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Beliefs, superstitions and tales about luck are present across all human cultures, according to anthropologists. We are perennially fascinated by luck and by its association with happiness and danger, uncertainty and aspiration. Yet it remains an elusive, ungraspable idea, one that slips and slides over time: all cultures reimagine what luck is and how to tame it at different stages in their history, and the modernity of the 'long twentieth century' is no exception to the rule. Apparently overshadowed by more conceptually tight, scientific and characteristically modern notions such as chance, contingency, probability or randomness, luck nevertheless persists in all its messiness and vitality, used in our everyday language and the subject of studies by everyone from philosophers to psychologists, economists to self-help gurus. Modern Luck sets out to explore the enigma of luck's presence in modernity, examining the hybrid forms it has taken on in the modern imagination, and in particular in the field of modern stories. Indeed, it argues that modern luck is constituted through narrative, through modern luck stories. Analysing a rich and unusually eclectic range of narrative taken from literature, film, music, television and theatre - from Dostoevsky to Philip K. Dick, from Pinocchio to Cimino, from Curtiz to Kieślowski - it lays out first the usages and meanings of the language of luck, and then the key figures, patterns and motifs that govern the stories told about it, from the late nineteenth century to the present day.

Fortune. --- Luck --- Opportunity

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From New York Times bestselling author and economics columnist Robert Frank, a compelling book that explains why the rich underestimate the importance of luck in their success, why that hurts everyone, and what we can do about itHow important is luck in economic success? No question more reliably divides conservatives from liberals. As conservatives correctly observe, people who amass great fortunes are almost always talented and hardworking. But liberals are also correct to note that countless others have those same qualities yet never earn much. In recent years, social scientists have discovered that chance plays a much larger role in important life outcomes than most people imagine. In Success and Luck, bestselling author and New York Times economics columnist Robert Frank explores the surprising implications of those findings to show why the rich underestimate the importance of luck in success-and why that hurts everyone, even the wealthy.Frank describes how, in a world increasingly dominated by winner-take-all markets, chance opportunities and trivial initial advantages often translate into much larger ones-and enormous income differences-over time; how false beliefs about luck persist, despite compelling evidence against them; and how myths about personal success and luck shape individual and political choices in harmful ways.But, Frank argues, we could decrease the inequality driven by sheer luck by adopting simple, unintrusive policies that would free up trillions of dollars each year-more than enough to fix our crumbling infrastructure, expand healthcare coverage, fight global warming, and reduce poverty, all without requiring painful sacrifices from anyone. If this sounds implausible, you'll be surprised to discover that the solution requires only a few, noncontroversial steps.Compellingly readable, Success and Luck shows how a more accurate understanding of the role of chance in life could lead to better, richer, and fairer economies and societies.

Economics --- Merit (Ethics) --- Success --- Fortune --- Luck --- Opportunity --- Growth (Psychology) --- Personal development --- Personal growth --- Self-improvement --- Conduct of life --- Failure (Psychology) --- Fear of success --- Desert (Ethics) --- Moral desert (Ethics) --- Ethics --- Economic sociology --- Socio-economics --- Socioeconomics --- Sociology of economics --- Sociology --- Behavioral economics --- Behavioural economics --- Psychological aspects --- Sociological aspects --- Economic aspects --- Social aspects

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"One of the world's preeminent cultural anthropologists leaves a last work that fundamentally reconfigures how we study most other cultures. 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 Arawete 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"-- "The vast majority of human societies known to us have been organized along "immanentist" lines. In such societies, as Marshall Sahlins argues, everything we associate with religion, gods and spirits of every sort is part of the daily, embodied (immanent) lives of people. Plants and animals have souls and the same essential attributes as other persons, and supposedly long-dead ancestors continue to live among people, communicate with them, and have sway over the course of events. In this "enchanted" type of society, there is no strict separation between economics, politics, religion, philosophy, and culture. Some 2,500 years ago, at the dawn of the so-called Axial Age, a radical transformation in human societies began when civilizations spread around the globe from their origins in Greece, the Near East, northern India, and China. These civilizations effected a cultural revolution, creating a new type of society in which the things we typically associate with religion move from immanent infrastructure to transcendent superstructure. Only in a transcendentalist society does it make sense to speak of a god or God, and of a heaven, "out there," "above us," or in a separate realm entirely. And only in such a society do we have a division of labour separating out an economic sphere from a political sphere and a sphere of culture. Transcendentalist worldviews and modes of life are, of course, pervasive today. They are so much a part of who we are that when we attempt to understand the nature and workings of immanentist societies, we often misdescribe them in transcendentalist terms. This confusion, observes Sahlins, has long bedeviled the social sciences and consequently has impeded our understanding of many Indigenous religions and worldviews past and present. Sahlins, drawing on a vast array of recent and older ethnographic and historical research, offers this book as both diagnosis of these ills and a call to correction-to develop a "new science" that would be better positioned to grasp the realities of immanentist societies, and to take seriously the cultures of others"--

Anthropology of religion. --- Acculturation. --- Ambivalence. --- Ancient Mesopotamian religion. --- Animism. --- Anthropologist. --- Axial Age. --- City-state. --- Civilization. --- Concept. --- Confucius. --- Consciousness. --- Copernican Revolution (metaphor). --- Cosmogony. --- Cousin marriage. --- Cultural relativism. --- Culture hero. --- Deference. --- Deity. --- Deus otiosus. --- Disenchantment. --- Divinity. --- Early modern period. --- Ekur. --- Empirical evidence. --- Energy (esotericism). --- Enki. --- Enlil. --- Epitome. --- Ethnography. --- Explanation. --- Fertility. --- Fountain of Life. --- Genius loci. --- God. --- Great power. --- Honorific. --- Igloo. --- Illustration. --- Immanence. --- Immortality. --- In This World. --- Inua. --- Inuit. --- Invisibility. --- Luck. --- Magic (paranormal). --- Magical texts. --- Mainspring. --- Marsupial. --- Matricide. --- Matrilateral. --- Mervyn Meggitt. --- Metahuman. --- Modernity. --- Morpheme. --- Mother goddess. --- Multitude. --- Natural language. --- New Caledonia. --- New Guinea. --- Nidaba. --- Ninhursag. --- Ninurta. --- Normal science. --- Nuliajuk. --- Ontology. --- Otherworld. --- Pantheism. --- Personal god. --- Personhood. --- Phenomenon. --- Potentate. --- Proscription. --- Reincarnation. --- Relevance. --- Religion. --- Religiosity. --- Reproduction. --- Rite. --- Rodney Needham. --- Ruler. --- Science. --- Scientist. --- Shamanism. --- Spirit. --- Subjectivity. --- Supernatural. --- Supplication. --- Supreme Being. --- The New Science. --- The Other Hand. --- The Transcendentalist. --- The Various. --- Theory. --- Thought. --- Transcendence (religion). --- Transcendental idealism. --- Transcendentalism. --- Vision quest. --- Western esotericism.