Sahlins, Marshall, The New Science of the Enchanted Universe: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press. 2022. 208 pages

In 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. Both the crux of the argument and the methodological key to the book, and presumably to the project that was to be, are laid out in the introduction. Not just in the obvious sense that this is the usual function of an introduction, but also because there is a noticeable difference in tone and style between it and what follows. That is, the introduction is close in style to an argumentative essay, and the rest of the book presents studies that speak to variations on the original and already presented theme. Sahlins argues that, between the eighth and third millennia BCE, the worldwide spread of civilizations from Greece, Northern India, China, and the Near East commenced a still ongoing 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” (2). In that immanent condition of the divine, Sahlins found no separation between the natural and the supernatural, but rather a condition in which everything is “enspirited” and people are empowered by their differential relations to the godly beings that surround them. This, he argues, is a condition of intersubjectivity (10). Achieving anything is, as such, conditional on the intervention of several of these other nonhuman beings, and on the kinds of relations people entertain with them. Sahlins argues that most of humanity still lived in cultures of “immanence” as he drafted this volume in the early 2020s. Meanwhile, the transcendental turn relegated God to a supernatural, unreachable realm, and carried on imagining autonomous domains—religion, the economy, politics—whose impersonal objectivity organizes and gives sense and coherence to human social relations. This is the regime anthropology partakes in, dissolving immanent worlds in its transcendental ontology, even at its best. Sahlins advances a corrective to this regime, to recast anthropology by seeking understanding through generalizations of the kind Edmund Leach favoured: inspired guesswork that looks to see patterns emerge in relations across contexts, in a manner that can build possible universal propositions (14). The book’s four chapters expand on the facets of the immanent regime. Each seeks patterns to generalize from an impressive array of ethnographic work and contexts, broad in historical and geographic scope: from work in late nineteenth century to recent ethnographies of the Arctic and Amazon, including also written historical sources from the last 500 years, and even the Bible. Chapter …