The New Science of the Enchanted Univ..., Marshall Sahlins
The New Science of the Enchanted Univ..., Marshall Sahlins
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The New Science of the Enchanted Universe
An Anthropology of Most of Humanity

Author: Marshall Sahlins

Narrator: BJ Harrison

Unabridged: 8 hr 26 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 04/25/2023


Synopsis

From the perspective of Western modernity, humanity inhabits a disenchanted cosmos. Gods, spirits, and ancestors have left us for a transcendent beyond. 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 listeners around the world. 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.

About Marshall Sahlins

Marshall Sahlins (1930-2021) was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and the author of many books, including Stone Age Economics and Culture and Practical Reason.


Reviews

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,......more

Goodreads review by Nobody

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......more

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......more

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 t......more

Goodreads review by Grant

Fascinating.......more