Ghosts have provided an eventful, unfinished history in ethnology.

“Moves” because in many African languages ​​(and the Old Testament) spirits are referred to as wind, breath, or breath, an invisible force or power that can move.

As strange in-between beings, quasi-objects, non-persons, and present without presence, spirits provide the presence of radical alterity;

they break into everyday life, bringing back the dead and making strangers appear from distant lands;

they are powerful, heal, damage and kill, but mostly allow themselves to be talked about if they are worshiped in a cult and cared for properly.

They transform themselves, "stove pipe becomes a cat" (W. Benjamin), and mock both semantics and ontology.

The last book by Marshall Sahlins, who died last year shortly before it was finished, is also about ghosts and deities (FAZ from April 7, 2021).

His son Peter, a well-known historian, prepared it for printing.

A revolution in anthropology is envisaged

As an unorthodox Marxist and structuralist, Sahlins, who taught in Chicago and is certainly one of the best and most controversial representatives of North American ethnology, repeatedly questioned supposed ethnological certainties and directed the ethnographic view not only of foreign cultures but also of his own society.

In his last book, he claims to be attempting nothing less than a “revolution of anthropology”, which aims to promote the rescue of indigenous cosmologies and combine it with a critique of science.

He divides the world into two parts: one into a smaller part that has been disenchanted and which the ghosts have abandoned throughout the story.

As transcendent beings, they now inhabit another world - the hereafter.

With this retreat, they left the earth alone to humans, who were increasingly ruinous with that part of creation we call nature.

In the other, larger part of the world, on the other hand, spirits are still recognized as immanent powers and determine people's lives there.

Sahlins thus builds an opposition between "transcendentalist societies" and "immanentalist societies", and in the best ethnological tradition he defends the latter and even converts to the "immanentalist".

He uses Giambattista Vico as a model, who in his "New Science" of 1744 left his own transcendentalistic milieu and recognized the ontologies of immanentalistic cultures.

Sahlins' goal: to do justice to spirits according to their own immanent premises and to represent them according to their own ontologies.

The spirits mark a boundary of ethnology

Here he undoubtedly hits the sore point of modern ethnology, which since Bronislaw Malinowski has pledged to express "the native's point of view", but when spirits came into play, dismissed them as fictions and disempowered them.

In fact, ghosts in particular have always been a source of cracks in the ethnographic enterprise.

They marked a boundary beyond which the effects of the powers were felt and suffered but failed to gain recognition in scholarly discourse, so that the ethnological enterprise itself appeared as a kind of spell against the effects and affects that spirits can produce.