The New Science of the Enchanted Universe. Anthropology of Most of Humanity

From the perspective of a Western person, we live in a secularized — demystified — world. Gods and spirits, if they exist, are separated from our — immanent — world and are sent to the otherworldly — transcendent, leaving the earth at the disposal of humans, who are now free to create their institutions by their means according to their own standards. However, for most of human cultural history, people were surrounded by myriad non-human beings — gods, ancestors, spirits; they were the causes of human sorrow and joy, sources of success and failure in various endeavors — from agriculture and hunting to sexual reproduction and political ambitions.

Marshall Sahlins, on the basis of an incredibly vast amount of material — from the societies of the Inuit and Trobrianders to the civilizations of Ancient Mesopotamia — shows that describing non-Western societies in familiar terms («religion», «myth», «supernatural») leads rather to misunderstanding than understanding, and offers a new paradigm for studying the enchanted universe. Edited by Candidate of Historical Sciences, Associate Professor of the Department of Ethnology at Moscow State University Andrey Tutorsky