- What a Mushroom Lives For
Michael J. Hathaway- Revolution of Things
Kusha Sefat- An Internet for the People
Jessa Lingel- American Shtetl
Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers- Experiments of the Mind
Emily Martin
The New Science of the Enchanted Universe: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity
From the perspective of Western modernity, humanity inhabits a disenchanted cosmos. Gods, spirits, and ancestors have left us for a transcendent beyond, no longer living in our midst and being involved in all matters of everyday life from the trivial to the dire. Yet the vast majority of cultures throughout human history treat spirits as very real persons, members of a cosmic society who interact with humans and control their fate. In most cultures, even today, people are but a small part of an enchanted universe misconstrued by the transcendent categories of “religion” and the “supernatural.” The New Science of the Enchanted Universe shows how anthropologists and other social scientists must rethink these cultures of immanence and study them by their own lights.
In this, his last, revelatory book, Marshall Sahlins announces a new method and sets an exciting agenda for the field. He takes readers around the world, from Inuit of the Arctic Circle to pastoral Dinka of East Africa, from Araweté swidden gardeners of Amazonia to Trobriand Island horticulturalists. In the process, Sahlins sheds new light on classical and contemporary ethnographies that describe these cultures of immanence and reveals how even the apparently mundane, all-too-human spheres of “economics” and “politics” emerge as people negotiate with, and ultimately usurp, the powers of the gods.
The New Science of the Enchanted Universe offers a road map for a new practice of anthropology that takes seriously the enchanted universe and its transformations from ancient Mesopotamia to contemporary America.
Marshall Sahlins (1930–2021) was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and the author of many books, including Stone Age Economics and Culture and Practical Reason. Frederick B. Henry Jr. is an independent scholar and translator.
“A characteristically feisty final statement from one of the greatest anthropologists of the past century.”—Jonathan Spencer, Science
“Sahlins is perhaps one of the last great anthropological time travelers, unashamed of his vocation, and openly committed to immersing himself in ways of being that were not originally his own, or at least trying his hardest to do so. We may not see his like again.”—Vincent P. Pecora, European Legacy
“This much-anticipated volume brings us Sahlins at his iconoclastic best. His voice leaps from the pages in a magnificent reprise of a scholar-warrior’s lifelong challenge to visions of humankind at large. That largesse here becomes a mode of restorative justice, exposing the anthropocentrism at the heart of so much explanation, a jolt to bring us to our senses.”—Marilyn Strathern, author of Relations: An Anthropological Account
“Sahlins draws on his vast erudition to guide us to the realization that the disenchanted world of modernity and its conceptual divides—the animate versus the inanimate, the material versus the spiritual—denote but a state of exception in human history. The New Science of the Enchanted Universe is a lasting gift that Sahlins’s readers will treasure and cherish.”—Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age
“The New Science of the Enchanted Universe is a work of profound scholarship and remarkable theoretical daring. The crowning achievement of a long and brilliant anthropological career, this book is destined to become a classic.”—Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, author of The Relative Native: Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds
“Marshall Sahlins has never published a book that didn’t change how anthropologists think about the ways humans live, and this is no exception. The New Science of the Enchanted Universe is peak Sahlins, at once a tour de force of anthropological argument and a great read.”—Joel Robbins, author of Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society
“Marshall Sahlins recovers for us in this great last work the vivid presence of the local and immanent religions forced to the world’s margins by more abstract, transcendent faiths. No reader, religious or secular, can fail to be fascinated.”—Paul Seabright, author of The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life
“In this capstone to a life’s work, Marshall Sahlins offers a sweeping vision of humanity and the gods, delivered with his inimitable blend of panache and provocation.”—Webb Keane, author of Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories
“Who else but Marshall Sahlins could have retrieved from their ethnographical and historical vaults the enchanted stories of immanentism? This great voice of anthropology, still booming posthumously, not only uncovers worlds that flourish away from transcendence but also critically reveals how the social sciences have misportrayed these worlds and their plural denizens.”—Philippe Descola, author of Beyond Nature and Culture
Visualize the enchantment of the cosmos
27 июн. 2016 в 18:00
Can someone explain starshard crafting to me?
I’m afraid to touch it for fear of wasting them using them suboptimally, and searching the theads for a while didn’t give me all the info I wanted. Does using them always give the same bonus, does it keep all the previous enchantmens, and does it combine with other enchantments for a maximum possible number of enchantmens? Can you use more than one shard on the same item? Please tell me if you know the answers to any of these.
Сообщения 1 – 9 из 9
27 июн. 2016 в 19:26
Yes it’s always the same bonus
Yes it keeps previous enchantments
You can use more than one shard, but I believe all it does is increase the + on the item (more damage/armor/dodge/block as appropriate)
As for the enchants, that’s a little more complicated. Basically, each item in the game has a maximum # of enchants based on its * level, the higher the level, the more enchants an item can hold. Because a scroll can (rarely) do 2 or even 3 enchants in one use, I think that can sometimes let you exceed that hard limit.
Hammers let you bypass the scroll limit (past the point where it says ‘this scroll has no effect and was not destroyed’), as does the Cosmic enchant.
However, if you use Cosmic/Hammer *before* you finish fully enchanting an item, I believe those ‘enchants’ *do* affect the chance of failure, and the maximum number of enchants on the item.
TLDR: If you want to *totally* max an item, use scrolls until you can’t use any more, then Hammer + Cosmic in either order.
This will be changing to be less of an issue in the next patch, enchant scrolls are supposedly being changed so they can’t fail any more, which will mean no need to worry about wasting scrolls – I don’t know if that will have any effect on the enchant limit being affected by a Hammer/Cosmic being added ‘early’ to an item, but that’s pretty edge case – basically if you’re worrying about squeezing the last little bit of enchant power out of your gear, you’re probably already at or beyond the point you need to be to beat the game.
27 июн. 2016 в 20:24
Thanks for the info. Based on what you said and that you seem to know what you’re talking about, one last thing I’d like to know: is it possible to tell when an item is at the max number of enchants from scrolls, or will it just keep failing over and over with no feedback that the chance of success is 0?
27 июн. 2016 в 21:48
Oh, and do the scrolls that cost you stremf (from the graveyard areas) give prefixes that you can’t get from the enstremfize scrolls?
27 июн. 2016 в 21:57
Yes, they have unique prefixes
And the game *won’t* let you ‘waste’ enchant scrolls at the limit. If you’re actually at the limit, it’ll outright say ‘you can’t enchant this anymore’ and the scroll isn’t destroyed. It can take a lot of scrolls on a highly enchanted item to get those last few enchants, but there’s always a small chance until it says you can’t enchant it period.
27 июн. 2016 в 22:04
Are those unique prefixes at all worth losing the stremf?
27 июн. 2016 в 22:07
They’re basically 2for1 prefixes that have damage types you won’t usually see elsewhere, except on very rare drop-only enchants.
Proofs are an infinite resource, and Stremf past a certain point is overkill for beating the game, so in general I think they are worth it – I’ve done ‘endgame’ weapons that started by stacking two and then piling on the rest as enstremf then hammer and cosmic.
They’re not necessary by any means, but they’re a nice bonus.
On an established Academy you probably have way more proofs than you’d care about losing any stremf from – on a new academy or an ironmans char, it’s a more meaningful sacrifice. But ruined forts and smart use of Xespera scrolls both yield a lot of proofs, so you can easily get the stats needed for the final dungeon even if you use multiple defiled scrolls.
28 июн. 2016 в 9:18
Автор сообщения: wckowalski
Are those unique prefixes at all worth losing the stremf?
yes, one of the prefixes is “your weapon randomly shoots bees” that works like the scroll but scales off your attack and is one of 4 prefixes actually worth using endgame-wise (cosmic eager freezinating xSwarm)
it’s rare and ofc you lose stremf though so if you actually want to use the scroll, alt-f4 if you dont get it (the other prefixes are bad)
Oh and yeah you lose stremf. No big deal, 1 xespera scroll translates to 200 proofs if you know where to use it so you’ll easily regain them.
