Thinking Twice About Re-Enchantment

Since the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, the story goes, we’ve lived more and more in a machine world of cogs, pistons, and flywheels, devoid of meaning and mystery. These days, podcasts, articles, books, sermons, and lectures fill the air with a summons to reverse the Weberian disenchantment of the world by acknowledging the weirdness of it—the reality of spooks, ghouls, gnomes, and fairies, the deeper-than-science truth of myths and fairy tales, the dazzling radiance of everyday things. Rod Dreher once again (uncannily) captures the cultural moment with his recent Living in Wonder.

Welcome as this trend is in some respects, we should greet it with some caution. After all, there’s enchantment, and then there’s enchantment. Not every mystery should be plumbed. Tales aren’t true just because they poke scientific naturalism in the eye. As Dreher points out, some forms of re-enchantment are demonic. 

That caution comes powerfully home in the late Marshall Sahlins’s The New Science of the Enchanted Universe. The book is partly a rebuke to Sahlins’s fellow cultural anthropologists. Anthropology has long boasted of its ability to grasp cultures, especially pre-modern tribal cultures, from the inside. Sahlins says it doesn’t, not really. Anthropologists systematically translate the practices and ways of “immanent” cultures into “transcendent” Western categories that ultimately derive from Christianity. Sahlins doesn’t do any original fieldwork here, but draws from pre-existing studies. None of the details are new. What’s new is how he regards the evidence. He resists the temptation to say, “Primitive peoples think X, but we know better.” Instead, he describes the worlds these peoples inhabit as they would describe them. His “anthropology of most of humanity” takes the immanentists seriously. 

Immanent cultures don’t recognize any distinction between natural and supernatural, religion and the rest of life, nature and humanity. Transcendence, whether of God to creation or of man to the world, makes no sense. A thing that isn’t experienced isn’t at all: “Immanence is a quality of being. Being is being there.” Immanent cultures are empiricist to the core: Don’t try to convince a tribesman that something exists if he’s never seen, heard, or experienced it. But their empiricism is generous, because they see things we don’t. Many in immanent societies claim to see spirits; some claim to have married female spirits and had children with them. Ancestors aren’t present merely in memory, but often in conversation. Every human being has a double-soul—the corporate soul received from parents and ancestors, and a superadded individual soul. 

Anthropologists have often claimed that tribal peoples invoke spirits or do magic when they reach the limits of human capacity. In fact, the sense of limit goes all the way down: Immanent peoples know they’re totally dependent, that they control nothing, and so don’t think they can do anything without metapersonal aid. Which is why they enlist “a variety of appropriate spirits in hunting, warfare, fishing, trading, lovemaking, curing illness, cooking food, whatnot.” Everywhere and in everything, spirits, not humans, are the agents of action. 

Occasionally, Sahlins pulls the old anthropologist trick: See how weird they are? Well, we’re just as weird. Tribal peoples believe in metapersons? That’s nothing: Sahlins taught for years for a metaperson known as the University of Chicago. Mostly, he sticks to showing how weird enchanted worlds actually are. Spirit pervades everything—plants, rocks, animals—and metahumans or metapersons (gods, ghosts, demons, ancestors) interact regularly and intimately with human beings. Human society is never merely human; it includes spiritual beings, trees, bears, stars and planets, soil, all coming together to form a cosmopoliteia. For some peoples, humans are creators of the world, so that everything has a human soul. Others believe in reincarnation, so human souls end up transferring to other creatures. The Achuar of the northern Amazon believe the body parts of dead humans turn into animals: “the lungs turn into butterflies . . . the deceased’s shadow, a brocket deer . . . the heart, a slate-colored grosbeak . . . and the liver, an owl” (quoting Philippe Descola). According to one Arctic tribe, “Siberian mice are people living in underground houses, whose reindeer are what humans see as the roots of certain plants and the sleds they use for hunting are certain grass.” 

To jaded moderns, an enchanted world sounds cozy, like living inside a bright fairy tale. Real enchanted societies are terrifying. Spirits can be malevolent, and even the benevolent ones can be mighty trying. Dead ancestors own land and houses long after they’re dead and haunt the living to enforce their property rights. The relation of human to spirit being is never equal: for immanentists, “there are no egalitarian societies.” Spirit beings are masters, frequently harsh. Immanent life is hemmed in by arbitrary rules, like these among the Iglulik: “A pregnant woman must never go outside without her mittens on,” and “A newly born infant is cleansed by being wiped all over with the skin of a small snipe,” and “If a woman sees a whale, she must point to it with her middle finger,” and “Widows are never allowed to pluck birds.”  

Sahlins isn’t a theologian, but his book raises intriguing theological questions. Can Christians regard these immanent descriptions as literally true of the cultures they describe? Are some humans genuinely incapable of exercising control over their environments? Is cultural anthropology a disciplined form of pre-exorcism, offering detailed studies of demon-dominated cultures by people who don’t believe in demons? Since human beings are intrinsic to creation, it makes theological sense to say the world is different to people who are radically different—people who are in Adam versus those who are fulfilled and elevated in the Last Adam.

Sahlins several times cites Fustel de Coulanges’s classic study The Ancient City, highlighting analogies between the ancestor cults of Greece and those of tribal peoples. That suggests we can read Sahlins’s book as a characterization of the world Christianity invaded, conquered, and turned upside down. Christianity as the original force of disenchantment: That’s a powerful reason to think twice about re-enchantment.

Image from the Folger Shakespeare Library Digital Image Collection. Image cropped.