The New Science of the Enchanted Universe

It will become all too evident that our own transcendentalist notions, insofar as they have been embedded in common ethnographic vocabularies, have disfigured the immanentist cultures they purport to describe. Take the familiar distinction between the “spiritual” and the “material,” for example: it is not pertinent in societies that know all sorts of so-called “things”—often everything there is—as animated by indwelling spiritpersons. That this difference makes a fundamental difference of cultural order is the point of the book.