Inaugural Hocart Lecture Marshall Sahlins, SOAS University of London

Marshall Sahlins argues that even seemingly egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies like the Inuit and Australian Aborigines are actually cosmic polities governed by divinities, ancestors, and species masters with life-and-death powers over humans, challenging the conventional anthropological view that government originated as a human invention to escape anarchy; instead, government developed from ritual practices that organized human societies within larger cosmic systems where supernatural beings held primary authority over earthly existence.