At the track

Abstract

To begin, we want to offer our warmest thanks to Katherine Pratt Ewing,Marilyn Strathern, GordonMatthews, and Carlos Fausto for their generous and insightful comments onThe new science of the enchanted universe. Such affectionate appraisals and congenial criticisms do signal service to the anthropological legacy of Marshall Sahlins, which we too will attempt to honor in response. As assistants and editors in the production of his final book, we aim to stay close to its spirit and argument, although of course he is gone and we can only do our best to speak for him. Long before Marshall Sahlins passed, he vowed to leave his body to science. In the event, he taught his last “in-person” class to students at the University of Chicagomedical school. The anecdote holds two key dimensions of his life: his own pursuit of “science,” including the “science of anthropology,”which was a lifelong commitment; and his quest for immortality, which he pursued with great urgency in the work of his last decade. True, he had always sought immortality. In a not entirely comforting response sixty years ago to his young daughter when she discovered the concept of death, he told her that “If you write a book, you will live forever.” Just so, in The new science of the enchanted universe he turns his full attention to human finitude and the spirit world, to metempsychosis and the cycle of life and death. His explorations of these concepts may indeed have helped him