by Faun Rice
domination. Hobbes spoke of the state of nature as all that time in which “men
lived without a common power to keep them all in awe.” Yet in Rasmussen’s ac-
counts of the Inuit, a people who might otherwise be said to approximate that
natural state, “mankind is held in awe”—given the fear of hunger and sickness
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ON KINGS
inflicted by the powers governing them (1931: 124).5 If this accounts for the
people’s anxieties, it also helps explain the reports of their stoic, composed, often
congenial disposition. This happier subjectivity is not simply seasonal, not sim-
ply due to the fact that times are good in terms of hunting and food supply, for
that in itself would be because the people have been observant of Sedna’s rules,
and accordingly she makes the animals available. There is a certain comfort and
assurance that comes from the people’s compliance with the higher authorities
that govern their fortunes—or if you will, their compliance with the “dominant
ideology” (cf. Robbins 2004: 212). In the upshot, it’s almost as if these polar
inhabitants were bipolar—except that, beside the fear and composure that came
from their respect of the god, on occasion they also knew how to oppose and
defy her.
More precisely, if great shamans could on occasion force the god to desist
from harming the people, it was by means of countervailing metapersons in
their service: familiar spirits they possessed or who possessed them. Thus em-
powered, the shaman could fight or even kill Sedna, to make her liberate the
game (upon her revival) in a time of famine (Weyer 1932: 359; Merkur 1991:
112). More often, the dangerous journeys shamans undertake to Sedna’s un-
dersea home culminate in some manhandling of her with a view to soothing
her anger by combing the sins of humans out of her tangled hair. Alternatively,
Sedna was hunted like a seal from a hole in the ice in winter: she was hauled up
from below by a noose and while in the shaman’s power told to release the ani-
mals; or she was conjured to rise by song and then harpooned to the same effect.
The last, the attack on the god, was the dramatic moment of an important
autumnal festival of the Netsilik, designed to put an end to this tempestuous
season and ensure good weather for the coming winter. Again it was not just the
stormy weather with its accompaniment of shifting and cracking ice that was
the issue, but the “countless evil spirits” that were so manifesting themselves,
including the dead knocking wildly at the huts “and woe to the unhappy per-
son they can lay hold of ” (Boas [1888] 1961: 603). Ruling all and the worst of
them was Sedna, or so one may judge from the fact that when she was ritually
5. Like the Chukchee shaman who told Bogoras:
We are surrounded by enemies. Spirits always walk about with gaping mouths.
We are always cringing, and distributing gifts on all sides, asking protection
of one, giving ransom to another, and unable to obtain anything whatever
gratuitously. (1904–9: 298)
THE ORIGINAL POLITICAL SOCIETY
35
hunted and harpooned, the evil metahuman host were all driven away. Sedna
dives below and in a desperate struggle manages to free herself, leaving her
badly wounded, greatly angry, and in a mood to seize and carry off her human
tormenters. That could result in another attack on her, however, for if a rescuing
shaman is unable to otherwise induce her to release the victim, he may have to
thrash her into doing so (Rasmussen 1930: 100). Although the shamans’ pow-
ers to thus oppose the god are not exactly their own, may one not surmise—as
David Graeber develops at length in chapter 7 in this volume—there is here
a germ of a human political society: that is, ruling humans qua metapersons
themselves?
A word on terminology. Hereafter, I use “inua” as a general technical term
for all animistic forms of indwelling persons, whether of creatures or things—
and whether the reference is singular or plural. I use “metaperson” preferably and
“metahuman” alternately for all those beings usually called “spirits”: including
gods, ghosts, ancestors, demons, inua, and so on. Aside from direct quotations,
“spirit” will appear only as a last resort of style or legibility, and usually then in
quotation marks—for reasons to which I now turn, by way of the life story of
Takunaqu, an Iglulik woman:
One day I remember a party of children out at play, and wanted to run out at
once and play with them. But my father, who understood hidden things, per-
ceived that I was playing with the souls of my dead brothers and sisters. He was
afraid this might be dangerous, and therefore called upon his helping spirits and
asked them about it. Through his helping spirits, my father learned . . . there
was . . . something in my soul of that which had brought about the death of my
brothers and sisters. For this reason, the dead were often about me, and I did
not distinguish between the spirits of the dead and real live people. (Rasmussen
1930: 24)
WHY CALL THEM SPIRITS?
Sometime before Hocart was asking, “Why not call them gods?” Andrew Lang
in effect asked of gods, “Why call them spirits?” Just because we have been
taught our god is a spirit, he argued, that is no reason to believe “the earliest
men” thought of their gods that way ([1898] 1968: 202). Of course, I cannot
speak here of “the earliest men”—all those suggestive allusions to the state of
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ON KINGS
nature notwithstanding—but only of some modern peoples off the beaten track
of state systems and their religions. For the Inuit, the Chewong, and similar
others, Lang would have a point: our native distinction between spirits and
human beings, together with the corollary oppositions between natural and su-
pernatural and spiritual and material, for these peoples do not apply. Neither,
then, do they radically differentiate an “other world” from this one. Interacting
with other souls in “a spiritual world consisting of a number of personal forces,”
as J. G. Oosten observed, “the Inuit themselves are spiritual beings” (1976: 29).
Fair enough, although given the personal character of those forces, it is more
logical to call spirits “people” than to call people “spirits.” But in either case, and
notwithstanding our own received distinctions, at ethnographic issue here is the
straightforward equivalence, spirits = people.
The recent theoretical interest in the animist concepts of indigenous peoples
of lowland South America, northern North America, Siberia, and Southeast
Asia has provided broad documentation of this monist ontology of a personal-
ized universe. Kaj Århem offers a succinct summary:
As opposed to naturalism, which assumes a foundational dichotomy between
objective nature and subjective culture, animism posits an intersubjective and
personalized universe in which the Cartesian split between person and thing
is dissolved and rendered spurious. In the animist cosmos, animals and plants,
beings and things may all appear as intentional subjects and persons, capable
of will, intention, and agency. The primacy of physical causation is replaced by
intentional causation and social agency. (2016: 3)
It only needs be added that given the constraints of this “animist cosmos” on the
human population, the effect is a certain “cosmo-politics” in Eduardo Viveiros
de Castro’s sense of the term (2015). Indeed, the politics at issue here involves
much more than animist inua, for it equally characterizes people’s relations to
gods, disembodied souls of the dead, lineage ancestors, species-masters, demons,
and other such intentional subjects: a large array of metapersons setting the
terms and conditions of human existence. Taken in its unity, hierarchy, and to-
tality, this is a cosmic polity. As Déborah Danowski and Viveiros de Castro (2017:
68–69) very recently put the matter (just as this article was going to press):
What we would cal “natural world,” or “world” for short, is for Amazonian
peoples a multiplicity of intricately connected multiplicities. Animals and other
THE ORIGINAL POLITICAL SOCIETY
37
spirits are conceived as so many kinds of “‘people” or “societies,” that is, as po-
litical entities. . . . Amerindians think that there are many more societies (and
therefore, also humans) between heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our
philosophy and anthropology. What we cal “environment” is for them a society
of societies, an international arena, a cosmopoliteia. There is, therefore, no abso-
lute difference in status between society and environment, as if the first were
the “subject” and the second the “object.” Every object is another subject and is
more than one.
In what follows I offer some selected ethnographic reports of the coexistence of
humans with such metapersonal powers in the same “intersubjective and per-
sonalized universe”—just by way of illustration. But let me say here, and try to
demonstrate in the rest of the essay, the implications are world-historical: for if
these metaperson-others have the same nature as, and are in the same experien-
tial reality with, humans, while exerting life-and-death powers over them, then
they are the dominant figures in what we habitually call “politics” and “econom-
ics” in all the societies so constituted. In the event, we will require a different
anthropological science than the familiar one that separates the human world
into ontologically distinct ideas, social relations, and things, and then seeks to
discount the former as a dependent function of one of the latter two—as if our
differentiated notions of things and social relations were not symbolically con-
stituted in the first place.
Not to separate, then, what peoples of the New Guinea Highlands join:
surrounded and outnumbered above, below, and on earth by ghosts, clan ances-
tors, demons, earthquake people, sky people, and the many inua of the wild, the
Mbowamb spend their lives “completely under the spell and in the company of
spirits. . . . The spirits rule the life of men. . . . There is simply no profane field
of life where they don’t find themselves surrounded by a supernatural force”
(Vicedom and Tischner (1943–48, 2: 680–81). Yet if the “other world” is thus
omnipresent around Mt. Hagen, it is not then an “other world.” These people,
we are told, “do not distinguish between the purely material and purely spiritual
aspects of life” (ibid . : 592). Nor would they have occasion to do so if, as is re-
ported of Mae Enga, they conducted lives in constant intersubjective relations
with the so-called “spirits.” “Much of [Enga] behavior remains inexplicable to
anyone ignorant of the pervasive belief in ghosts,” reports Mervyn Meggitt.
“Not a day passes but someone refers publicly to the actions of ghosts” (1965:
109–10). Or as a missionary-ethnographer recounts:
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ON KINGS
For the Central Enga the natural world is alive and endowed with invisible pow-
er. To be seen otherwise would leave unexplained numerous events. The falling
tree, the lingering illness, the killing frost, the haunting dream—all confirm the
belief in a relationship between the physical world and the powers of earth, sky,
and underworld. (Brennan1977: 11–12; cf. Feachem 1973)
Such metapersonal powers are palpably present in what is actually happening
to people, their fortunes good and bad. Hence Fredrik Barth’s own experience
among Baktaman in the Western Highlands: “The striking feature is . . . how
empirical the spirits are, how they appear as very concrete observable objects in
the world rather than ways of talking about the world” (1975: 129, emphasis
in original). Supporting Barth’s observation from his own work among nearby
Mianmin people, Don Gardner adds that “spirits of one kind or another are a
basic feature of daily life. Events construed as involving ‘supernatural’ beings are
commonly reported and discussed” (1987: 161).6
Mutatis mutandis, in the Amazonian forest, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
comes to a similar appreciation of the gods and dead as immanently present
for Araweté. Listening to the nocturnal songs of shamans summoning these
metaperson-others to the village, the ethnographer
came to perceive the presence of the gods, as the reality or source of examples, in
every minute routine action. Most important, it was through these that I could
discover the participation of the dead in the world of the living. (1992: 13–14)
The presence of maï [‘gods’] in daily life is astonishing: for each and every pur-
pose, they are cited as models of action, paradigms of body ornamentation,
standards for interpreting events, and sources of news . . . . (1992: 74–75)7
The general condition of the cohabitation of humans and their metaperson-
al-alters in one “real world” is their psychic unity: their mutual and reciprocal
6. Peter Lawrence and Meggitt speak of a general Melanesian “view of the cosmos
(both its empirical and non-empirical parts) as a unitary physical realm with few, if
any, transcendental attributes” (1965: 8).
7. Yet the Araweté are no more mystical in such regards than is the ethnographer.
The affective tone of their life, Viveiros de Castro notes, does not involve what we
consider religiosity: demonstrations of reverence, devaluation of human existence,
and so forth. They are familiar with their gods.
THE ORIGINAL POLITICAL SOCIETY
39
status as anthropopsychic subjects. The venerable anthropological premise of
“the psychic unity of mankind”has to be more generously understood. For as
Viveiros de Castro says, “There is no way to distinguish between humans and
what we call spirits” (ibid.: 64). In effect, the so-called “spirits” are so many
heterogeneous species of the genus Homo: “Human beings proper ( bide) are a
species within a multiplicity of other species of human beings who form their
own societies” (ibid . : 55).8 As is well known, the statement would hold for many
peoples throughout lowland South America. Of the Achuar, Philippe Descola
writes that they do not know the “supernatural as a level of reality separate from
nature,”
inasmuch as the human condition is common to “all nature’s beings. . . .
Humans, and most plants, animals, and meteors are persons ( aents) with a soul
( wakan) and individual life” (1996: 93).
In speaking of the “own societies” of the metaperson-others as known to
Araweté, Viveiros de Castro al udes to the “perspectivism” that his writings
have done much to make normal anthropological science. Wel documented
from Siberia as wel as Amazonia, the phenomenon offers a privileged instance
of the coparticipation of humans with gods, ghosts, animal-persons, and others
in the same complex society. In consequence of differences in their perceptual
apparatus, both people and animals live unseen to each other in their own
communities as fully human beings, bodily and culturally; even as each ap-
pears to the other as animal prey or predators. In this connection, the com-
mon ethnographic observation that because the nonhuman persons are as such
general y invisible, they must inhabit a different, “spiritual” reality, is a cultural
non sequitur for Araweté and other perspectivists. In Lockean terms the differ-
ences are only secondary qualities: due to perception—because of the different
bodily means thereof—rather than to the thing thus perceived. In practice,
moreover, the socius includes a variety of metapersonal communities: not only
those of the animal inua, but also the vil ages of the gods, the dead, and perhaps
others, all of them likewise cultural replicas of human communities. Accord-
ingly, the human groups are engaged in a sociological complexity that defies
the normal anthropological characterizations of their simplicity. A lot of social
intercourse goes on between humans and the metahuman persons with whom
they share the earth, as wel as with those who people the heavens and the
8. Or else, like the various animals known to Naskapi of the Canadian Northeast, these
other persons “constitute races and tribes among which the human is included”
(Speck 1977: 30).
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ON KINGS
underworld. Apart from shamans, even ordinary humans may travel to lands
of the metaperson-others, as conversely the latter may appear among people in
human form. Human and nonhuman persons are often known to intermarry