A perspective on science, ontology, and reflexivity

Abstract

I was initiated into anthropological theory as a first-year graduate student in 1973 by Marshall Sahlins as we simultaneously arrived at the University of Chicago. He taught the required theory course while in the midst of writing his influential book Culture and practical reason (Sahlins 1976), which formed the basis of the course. I was profoundly shaped by his conceptual map of the world of anthropologists, as well as his understanding of culture, semiotics, and French structuralism, but I also vividly recall his instruction to us first-year grad students: “stand on my shoulders and shit on my head.” While I would not presume to do either, I find that his posthumous book, The new science of the enchanted universe: An anthropology of most of humanity, serves as a poignant bookend for my relationship to his thought, as I return to his work after pursuing a very different approach to the anthropology of Islam over the course of my career. I find myself finally carrying out his instruction to think critically about his work as I ponder a book that moves explicitly into my area of expertise: the problem of religion and ontology. According to Sahlins, most of the world lives in cultures based on the premises of immanentism. By this he means that people inhabit worlds where a distinction between spiritual andmaterial is not made and “all sorts of so-called ‘things’—often everything there is—[are] animated by in-dwelling spirit-persons” (p. 3). This book aims to explain why most societies, except those