The New Science of the Enchanted Universe

An Anthropology of Most of Humanity

Marshall Sahlins

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780691238166
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

One of the world's preeminent cultural anthropologists leaves a last work that fundamentally reconfigures how we study most other cultures From 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.

1

Human Finitude

A tradition has been handed down by the ancient thinkers of very early times, and bequeathed to posterity in the form of a myth, to the effect that … heavenly bodies are gods, and that the Divine pervades the whole of nature.

—ARISTOTLE, METAPHYSICS (1935, TREDENNICK TRANS.)

The Master said, “How abundantly do spiritual beings display the powers that belong to them!

“We look for them, but do not see them; we listen to, but do not hear them; yet they enter into all things, and there is nothing without them.

“They cause all the people of the kingdom to fast and purify themselves, and array themselves in their richest dresses, in order to attend at their sacrifices. Then, like overflowing water, they seem to be over the heads, and on the right and left of their worshippers.

“It is said in the Book of Poetry, ‘The approaches of the spirits, you cannot surmise;—and can you treat them with indifference?’ ”

—CONFUCIUS, THE DOCTRINE OF THE MEAN (1869, LEGGE TRANS.)

HERE’S THE PROBLEM. According to the traditional anthropological wisdom, people invoke the spirits’ aid when an important enterprise is hazardous, or the outcome is uncertain. Religion is when human effort is at risk: in warfare, for instance; or in gardening, where the crop is subject to the vagaries of weather or the depredations of pests. Yet as the ethnographer Simon Harrison observes of Manambu of New Guinea, success, not failure, is what brings the spirits particularly into mind and play. Every adult man and woman knows how, when, and where to plant, but some people’s gardens are much more fruitful than others’—because the totemic ancestors, who “release” the crops from their distant villages, have selectively favored them (Harrison 1990, 63). Similarly, about Achuar of the Upper Amazon, the French anthropologist Phillipe Descola relates that the gardeners who most assiduously call upon the goddess at every stage of the agricultural process are precisely those whose skills are sure and never fail (1994, 198). So the question is, when is there religion?—or perhaps, when isn’t there?

The notion that people get religion where outcomes are uncertain and they can’t control their fate has a considerable pre-anthropological and premodern pedigree. It was already established in Classical Antiquity. The ancient Greek historian Diodorus Siculus is often cited for it, as by the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume in his remarkable treatise on The Natural History of Religion: “Fortune has never … bestowed an unmixed happiness on mankind; but with all her gifts has ever conjoined some disastrous circumstance, in order to chastise men into a reverence for the gods, whom, in a continued course of prosperity, they are apt to neglect and forget” (Bib. hist. 3.47 in Hume [1757] 1998, 143–44). Essentially the same topos recurs over and again in Hume’s essay. Of special interest here, the essay itself is part of the transcendental revolution, in its pure Enlightenment formulation.

Hume sets out to prove that religion is fashioned by men—it is an expression of human nature under certain dire circumstances—by contrast to the current, reasoned arguments for the existence of God from intelligent design. For early men, in a barbarous and ignorant condition, no passions can be expected to work “but the ordinary affections of human life; the anxious concern for happiness, the dread of future misery, the terror of death, the thirst of revenge, the appetite for food and other necessaries. Agitated by hopes and fears of this nature, especially the latter, men scrutinize, with a trembling curiosity, the course of future causes, and examine the various and contrary events of human life. And in this disordered scene, with eyes still more disordered and astonished, they see the first obscure traces of divinity” (Hume [1757] 1998, 140). There is, however, a subdominant theme in Hume’s argument, already suggested by “hopes” as well as “fears”: that humans, being in control of neither, are subject to good fortune and bad alike. Presumably, then, they have some cause to be pious about their successes too. This is the argument I am making here, and it could well be set up by Hume saying: “We are placed in this world, as in a great theatre, where the true springs and causes of every event are entirely concealed from us” (140). In that case, the divine is as necessarily engaged in people’s possible achievements as in their possible failures.

As a rule, however, anthropologists didn’t get the clue. Based on his research in the Trobriand Islands, the influential structural-functionalist ethnographer Bronislaw Malinowski was an advocate of the notion that the spirits begin where human control ends. (He called it “magic,” but since as a general rule what passes for “magic” actually involves metaperson beings and metaperson powers, I do not use the concept in these pages.) The occult powers were not simply those of the formulas uttered, the acts of the practitioner, or the objects he or she may use. The incantations of ritual experts—the so-called garden magician, often a paramount chief, or a designated close relative—that ensured the success of yam gardening specifically invoked the powers of the clan ancestor-spirits, and yam gardening was Malinowski’s prime example. For all the Trobriand Islanders’ appropriate knowledge and hard work, they regarded the ancestors’ intervention, achieved in a series of rituals correlated with specific stages of the cultivation cycle, as absolutely indispensable for a successful harvest. What would happen if the rituals were not performed the people could not tell, for that had never happened. What they did know from experience is that, depending on rain and sunshine, bush pigs and locusts, some years the yams flourished and some years their gardens did poorly. Because of this uncertainty and this only, Malinowski argues, the people employed magic (1948, 11–12; cf. Mosko 2017).

Gardening is not unique in this respect: everything needs magic. “What has been said about gardens can be paralleled from any one of the many other activities in which work and magic run side by side without ever mixing” (Malinowksi 1948, 13). The people know all about canoe building and sailing, but in their fragile vessels “they are still at the mercy of powerful and incalculable tides, sudden gales during the monsoon season and unknown reefs. And here comes in their magic” (13)—not to mention all the “magic” that they put in the overseas voyaging of the famous kula trade to induce their trading friends to part with important valuables. Then again, there is warfare. For all a warrior’s strength and courage, “the elements of chance and luck” remain, and hence the need for ritual spells (14). Still more, there are spells for the uncontrolled events of sickness, aging, and death. In the end, the only activity that Malinowski cites as completely within Trobriand Islanders’ own capacities, therefore without the intervention of metahuman powers, is fishing in the calm waters of the lagoon—as distinct from the hazards of deep-sea fishing (14). (Yet I have my doubts, given the practices of enlisting the spirits in other Oceanic societies to make fishing nets effective and to bring shoals of fishes inshore in their season.) In any case, as Australian anthropologist Mark Mosko (2017) has recently reported, the Trobriand ancestors (baloma) are “the perceived agents of magical practices implicated in nearly all contexts of living humans’ and spirits’ imagined [sic] sociality—procreation, kinship, clanship, and affinal relations, mythology, cosmology, chiefly hierarchy and rank, ritual performance (e.g., religious sacrifice, mortuary exchange, kula, milamala harvest celebration, sorcery and witchcraft, taboo observance, etc.)” (11). As it turns out, the ancestors are indispensable agents in all varieties of human endeavor, risky or not. There is some kind of greater human dependency.

In Philippe Descola’s experience, the conventional functionalist thesis that the spirits intervene where humans have insufficient technical control—he cites the American anthropologist Leslie White’s version (1959, 272)—is doubly disconfirmed by Amazonian Achuar: first, because the risks that prompt gardeners to invoke Nunkui, the goddess of cultivation, are “imaginary”; and correlatively, because their gardens never fail. Achuar gardens, Descola notes, are exemplary of the technical sophistication achieved by certain slash-and-burn cultivators in the Amazon. They are highly productive, require little labor, and beside the staple manioc yield a great variety of crops “perfectly adapted to soil and climate variations” (Descola 1994, 191). Gardening here is free of all contingencies. For by means of clandestine ritual songs (anent), which the women cultivators address to Nunkui, mother of cultivated plants, they are able to assume her person and themselves nurture the manioc plants as their own children.

So far as Achuar are concerned, the women who have the best array of ritual spells for invoking Nunkui achieve the best results (Descola 1994, 198, 208). By the same token, those who offend the goddess become vulnerable to “Nunkui’s Curse,” the threat that she will withdraw the food plants altogether, as she did to punish a foolish woman in primordial times (Descola 2016, 9). Among other threats are those posed by jealous women who call out evil spells on prosperous gardens, the soul power conveyed in their malignant anent working its effects on the souls of the plant-persons (Descola 1994, 212; 1996, 99–100). Again, contrary to traditional anthropological wisdom, it appears that the gardens are not governed by spirits because they are at risk of poor results; rather they are at risk of poor results because they are governed by spirits. And whether as a matter of success or failure, the spirits are responsible for both.

It is only necessary to add that, as with Trobriand Islanders, the invocation of metahuman powers to empower humans is hardly confined to gardening. Recall that for Achuar, there are appropriate spells (anent) for endeavors of every sort, thereby enlisting a variety of appropriate spirits in hunting, warfare, fishing, trading, lovemaking, curing illness, cooking food, and whatnot. Prerequisite to all sorts of human activities, this engagement of metahuman power is an all-around cultural praxis: meaning, the implication of spiritual powers is the condition of the possibility of human social activities of every kind.

Simon Harrison’s (1990) account of Manambu of Northern Papua New Guinea, while similarly observing that the ancestors are responsible for the success of some cultivators relative to others, offers insight into this sort of all-around participation of metahuman powers in common cultural practices. Here yam cultivation is particularly significant politically because of the unique ritual control of yam garden fertility by one important dual-clan group. Like other cultivated and wild foods, yams, as Harrison says, are not created by gardening but come into existence when they are “released” by the totemic ancestors from their distant villages in response to the secret invocations of certain clan leaders. People do not produce their means of subsistence; they receive them from the ancestral sources (63).

Not that they lack the knowledge or the skills. To a man and woman, these technical capacities are possessed by all socialized adults. People know how yams are grown successfully, but their “religion,” as Harrison puts it, “answers a different question: why the yams grew successfully, and to whom the social and political credit is owed” (63). The latter question will be a matter of further discussion in these pages, but inasmuch as credit goes to the ritually adept clan leaders rather than the cultivators, one might already conclude that the alienation of the workers from their product did not originate with capitalism. As for why yams grow, the lack of people’s control over causes can apply to a lot of things, like the weather, procreation, animal behavior, human growth and decline, sickness and death, and other such existential matters. Especially when it comes to people making the causes, not just knowing them but themselves being them, their limitations amount to an all-around human finitude.

The relevant anthropology of human finitude goes back to the Neapolitan Enlightenment philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668–1744). Vico’s works On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians ([1711] 2010) and especially The New Science ([1744] 1968) are unacknowledged charters of an anthropology that knew how to take its informants’ words as a distinctive ontology constituting worlds other than ours. Vico enacts a rite de passage in anthropology from its transcendentalist background to an immanentist ontology that is nothing like our own. Vico moves beyond his own transcendentalist milieu into an appreciation of the different ontological qualities of immanentist cultures, which he correlates with different stages of human development. Not to dismiss either the rebound or the enlightenment that the immanentist perspective sheds on the relativity of our own categories. Anthropology is a double cultural enlightenment of the other and of the self, and Vico was among the first to realize it. Like a good Hegelian dialectic, Vico transcends and incorporates his own transcendentalist origins to produce a description of ontologies quite different from his own, whether primitive or ancient. This is the epitome of anthropology.

The Ancient Wisdom begins with the famous aphorism: “For the Latins, verum (the true) and factum (the made) are interchangeable or, as commonly said in the Schools, they are convertible” ([1711] 2010, 17). As Vico’s Latin is “Latinis verum et factum reciprocantur seu convertuntur”—often abbreviated as verum ipsum factum—one might otherwise say that the true and the made are reciprocals or convertibles, that each entails the other. From this comes the pervasive theme of his New Science: that what men make, they may know truly; what God makes only He can know. This is relevant anthropology because it specifies the circumstances of immanent spiritual agency in people’s affairs: that is, as a function of their fateful dependence on forces and conditions of which they are not the creators—not the causative sources themselves.

Considering Vico’s arguments from the Ancient Wisdom, the scope of such human limitations is necessarily very broad. For almost all the things people seek to know, indeed need to live, are neither contained within nor emanate from the mind by which they coul...