Marshall Sahlins, where are you? From the intellectual to the existential

Abstract

Marshall 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. “In an enchanted universe,