'Metaperson'

March 8, 2024 4:36 PM

"When the academic reviews of The New Science of the Enchanted Universe began to appear, following its publication a year after Sahlins’s death, I noticed a strange phenomenon: For a genre conventionally prosaic, the scholarly critics kept having encounters with the metaperson of Sahlins himself. When Katherine Pratt Ewing, a professor of Islam at Columbia University, sat down to write her review at her dining table on a Sunday morning, she suddenly found herself slipping into “an almost hypnagogic state in which Marshall was a felt presence,” she recalled in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. “It wasn’t a matter of belief about whether this was possible—it just was.” 'The enchanted worlds of Marshall Sahlins' (via A&L Daily)
posted by clavdivs (3 comments total)

Would love to be able to live up to this:

In his essay “The Original Affluent Society,” he argued that hunter-gatherers lived not in hardscrabble misery, on the edge of starvation, but in prosperity.

“There is,” Sahlins wrote, “a Zen road to affluence, departing from premises somewhat different from our own: that human material wants are finite and few.” Among pre-agricultural tribes, Sahlins calculated, food acquisition took only three to five hours per day, leaving plenty of time for feasting, recreation, and sleep. In contrast, “the market-industrial system institutes scarcity, in a manner completely unparalleled,” as it requires insufficiency as the foundation of all economic activity.
posted by chavenet at 5:01 PM on March 8 [5 favorites]

Had no idea that Marshall Sahlins was connected to David Graeber - although now that I do, it makes a lot of sense.

the New Science of the Enchanted Universe takes as its starting point perhaps the earliest cultural revolution, that of the “Axial Age,”

I've been listening to an audiobook version of Robert Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution, which also centers the Axial Age. I'm resisting impulse buying Sahlins' book too, but it'll probably be my next monthly Audible credit.
posted by AdamCSnider at 6:06 PM on March 8 [2 favorites]

The New Science

an almost hypnagogic state in which Marshall was a felt presence

He is Vico! You are like the buzzing of graduate students to him.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:50 AM on March 9 [4 favorites]