Life-giving and death-dealing powers

Abstract

1. He has amply discoursed on life-bestowing powers in other contexts: for example, in the precursor to his Hocart Lecture (Sahlins 2013). We just have to conjoin that with death-dealing It already seems some time ago that Elizabeth Povinelli (2016) bracketed together life and death in order to contrast the duo (“life”) with nonlife. TheAnthropocene and climate change are, she suggests, as much political and conceptual disturbances as meteorological or geological. They tamper with time in the sense that Carol Greenhouse (2019) conveys of the politics of populism, where the only possible question becomes what (kind of) time is shared by coevals who are present to one another. It is certain entrenched perceptions of time that Marshall Sahlins proposed upending by hailing in his Hocart Lecture (2017) a new Copernican revolution. Rather than celebrate human society as the (originating) center of the universe, anthropologists pursuing ethnographic realities should evacuate it in favor of the cosmic authorities who were for so many and so long people’s primordial rulers. Reversing customary priorities of infrastructure and superstructure, he was also challenging conventional temporal orderings in anthropological thinking about hierarchical and egalitarian polities. I am glad there was an opportunity to respond to Sahlins’s lecture while he was still with us (Strathern 2017). This is both because it feels too soon to be responding to his last volume and because I have already made evident my considerable appreciation of his demonstration, including the way in which he drew on the work of the early missionary anthropologists of Mount Hagen, especially Hermann Strauss. On this occasion I leave that appreciation as read. In Sahlins’s magisterial delineation, the immanentist condition is to be apprehended through people’s utter