From the perspective of Western modernity, humanity inhabits a disenchanted universe. Gods, spirits, and ancestors have retreated to a transcendent world; they no longer live among us nor are they involved in the affairs of everyday life. Yet, the overwhelming majority of cultures throughout human history regard spirits as absolutely real persons, members of a cosmic polity who interact with the living and determine their fate. For these cultures, humans constitute only a small part of an enchanted universe, which has been distorted through the transcendent categories of “religion” and the “supernatural.” The present book calls upon anthropologists and social scientists to reconsider these cultures of persistence and to study them based on their own measures of the world.

In his latest, revealing work, Marshall Sahlins proposes a new methodology and charts an exciting research program for the field of anthropology. He takes us on a journey from the Inuit of the Arctic Circle to the Dinka of East Africa, and from the Araweté of the Amazon to the island people of the Tikopians in the Pacific, shedding new light on classic and contemporary ethnographies and revealing how even the seemingly human spheres of “economy” and “politics” emerge through the negotiation—and ultimately the appropriation by humans—of the powers of the gods.