by Faun Rice
ahead of others or show the slightest ambition to control other people” (Oosten
1976: 16), and in particular of the Netsilik of the Central Canadian Arctic that
“there were no lineages or clans, no institutionalized chiefs or formal govern-
ment” (Balikci 1970: xv). On the other hand, of the same Netsilik, Knud Ras-
mussen (1931: 224) wrote:
1. One is reminded of the great Rainbow Serpent of Australian Aboriginals, as also
by the Original Snake’s relation to the celestial god Tanko, thus making a pair
like the male sky deity and the autochthonous serpent of Australian traditions (see
below on Magalim of the Central New Guinea Min peoples and Ungud of the
Kimberleys, Western Australia).
28
ON KINGS
The powers that rule the earth and all the animals, and the lives of mankind are
the great spirits who live on the sea, on land, out in space, and in the Land of
the Sky. These are many, and many kinds of spirits, but there are only three really
great and really independent ones, and they are Nuliajuk, Narssuk, and Tatqeq.
These three are looked upon as directly practicing spirits, and the most powerful
of them all is Nuliajuk, the mother of animals and mistress both of the sea and
the land. At all times she makes mankind feel how she vigilantly and mercilessly
takes care that all souls, both animals and humankind, are shown the respect the
ancient rules of life demand.
Ruling their respective domains—Nuliajuk or Sedna, the sea and the land;
Tatqeq, the Moon Man, the heavens; and Narssuk or Sila, the meteorologi-
cal forces of the air—these three “great spirits” were widely known under vari-
ous names from East Greenland to the Siberian Arctic—which affords some
confidence in their antiquity and indigeneity. While always complementary in
territorial scope, they varied in salience in different regions: the Moon Man
generally dominant in the Bering Strait and Sila in Greenland; whereas Sedna,
as Franz Boas wrote, was “the supreme deity of the Central Eskimos,” holding
“supreme sway over the destinies of mankind” (1901: 119).2
The Central Inuit and Sedna in particular will be the focus here: “The stern
goddess of fate among the Eskimos,” as Rasmussen (1930: 123) characterized
her. In command of the animal sources of food, light, warmth, and clothing that
made an Inuit existence possible, Sedna played “by far the most important part
in everyday life” (ibid.: 62). She was effectively superior to Sila and the Moon,
who often functioned as her agents, “to see that her will is obeyed” (ibid.: 63).
Accordingly, in his ethnography of the Iglulik, Rasmussen describes a divine
pantheon of anthropomorphic power ruling a human society that was itself in-
nocent of institutional authority. So whenever any transgression of Sedna’s rules
or taboos associated with hunting occurs,
the spirit of the sea intervenes. The moon spirit helps her to see the rules of life
are daily observed, and comes hurrying down to earth to punish any instance of
2. On the distribution and respective powers of these great spirits among Inuit and
Siberian peoples, see the general summaries in Weyer (1932), Oosten (1976),
Hodgkins (1977), and Merkur (1991). On the dominance of Sedna among the
Central Inuit, see in particular Weyer (1932: 355–56).
THE ORIGINAL POLITICAL SOCIETY
29
neglect. And both sea spirit and moon spirit employ Sila to execute all punish-
ments in any way connected with the weather. (Rasmussen 1930: 63; cf. 78)
Scholars perennially agonize over whether to consider the likes of Sedna as
“gods.” Too often some promising candidate is rejected for failing to closely
match our own ideas of the Deity: an act of religious intolerance, as Daniel
Merkur observed (1991: 37–48), with the effect of promulgating the Judeo-
Christian dogma that there is only one True God. But, “Why not call them
gods?”; for it happens that Hocart thus posed the question in regard to a close
analogue of Sedna among Winnebago people, a certain “immaterial being in
control of animal species” ([1936] 1970: 149; cf. Radin 1914). More than just
species-masters, however, Sedna, Sila, and the Moon had the divine attributes
of immortality and universality. All three were erstwhile humans who achieved
their high stations by breaking with their earthly kinship relations, in the event
setting themselves apart from and over the population in general. Various ver-
sions of Sedna’s origin depict her as an orphan, as mutilated in sacrifice by her
father, and/or as responsible for his death; the Moon Man’s divine career fea-
tured matricide and incest with his sister; Sila left the earth when his parents,
who were giants, were killed by humans. Much of this is what Luc de Heusch
(1962) identified as “the exploit” in traditions of stranger-kingship: the crimes
of the dynastic founder against the people’s kinship order, by which he at once
surpasses it and acquires the solitude necessary to rule the society as a whole,
free from any partisan affiliation (see chapters 3 and 4). And while on the mat-
ter of kingship, there is this: as the ruling powers of earth, sea, air, and sky, all of
the Inuit deities, in breaking from kinship, thereby become territorial overlords.
Transcending kinship, they achieve a kind of territorial sovereignty. The pas-
sage “from kinship to territory” was an accomplished fact long before it was
reorganized as the classic formula of state formation. This is not only to say that
the origins of kingship and the state are discursively or spiritually prefigured in
Inuit communities, but since, like Chewong, “the human social world is intrinsi-
cally part of a wider world in which boundaries between society and cosmos are
non-existent,” this encompassing cosmic polity is actually inscribed in practice.
Like the Chewong, the Inuit could pass for the model of a (so-called) “sim-
ple society” were they not actually and practically integrated in a (so-called)
“complex society” of cosmic proportions. In the territories of the gods dwelt a
numerous population of metahuman subjects, both of the animistic kind of per-
sons indwelling in places, objects, and animals; and disembodied free souls, as of
30
ON KINGS
ghosts or demons. “The invisible rulers of every object are the most remarkable
beings next to Sedna,” Boas wrote: “Everything has its inua (owner)” ([1888]
1961: 591).3 All across the Arctic from Greenland to Siberia, people know and
contend with these inua (pl. inuat), a term that means “person of ” the noun
that precedes it. Or “its man,” as Waldemar Bogoras translates the Chukchee
cognate, and which clearly implies that “a human life-spirit is supposed to live
within the object” (1904–9: 27–29). (Could Plato have imagined the perspecti-
val response of Chukchee to the allegory of the shadows on the wall of the cave?
“Even the shadows on the wall,” they say, “constitute definite tribes and have
their own country where they live in huts and subsist by hunting” [ibid: 281].)
Note the repeated report of dominion over the thing by its person—“everything
has its owner.” Just so, as indwelling masters of their own domains, the gods
themselves were superior inuat, endowed with something akin to proprietary
rights over their territories and the various persons thereof. J. G. Oosten ex-
plains: “An inua was an anthropomorphic spirit that was usually connected to
an object, place, or animal as its spiritual owner or double. The inuat of the sea,
the moon, and the air could be considered spiritual owners of their respective
territories” (1976: 27). Correlatively, greater spirits such as Sedna, mother of sea
animals, had parental relations to the creatures of their realm, thus adding the
implied godly powers of creation and protection to those of possession and do-
minion. Taken in connection with complementary powers of destruction, here
is a preliminary conclusion that will be worth further exploration: socially and
categorically, divinity is a high-order form of animism.
That’s how it works in Boas’ description of Sedna’s reaction to the viola-
tion of her taboos on hunting sea animals. By a wel -known tradition, the sea
animals originated from Sedna’s severed fingers; hence, a certain mutuality of
being connected her to her animal children. For its part, the hunted seal in Boas’
account is endowed with greater powers than ordinary humans. It can sense
that the hunter has had contact with a corpse by the vapor of blood or death
he emits, breaking a taboo on hunting while in such condition. The revulsion
of the animal is thereupon communicated to Sedna, who in the normal course
3. The distinction between “indwelling” and “free souls” (such as ghosts) is adopted
from Merkur (1991). Reports of the ubiquity of the former among Inuit have been
recurrent at least since the eighteenth century. Thus, from East Greenland in 1771:
“The Greenlanders believe that all things are souled, and also that the smallest
implement possesses its soul. Thus an arrow, a boot, a shoe sole or a key, a drill, has
each for itself a soul” (Glann, in Weyer 1932: 300).
THE ORIGINAL POLITICAL SOCIETY
31
would withdraw the seals to her house under the sea, or perhaps dispatch Sila
on punishing blizzards, thus making hunting impossible and exposing the entire
human community to starvation. Note that in many anthropological treatments
of animism, inasmuch as they are reduced to individualistic or phenomenologi-
cal reflections on the relations between humans and animals, these interactions
are characterized as reciprocal, egalitarian, or horizontal; whereas often in social
practice they are at least three-part relations, involving also the master-person of
the species concerned, in which case they are hierarchical—with the offending
person in the client position. Or rather, the entire Inuit community is thereby
put in a subordinate position, since sanction also falls on the fellows of the trans-
gressor; and as the effect is likewise generalized to all the seals, the event thus
engages a large and diverse social totality presided over by the ruling goddess.4
In the same vein, the many and intricate taboos shaping Inuit social and ma-
terial life entail submission to the metaperson-others who sanction them, wheth-
er these prohibitions are systematically honored or for whatever reason violated.
Of course, submission to the powers is evident in punishments for transgressions.
But the same is doubly implied when the proscriptive rule is followed, for, more
than an act of respect, to honor a taboo has essential elements of sacrifice, involv-
ing the renunciation of some normal practice or social good in favor of the higher
power who authorizes it (cf. Leach 1976; Valeri 2000). In this regard, the exist-
ence of the Inuit, in ways rather like the Chewong, was organized by an elaborate
set of “rules of life,” as Rasmussen deemed them, regulating all kinds of behavior
of all kinds of persons. For even as the main taboos concerned the hunt, the
disposition of game, and practices associated with menstruation, childbirth, and
treatment of the dead, the enjoined behaviors could range from how one made
the first cut of snow in building an igloo, to whether a pregnant woman could go
outside with her mittens on—never (Rasmussen 1930: 170). Rasmussen’s major
work on the “intellectual culture” of the Iglulik includes a catalogue of thirty-one
closely written pages of such injunctions (ibid.: 169–204). As, for example:
R5 The marrow bones of an animal killed by a first-born son are never to be
eaten with a knife, but must be crushed with stones (ibid.: 179).
4. In a comparative discussion of species-masters in lowland South America, Carlos
Fausto (2012: 29) notes that the topic has been relatively neglected by ethnographers,
“due to a widespread view of the South American lowlands as a realm of equality
and symmetry.”
32
ON KINGS
R5 A man suffering want through ill success in hunting must, when coming to
another village and sitting down to eat, never eat with a woman he has not
seen before (ibid.: 182).
R5 Persons hunting seal from a snow hut on ice may not work with soapstone
(ibid.: 184).
R5 Young girls present in a house when a seal is being cut up must take off
their kamiks and remain barefooted as long as the work is in progress (ibid.:
185).
R5 If a woman is unfaithful to her husband while he is out hunting walrus,
especially on drift ice, the man will dislocate his hip and have severe pains
in the sinuses (ibid.: 186).
R5 If a woman sees a whale she must point to it with her middle finger (ibid.:
187).
R5 Widows are never allowed to pluck birds (ibid.: 196).
R5 A woman whose child has died must never drink water from melted ice,
only from melted snow (ibid.: 198).
Commented Boas in this connection: “It is certainly difficult to find out the
innumerable regulations connected with the religious ideas and customs of the
Eskimo. The difficulty is even greater in regard to customs which refer to birth,
sickness and death” ([1888] 1961: 201–2).
The greater number of these “rules of life” were considerations accorded to
Sedna. When they were respected, the sea goddess became the source of human
welfare, providing animals to the hunter. But when they were violated, Sedna or
the powers under her aegis inflicted all manners of misfortune upon the Inuit,
ranging from sicknesses and accidents to starvation and death. Punishments
rained upon the just and the unjust alike: they might afflict not only the offender
but also his or her associates, perhaps the entire community, though these others
could be innocent or even unaware of the offense. As it is sometimes said that
Sedna is also the mother of humankind, that is why she is especially dangerous
to women and children, hence the numerous taboos relating to menstruation,
childbirth, and the newborn. But the more general and pertinent motivation
would be that she is the mother of animals, hence the principle involved in her
animosity to women is an eye-for-an-eye in response to the murder of her own
children (cf. Gardner 1987; Hamayon 1996). Again, everything follows from
the animis
t predicament that people survive by killing others like themselves.
As explained to Rasmussen:
THE ORIGINAL POLITICAL SOCIETY
33
All the creatures we have to kill and eat, all those we have to strike down and
destroy to make clothes for ourselves, have souls like we have, souls which do not
perish with the body, and which therefore must be propitiated lest they should
revenge themselves on us for taking away their souls. (1930: 56)
Among Netsilik, Iglulik, Baffin Islanders, and other Central Inuit, the disem-
bodied souls of the dead, both of persons and of animals, were an omnipresent
menace to the health and welfare of the living. “All the countless spirits of evil
are all around, striving to bring sickness and death, bad weather, and failure
in hunting” (Boas [1888] 1961: 602; cf. Rasmussen 1931: 239; Balikci 1970:
200–1). In principle, it was the persons and animals whose deaths were not
properly respected ritually who thereupon haunted the living. But in this regard,
Rasmussen confirms what one may well have surmised from the extent and
intricacy of the “rules of life,” namely that the gods often act in ways mysterious
to the people:
There are never any definite rules for anything, for it may also happen that a
deceased person may in some mysterious manner attack surviving relatives or
friends he loves, even when they have done nothing wrong. . . . Human beings
are thus helpless in the face of all the dangers and uncanny things that happen in
connection with death and the dead. (1930: 108)
There is hardly a single human being who has kept the rules of life according to
the laws laid down by the wisdom of the ancients. (1930: 58)
In a way, the reign of the metaperson powers-that-be was classically hegemonic,
which helps explain the seeming conflict between the common travelers’ reports
of the Inuits’ good humor and their sense that “human beings were powerless in
the grasp of a mighty fate” (ibid.: 32)—“we don’t believe, we fear” (ibid.: 55). The
ambivalence, I suggest, represents different aspects of the same situation of the
people in relation to the metaperson powers-that-be. What remains unambigu-
ous and invariant is that for all their own “loosely structured” condition, they
are systematically ordered as the dependent subjects of a cosmic system of social