spiritual beings (‘metapersons’) who play an active role in their lives as a substrate of human action, currently framed by us as fundamentally economic.

Importantly, this transcendental perspective has led to a suite of binary oppositions, for instance between the spiritual and the material or secular, natural and supernatural, and people and spirits. The immanent perspective also provides the lens for the study of Anima Mundi reviewed below. Aristotle’s categories had a profound effect on the mediaeval outlook, and re-configured its ontology away from intersubjectivity towards objectivity, subsequently reinforced by Cartesian dualism. In this erudite study, Sahlins employs indigenous ‘onto-logics’ in a radical undermining of the conventional conceptual apparatus, ‘composed of nearly equal parts of transcendentalist equivocation and colonialist condescension’ exemplified by Sir Raymond Firth and Sir Edmund Leach. (p. 11) Terms such as ethnocentric, belief and myth need to be rectified.

We all share the limits of human finitude, although we understand this in different ways: we are not fully in control of our lives. Transcendental and immanent cultures are very different ways of making sense of the world in terms of agency and causality. They live in very different worlds – in the first, spirits are unreal, while in the second they play a central role: ‘The spirits may be invisible to the people, but the people are visible to the spirits.’ (p. 41) Indeed, people are spirits, as Swedenborg also maintained; humans are metaphysical beings. Theirs is a world filled with other-than-human persons endowed with greater-than-human powers. (p. 70) Some of these are ancestors, while others are anti-human demons.

What the author calls the Cosmic Polity is a hierarchical cosmology of which human society is a reflection, rather than the other way around. This leads him to assert that ‘we need something like a Copernican revolution within anthropological perspective: from human society as the centre of the universe upon which it projects its own forms – that is, the received transcendentalist wisdom – to the immanentist condition: the ethnographic realities of people’s dependence on encompassing life-giving and death-dealing powers essentially persons like themselves, who rule earthly existence.’ (p. 137) The gods are immanent in human affairs and sanction the authority of kingship. Modern societies have inverted the relationship between the heavenly and the earthly, the invisible and the visible. The result is that ‘enlightened social science sucks the substance out of divinity, turning the gods literally into nonentities, phantom creatures of Thought, in the service of the human powers that be to validate their legitimacy and consecrate their authority.’ (p. 172)

The forces engaged by immanent cultures are not imagined, but rather ‘real, empirical, life-giving and death-dealing forces…. People are lesser, dependent beings of an enchanted universe’ and it is hubris to think otherwise. This is a bracing and hugely significant argument widely illustrated from worldwide immanent cultures, and the thesis can even be read as a mode of restorative justice. A worthy legacy indeed.