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The New Science of the Enchanted Universe: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity
One of the world’s preeminent cultural anthropologists leaves a last work that fundamentally reconfigures how we study most other culturesFrom the perspective of Western modernity, humanity inhabits a disenchanted cosmos. Gods, spirits, and ancestors have left us for a transcendent beyond, no longer living in our midst and being involved in all matters of everyday life from the trivial to the dire. Yet the vast majority of cultures throughout human history treat spirits as very real persons, members of a cosmic society who interact with humans and control their fate. In most cultures, even today, people are but a small part of an enchanted universe misconstrued by the transcendent categories of “religion” and the “supernatural.” The New Science of the Enchanted Universe shows how anthropologists and other social scientists must rethink these cultures of immanence and study them by their own lights.In this, his last, revelatory book, Marshall Sahlins announces a new method and sets an exciting agenda for the field. He takes readers around the world, from Inuit of the Arctic Circle to pastoral Dinka of East Africa, from Araweté swidden gardeners of Amazonia to Trobriand Island horticulturalists. In the process, Sahlins sheds new light on classical and contemporary ethnographies that describe these cultures of immanence and reveals how even the apparently mundane, all-too-human spheres of “economics” and “politics” emerge as people negotiate with, and ultimately usurp, the powers of the gods.The New Science of the Enchanted Universe offers a road map for a new practice of anthropology that takes seriously the enchanted universe and its transformations from ancient Mesopotamia to contemporary America.
205 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2022
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725 people want to read
About the author
Marshall Sahlins
52 books147 followersMarshall David Sahlins was an American cultural anthropologist best known for his ethnographic work in the Pacific and for his contributions to anthropological theory. He was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
February 28, 2024
While reading this last, posthumously-published work from one of America’s preeminent anthropologists, I was reminded of a scene from the film Little Big Man: a quasi-satirical anti-western from the Vietnam era, which we were shown in one of my high school history classes. Holding up a human scalp, Old Lodge Skins, a Cheyenne elder, explains to Jack Crabb, a white man who has lived in both Cheyenne and Anglo-American society, his understanding of the essential difference between the European and Native American worldviews:
Replace “the human beings” with cultures of immanence—a category which includes virtually all premodern societies, and indeed many peoples living even today—and “the white man” with transcendentalism—the modern, “secular” culture that prides itself on objectivity, empiricism, and instrumental reason; expelling gods, spirits, faeries, and animal guardians beyond a conceptual horizon of transcendence—and then consider that most ethnographies are conducted by “modern” people who conceptualize the cultures they study in terms of their own (usually unconscious) transcendentalist assumptions, and you more-or-less have the thesis of this book.
For the vast majority of human history, most people lived in a world that was utterly pervaded by spiritual agencies (Sahlins frequently refers to them as “metapersons”) with whom every aspect of life, every endeavor conditioned by human dependency on “external” non-human forces—hunting, fishing, building, birthing, planting, warmaking—had to be negotiated. In such cultures, the shared ground of reality is not objectivity, but inter-subjectivity. Personhood is not derived from some pure, lifeless facticity of things, but rather the reverse is true: the objective world is a manifestation of personal energy, personal intention. The person is the noumenon, the thing in itself; but unlike the Kantian noumenon, it is knowable precisely because it is a living, spiritual reality with subjectivity, consciousness, agency, and intentionality, which can be interacted with on an interpersonal basis.
Metapersons are not always visible—though in many cultures the spirits of ancestors, animals, and even superficially “inanimate” objects like the sun and moon appear as human beings in dreams and visions, when human and non-human spirits alike slip free from their empirical “envelopes” and commune freely—but this makes them no less “real” and immediate to everyday human experience at both the individual and social levels. Indeed, according to some animistic cosmologies, all things were originally human before falling out of communion with us, taking on the forms of animals, rivers, trees, stars, and clouds, becoming reluctant to speak with us directly after we offended them in some way. One thinks of Enkidu returning to his watering hole after making love with Shamhat to find himself permanently estranged from the other animals; or of a certain legendary Garden in which humans could speak with snakes and were unaware of their nakedness. In such a world there is no distinction between nature and the supernatural, for everything exists within a single enchanted continuum: humans share their cosmos with a vast and diverse array of metapersons who enable everything they do and determine the entire course of their lives.
Transcendentalism—the establishment of an impersonal concept of “pure nature” or “pure objectivity” and the attendant relegation of metapersonal agencies to a transcendent realm, allowing for the unmediated technical manipulation and consumption of the world, now reduced to a mere thing, by a self-deified, self-authoring humanity—is the great cultural revolution of human history, unfolding gradually since the first Axial Age of the 8th to 3rd centuries BC. Most of what we call “modernity” is merely the continuing and accelerating disenchantment of reality. Immersed in such a culture, so fundamentally alien to those they study, many anthropologists and social scientists invert the self-understanding of immanentist societies.
To illustrate this, Sahlins compares Émile Durkheim with Giambattista Vico in terms of their contrasting conceptions of the nature of divinity in premodern cultures. Durkheim, thinking like a transcendentalist, saw the divine as a projection of internal human forces—material conditions, social arrangements, psychological needs and desires, etc.—onto an idealized canvas. Humanity effectively created the gods in its own image, to serve its own needs. For Vico, by contrast, the divine was not the externalization of human subjectivity, but rather the subjectification or hypostatization of external forces, of all the conditionality of the world by which people live and die. Animistic humanity really did serve the gods, because the gods were the human faces of the radical and pervasive conditionality and dependency of its existence. That the title of this book is a nod to Vico’s The New Science is enough of a hint that Sahlins sided with Vico on this matter, considering him the first proper anthropologist.
Yet another reason for me to finally read Vico.
Do you see this fine thing? Do you admire the humanity of it? Because the human beings [that is, the Cheyenne], my son, they believe everything is alive. Not only man and animals. But also water, earth, stone. And also the things from them...like that hair. The man from whom this hair came, he's bald on the other side, because I now own his scalp! That is the way things are. But the white man, they believe everything is dead. Stone, earth, animals. And people! Even their own people! If things keep trying to live, white man will rub them out! That is the difference.
Replace “the human beings” with cultures of immanence—a category which includes virtually all premodern societies, and indeed many peoples living even today—and “the white man” with transcendentalism—the modern, “secular” culture that prides itself on objectivity, empiricism, and instrumental reason; expelling gods, spirits, faeries, and animal guardians beyond a conceptual horizon of transcendence—and then consider that most ethnographies are conducted by “modern” people who conceptualize the cultures they study in terms of their own (usually unconscious) transcendentalist assumptions, and you more-or-less have the thesis of this book.
For the vast majority of human history, most people lived in a world that was utterly pervaded by spiritual agencies (Sahlins frequently refers to them as “metapersons”) with whom every aspect of life, every endeavor conditioned by human dependency on “external” non-human forces—hunting, fishing, building, birthing, planting, warmaking—had to be negotiated. In such cultures, the shared ground of reality is not objectivity, but inter-subjectivity. Personhood is not derived from some pure, lifeless facticity of things, but rather the reverse is true: the objective world is a manifestation of personal energy, personal intention. The person is the noumenon, the thing in itself; but unlike the Kantian noumenon, it is knowable precisely because it is a living, spiritual reality with subjectivity, consciousness, agency, and intentionality, which can be interacted with on an interpersonal basis.
Metapersons are not always visible—though in many cultures the spirits of ancestors, animals, and even superficially “inanimate” objects like the sun and moon appear as human beings in dreams and visions, when human and non-human spirits alike slip free from their empirical “envelopes” and commune freely—but this makes them no less “real” and immediate to everyday human experience at both the individual and social levels. Indeed, according to some animistic cosmologies, all things were originally human before falling out of communion with us, taking on the forms of animals, rivers, trees, stars, and clouds, becoming reluctant to speak with us directly after we offended them in some way. One thinks of Enkidu returning to his watering hole after making love with Shamhat to find himself permanently estranged from the other animals; or of a certain legendary Garden in which humans could speak with snakes and were unaware of their nakedness. In such a world there is no distinction between nature and the supernatural, for everything exists within a single enchanted continuum: humans share their cosmos with a vast and diverse array of metapersons who enable everything they do and determine the entire course of their lives.
Transcendentalism—the establishment of an impersonal concept of “pure nature” or “pure objectivity” and the attendant relegation of metapersonal agencies to a transcendent realm, allowing for the unmediated technical manipulation and consumption of the world, now reduced to a mere thing, by a self-deified, self-authoring humanity—is the great cultural revolution of human history, unfolding gradually since the first Axial Age of the 8th to 3rd centuries BC. Most of what we call “modernity” is merely the continuing and accelerating disenchantment of reality. Immersed in such a culture, so fundamentally alien to those they study, many anthropologists and social scientists invert the self-understanding of immanentist societies.
To illustrate this, Sahlins compares Émile Durkheim with Giambattista Vico in terms of their contrasting conceptions of the nature of divinity in premodern cultures. Durkheim, thinking like a transcendentalist, saw the divine as a projection of internal human forces—material conditions, social arrangements, psychological needs and desires, etc.—onto an idealized canvas. Humanity effectively created the gods in its own image, to serve its own needs. For Vico, by contrast, the divine was not the externalization of human subjectivity, but rather the subjectification or hypostatization of external forces, of all the conditionality of the world by which people live and die. Animistic humanity really did serve the gods, because the gods were the human faces of the radical and pervasive conditionality and dependency of its existence. That the title of this book is a nod to Vico’s The New Science is enough of a hint that Sahlins sided with Vico on this matter, considering him the first proper anthropologist.
Yet another reason for me to finally read Vico.
June 29, 2022
One of the very few books which deeply change the way you look at the world. And initially I didn’t even appreciate this book. After reading the first 50 pages, I abandoned it, but a few weeks later I decided to give it another try and only then I understood its importance
November 17, 2025
A competitor for most interesting book I have read in 2025!
October 19, 2024
Instead of a review, some notes:
Metapersons and the things they inhabit and are seem to be somewhat similar to “Actors” in Acteur Network Theory, but in ANT there are actions but no intent and an as-if-treatment; Metapersons have intent (even if often unclear and incomprehensible) and they are not as-if Metapersons in a experiment of thinking but to be treated as such.
Metapersons and the things they inhabit and are seem to be somewhat similar to “Actors” in Acteur Network Theory, but in ANT there are actions but no intent and an as-if-treatment; Metapersons have intent (even if often unclear and incomprehensible) and they are not as-if Metapersons in a experiment of thinking but to be treated as such.
February 13, 2024
Sahlins’s final book is one of those rare gems that turns everything upside down, transforming how we see the world. The new science of the enchanted universe is a call for ‘social science... to adapt itself and take seriously the cultural praxes of others’.
Sahlins explains that most humans, in most places, most of the time, understood the universe as animate and imminent; in so doing, he develops a fascinating ontology (world-view) of the cosmos. He convincingly argues this by bringing together anthropology and countless ethnographies, with some history and archaeology, combining knowledge from and beyond communities, including indigenous Australia, the Amazon, Inuit communities, and ancient Mesopotamia.
The book teams with profound and insightful points, masterfully mixing detailed treatment of ethnographic examples with occasional quips on Weber, Durkheim, Marx and others. My favourite chapters were the Introduction and Chapter Five ‘The Cosmic Polity’. The Introduction outlines Sahlins’s beguilingly simple yet powerful point that most humans have lived in an animate and imminent universe. I found chapter 5, ‘The Cosmic Polity', especially profound in outlining the seeming universality of cosmological hierarchies, explaining counterintuitively how ‘the state of nature has the nature of the state’. Sahlins explains that ‘human society is a fractional part of a much larger, cosmic society populated by a multiplicity of different kinds of persons, many organized in their own societies, and all more or less ordered, empowered, and encompassed by the greatest of them, deities of this cosmic polity— this cosmopoliteia.’
The book links to ideas found in Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, Philippe Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture, and David Graeber & Marshall Sahlins's
On Kings
‘Beyond Nature and Culture’, and Graeber and Sahlins’ ‘On Kings’.
This is a book for opening up new and interesting questions. I am excited to hear what my fellow readers, friends, colleagues and students make of it.
Five stars from me! ☆☆☆☆☆
Sahlins explains that most humans, in most places, most of the time, understood the universe as animate and imminent; in so doing, he develops a fascinating ontology (world-view) of the cosmos. He convincingly argues this by bringing together anthropology and countless ethnographies, with some history and archaeology, combining knowledge from and beyond communities, including indigenous Australia, the Amazon, Inuit communities, and ancient Mesopotamia.
The book teams with profound and insightful points, masterfully mixing detailed treatment of ethnographic examples with occasional quips on Weber, Durkheim, Marx and others. My favourite chapters were the Introduction and Chapter Five ‘The Cosmic Polity’. The Introduction outlines Sahlins’s beguilingly simple yet powerful point that most humans have lived in an animate and imminent universe. I found chapter 5, ‘The Cosmic Polity', especially profound in outlining the seeming universality of cosmological hierarchies, explaining counterintuitively how ‘the state of nature has the nature of the state’. Sahlins explains that ‘human society is a fractional part of a much larger, cosmic society populated by a multiplicity of different kinds of persons, many organized in their own societies, and all more or less ordered, empowered, and encompassed by the greatest of them, deities of this cosmic polity— this cosmopoliteia.’
The book links to ideas found in Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, Philippe Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture, and David Graeber & Marshall Sahlins's
On Kings
‘Beyond Nature and Culture’, and Graeber and Sahlins’ ‘On Kings’.
This is a book for opening up new and interesting questions. I am excited to hear what my fellow readers, friends, colleagues and students make of it.
Five stars from me! ☆☆☆☆☆
April 6, 2024
When I see "The New Science of..." and after reading the intro, I expect up-to-date anthropological research, but it is nowhere to be found. This book was rather a Spotify list of 20th-century anthropologists' works, on which the author commented and interpreted in simplified language. Besides all the familiar names in anthropology, there was Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer (my favorite). All the works were written in a distant time and most of them mentioned ethnicities that common people had never heard of. His interpretation was comprehensive, but the description was not, and I am not sure if the mentioned ethnic people still practice those customs nowadays. In general, I don't think plain commentary on past works should be called new science; it does not embrace cultural relativism. But if you are looking for a guide on how to talk about religion and spirituality backed up by past anthropological works, this is the one!
February 1, 2023
Fascinating.
March 23, 2024
Piccoli elementi che regalano spunti di riflessione e nuove convinzioni.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews