The New Science of the Enchanted Universe: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity
By Marshall Sahlins
Princeton University Press, 2022

The New Science of the Enchanted Universe, the new posthumous book by legendary anthropologist Marhsall Sahlins (completed and readied for publication by independent scholar Frederick Henry), begins solidly enough, despite a shaky simile: the mind, Sahlins was told by historian Karl Polani many years ago, is like a man with a crippled hand trying to retrieve an object from a table. Eventually the man will find a way, Polani taught Sahlins, but only by conforming his task to his disability – which is interesting when you consider how it reflects the often limited abilities of human cognition but becomes a hell of a lot more wobbly when you ask, in this simile, what’s the table? What’s the object? And most importantly, what’s a non-crippled hand? If the inquiring mind is a crippled, groping hand, what’s a fully-functional hand? It opens the door to supernaturalist thinking.

But as The New Science of the Enchanted Universe opens, things are still on solid footing. Sahlins points out that vast numbers of human societies have had an immanent rather than a transcendent conception of the supernatural as it relates to the ordinary everyday world. He delves into what it means for a society to believe that their gods and goblins are right there, immediately, immanently present at every turn, for every decision, inside every tool or table or book, what it means if those gods and goblins haven’t been safely relegated to some distant heavenly realm. 

When Sahlins is investigating what such immanence would mean in the tangible realms of literature, politics, and even economics, his insights are uniformly interesting. But when those insights turn from anthropology to passionate woo-infused metaphysics, they also start being alarming:

To keep in mind: the “spirits” are real, active co-workers in human economic projects. To consider here: for all their usual invisibility, the spirits are co-present with humans in the same reality. The spirits may be invisible to the people, but the people are visible to the spirits. Because they are normally – but not always or necessarily – invisible does not mean they are somewhere else, on some other plane of existence. Lots of things I know for a fact I have never seen, like the Sahara Desert; some I could not possibly see, like George Washington or Geronimo. It is incorrect to conclude, as ethnographers sometimes have, that the gods, ghosts, and other metapersons, because they are unseen or exist elsewhere as in the sky or distant mountains, are denizens of a reality or world beyond the human. 

The central problem here should be big enough to spot from a great distance, yes? There’s an enormous amount of disinterested, objective, testable, measurable physical evidence for the existence of the Sahara Desert, or the fact that George Washington and Geronimo actually lived. That measurable, objective evidence is the reason we not only say such things exist but know they do. Needless to say, there is no such measurable, objective evidence for gods and goblins, the “metapersons’ Sahlins starts out studying and seems to end up seeing. The two things are no in any way equivalent. A thing that has not one single shred of measurable, objective evidence to indicate its existence is at the very least necessarily operating on some other plane of existence. And since there’s not one single shred of measurable, objective evidence that other planes of existence actually exist, it’s probably more parsimonious to say gods and goblins don’t exist at all. 

At one point Sahlins proposes a thought experiment: 

Suppose all the “magical” things that make our current lives – all the appurtenances, meaningful and technical, whose substance and forces we do not make ourselves – were recognized by and as their humanized effects. Suppose they were proper subjects with real agency … We look at the television set which by some extraordinary powers brings us images of persons and things that we understand to be real existents, real persons and images … Subjectively speaking, how different is that from people, things, and events we see in dreams – and are real enough when we are dreaming?

With all due respect for a man who was quite rightly regarded as a legend in his own lifetime, this is a stupid thought experiment – it’s rather an experiment in not thinking. It works fine as a way of illuminating what living day-to-day in an immanent society would be like, where every item had agency and every detail was divine. But it in no way illuminates a world in which it isn’t, in fact, “extraordinary powers” that bring us TV and the Internet but rather Verizon, and in which those things are not, in fact, magical but rather technological – learnable, teachable, measurable, and reproducible. 

As The New Science of the Enchanted Universe progresses, its author seems less and less willing to acknowledge one key aspect of immanent societies: they’re wrong. They’re wrong that goblins cause radios to operate; they’re wrong that goblins cause hail to fall. When such societies see things for which science and reason have discerned actual, testable, objective causes and instead insist on goblins, those societies are in error. 

The fact that so many societies in human history have seen themselves as living in an “enchanted universe” is fascinating, and to the extent that Marshall Sahlins investigates that fact, so is his book. As for the book’s apparent eagerness for the universe to actually BE enchanted, well, wouldn’t it be nice to think so?

-Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.