Previous articleNext article FreeBook SymposiumMarshall Sahlins, where are you? From the intellectual to the existential Comment on Sahlins, Marshall. 2022. The new science of the enchanted universe: An anthropology of most of humanity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Gordon MathewsGordon MathewsChinese University of Hong Kong Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreMarshall Sahlins depicts the cosmos of immanence before the Axial Age and its monotheistic religions, which transformed divinity from being immanent in all human activity to transcendent and removed. This does not mean that no one lives in an immanent cosmos in our world: “There are still faith healers and witches in our midst—even some … pure animists” (p. 5). However, it does mean that prevailing cultural assumptions about reality have fundamentally shifted. We no longer live in a world of spirits and metahumans that inhabit and shape all aspects of human life; the world in our age has been left “alone to humans, now free to create their own institutions by their own means and lights” (p. 2), often through Christianity and its effects on the colonized the world over, as well as Islam.This book explores the ontology of the immanent world in a range of societies around the world; Sahlins seems to have read virtually every ethnography of tribal peoples ever written, as well as an array of historical works on ancient societies.1 “In an enchanted universe, the natural/supernatural distinction becomes meaningless. Many of its denizens are not only the all-pervasive, unseen agents of the events of this world, they often make themselves visible in its phenomenal forms, as all kinds of animals and notably as humans, to enter into people’s daily lives in all kinds of ways” (p. 36). In fact, we too today live, in effect, in a world of immanence in terms of the nonhuman persons, our newspapers, computers, phones, institutions, and so on, that inform and shape us. Through this trope, Sahlins argues, we can imagine the animistic world in its explicit granting of metapersonhood to arrays of entities in this world: animistic spirits, masters of species and space, demons and ghosts, guardian spirits, ancestors, and gods.However, anthropologists have signally failed to understand this world, Sahlins maintains. In these immanent worlds, humans do not project their social structures onto a cosmological world, as anthropologists have typically maintained; rather, that cosmological world is the source, constant presence, and creator of human social worlds. Anthropologists have typically done their fieldwork in cultures of immanence, but because they themselves have been immersed in the transcendental assumptions of their age, they have been unable to fully comprehend those cultures, creating “an anthropology that disfigures both the discipline and the culture so described by maligning the people’s mentality as a mistaken sense of reality” (p. 11). Sahlins argues that “we need something like a Copernican revolution within anthropological perspective: from human society as the center of a 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 … who rule earthly existence” (p. 137).Sahlins does a masterful job of portraying this immanent world in this book, by bringing together societies as diverse as the Inuit and the Mesopotamian empire in their cosmologies. I am intellectually convinced by his argument. However, it does not go far enough. We of the modern world have indeed moved from immanence to transcendence in our perceptions of divinity and reality, but ultimately beyond transcendence to skepticism and disbelief, as Charles Taylor (2007) has discussed. We have moved from a cosmos in which spirits are everywhere, to one in which they have been removed to a distant realm, to one in which they are now nowhere, and where their public apprehension might lead the apprehender to be locked in a mental institution. When Durkheim, Marx, and myriad other social scientists consign the spiritual to a realm of superstructure, this is not only because they are caught up in transcendental assumptions of a distant divinity rather than a living spiritual world, but more, because they believe that the spiritual world does not really exist. It is safe to assume that most if not all the anthropologists quoted in Sahlins’s book believe that the spiritual worlds lived in by their tribal interlocutors are fictions: something anthropologists may describe as “cultural reality” but certainly not, if they were pressed, as “actual reality.” This is why at a deep level they have failed to comprehend the ontological reality of that world.Sahlins takes to task anthropologists and other social scientists for their failure of intellectual imagination. However, he does not look at the underlying presupposition this involves: that the world we live in at present is more comprehending of reality than were worlds of the past, as if to say, “We know what is real, but they didn’t.” This is the assumption that anthropologists have held almost universally, much as they might avow their intellectual faith in cultural relativism. Sahlins offers various examples of anthropologists’ statements of disbelief or incomprehension of the spiritual worlds they studied (p. 12–14); to take one more example, in his Witchcraft, oracles, and magic among the Azande ([1937] 1976: 18), Evans-Pritchard flatly declares, “witches, as the Azande conceive them, clearly cannot exist.” Anthropologists of later eras did sometimes experience witchcraft as a reality (Favret-Saada 1981); but it is safe to say that even the most fervent anthropological relativists and postmodernists typically have gone to Western medical doctors when they have fallen ill. This, to them, has been reality. Their ethnocentrism has not been simply intellectual, as Sahlins implies; it is existential.2My own recent research (Mathews forthcoming) has been on senses of life after death in the United States, Japan, and China today, exploring what people in these three societies think happens to them once they die. These envisionings in all three societies range from nothingness, to reincarnation, to heaven (however it may be conceived), to returning to nature, to becoming a familial ancestor, to being remembered in this world. Sahlins also writes of life after death. In the immanent world, “human souls are typically immortal … As a general rule, in immanentist regimes, the principal cultural value of the soul’s immortality is its life-giving transformation into another being, into an ancestor, ghost, animal, or another human, rather than the perpetuation of the individual as such. The soul remains in this world, as the animating-power of an altered form. Following something like the Law of Spiritual Dynamics, souls are not created or destroyed, but transferred from one being to another” (p. 48). Sahlins’s book was the first of an envisioned trilogy; he died at the age of ninety after finishing only this opening section, an intellectual tragedy for those of us who desired to follow him to the intellectual denouement of his journey. These thoughts lead me to an impertinent question. Marshall Sahlins is dead. But where now is Marshall Sahlins? Is he gone, except in the many volumes he leaves behind and the memories of his family, students, and friends, a post-death fate that most anthropologists today within their secular worlds assume will happen to us all—the fading temporary immortality of posterity? Or might he have returned to the animist world that today we have lost—might it be that the immanent world that he so vividly intellectually portrays is in fact the existential fate of us all? Or might some of my Muslim friends be correct: we may all be facing Allah at the gates of judgment? Or might there be no common existential fate for us all—might subjectivity reign, so that, in the words of a Japanese interlocutor, “after you die, you go where you imagine you will go”?Was the belief in life after death that almost everyone adhered to in the past simply a relic of past peoples’ lack of understanding of how the world really works, an understanding that we are now progressively gaining? Is science leading us to greater truth, causing us to outgrow our religious certainties of the past? This is the view of Sigmund Freud in The future of an illusion ([1927] 1961); more recently, Carl Sagan has written that “I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking” (Sagan 1997: 214). But perhaps rather than simply gaining progressive insights into truth as we shed our illusions, we have also lost some form of truth. As Peter Berger has argued: “Our ancestors didn’t know about particle physics, but they spoke with angels … Could it be that we have lost a truth when our conversation with angels came to a stop? … It is quite possible that in the dawn of its history the human race had an access to reality that it subsequently lost” (Berger 1992: 13, 157). Proponents of psychedelic substances, such as Terrence McKenna (1992) have made exactly this claim, one which has been gained increasing currency of late (Pollan 2018).This returns us to the underlying question of Sahlins’s book. Does the immanent world held by our forebears, as Sahlins analyzes with such insight, reflect a reality that human beings have transcended—outgrown? Or does it represent a reality that human beings have simply forgotten? Sahlins argues that anthropologists, caught up in their contemporary transcendental assumptions, have not in an intellectual sense been able to comprehend immanent worlds. I argue further: in an existential sense, anthropologists often cannot comprehend those worlds because, while they may dismiss the cosmos of their forebears as fictitious, they may also be subconsciously terrified of death in a spiritually vacant contemporary world (Becker 1974; Solomon et al. 2015). This is a world that, as Harari discusses (2015: 233, 235), has moved from an age in which we found our sustenance in meaning beyond our mortal lives to an age in which meaning has been cast aside for the techniques of science. Sahlins’s book has touched upon ultimate existential issues but has rigorously avoided discussing them beyond the purely intellectual realm. This is intellectually valid but leaves an existential void. Since we cannot know—as I was reminded by various interlocutors in my research, “no one has ever come back from the world beyond death to tell us what it’s like”—this is sensible, but as human beings we may seek more.Marshall Sahlins, where are you? Wherever you may be beyond your human death, I hope that you can explore that realm in wonder and enlightenment—or at least, rest peacefully in oblivion.Notes1. There is, however, no reference to Robert Bellah’s comprehensive 2011 work, Religion in human evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. I also find scant attention paid to the religious-historical work of the philosopher Charles Taylor. No doubt Sahlins fervently disagrees with them both; but in leaving them aside to focus exclusively on ethnographic and ancient historical accounts, Sahlins has neglected to make his argument more accessible for debate in a larger scholarly world.2. I myself am ethnocentric, I must add; when I am sick, I go to medical doctors, whatever my intellectual doubts about the status of contemporary versions of reality.ReferencesBecker, Ernest. 1974. The denial of death. New York: The Free Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarBellah, Robert N. 2011. Religion in human evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarBerger, Peter L. 1992. A far glory: The quest for faith in an age of credulity. New York: Doubleday.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarEvans-Pritchard, E. E. (1937) 1976. Witchcraft, oracles, and magic among the Azande. Abridged edition by Eva Gillies. Oxford: Clarendon Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarFavret-Saada, Jeanne. 1981. Deadly words: Witchcraft in the bocage. Translated by Catherine Cullen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarFreud, Sigmund. (1927) 1961. The future of an illusion. New York: W. W. Norton.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarHarari, Yuval Noah. 2015. Homo deus: A brief history of tomorrow. London: Vintage.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarMathews, Gordon. forthcoming. Life after death today in the United States, Japan, and China. London: RoutledgeFirst citation in articleGoogle ScholarMcKenna, Terrence. 1992. The archaic revival: Speculations on psychedelic mushrooms, the Amazon, virtual reality, UFOs, evolution, shamanism, the rebirth of the goddess, and the end of history. New York: HarperCollins.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarPollan, Michael. 2018. How to change your mind: What the new science of psychedelics teaches us about consciousness, dying, addiction, depression, and transcendence. New York: Penguin Books.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarSagan, Carl. 1997. Billions & billions: Thoughts on life and death at the brink of the millennium. New York: Ballantine Books.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarSolomon, Sheldon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski. 2015. The worm at the core: On the role of death in life. New York: Random House.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarTaylor, Charles. 2007. A secular age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarGordon Mathews is Professor of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the author or coauthor of the books, What makes life worth living? How Japanese and Americans make sense of their worlds (University of California Press, 1996); Global culture/individual identity: Searching for home in the cultural supermarket (Routledge, 2000); Hong Kong, China: Learning to belong to a nation (Routledge, 2008); Ghetto at the center of the world: Chungking mansions, Hong Kong (University of Chicago Press, 2011); The world in Guangzhou: Africans and other foreigners in South China’s global marketplace (University of Chicago Press, 2017), and the forthcoming Life after death today in the United States, Japan, and China (Routledge, 2023).Gordon Mathews[email protected] Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory Volume 12, Number 3Winter 2022 Published on behalf of the Society for Ethnographic Theory Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/722387 © 2022 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.