onkings

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