![]() For example:Īnthropologists are prone to use the verb “to believe” - that the people “believe” in something - only when they don’t believe it themselves. But he is critical of what he sees as a pervasive underlying bias through which many anthropologists tend to take their own view of reality to be reality and then interpret the other culture as a “fictional representation of ours,” thereby “maligning the people’s mentality as a mistaken sense of reality” (p. Sahlins acknowledges and draws extensively on the efforts of anthropologists to record faithfully how people in different cultures live, think, and feel. ![]() ![]() These are only three examples from the hundreds discussed in the posthumously published book by anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, The New Science of the Enchanted Universe (Princeton University Press, 2022). How are we to understand people of Tikonia, a Polynesian island, who speak of humans, canoes, temples, or weapons as embodiments or vessels of the gods? Can we understand that gods and the dead descend from the heavens to participate in the feasts of the Arawaté people who live in the rain forest of northern Brazil? Can we take seriously the Netsilik Inuit perception that “Powers that rule the earth and all the animals and the lives of mankind on earth are the great spirits who live in the sea, on land, out in space and in the Land of the Sky”? ![]()
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