onkings
Page 11
that prove the rule of domination by metaperson powers-that-be; for, like Inuit
shamans or Hagen big-men, their own ability to command others is conveyed
by their service to or enlistment of just such metaperson-others. Indeed, as
Vicedom and Tischner write of Hageners: “Any manifestation of power in peo-
ple or things is ascribed to supernatural or hidden power,” whether in the form
the affairs of men.” Notably, one Datagaliwabe, “a unique spirit whose sole concern is
punishing breaches of kinship rules” (1965: 27)—including lying, stealing, adultery,
murder, incest, violations of exogamic rules and of ritual taboos—inflicts sickness,
accidents, death or wounding in war (ibid.: 37).
17. For a similar structure of divinity in a non-Tupi setting, see Jon Christopher Crocker
(1983: 37 et passim) on the bope spirits of the Bororo. In both cases, by conveying to
the gods their rightful share of certain foods, the people will be blessed with fertility
and natural plenty.
THE ORIGINAL POLITICAL SOCIETY
59
of good harvests, many children, success in trade, or a respected position in the
community (1943–48, 1: 43).
In insightful discussions of the Piaroa of the Orinoco region, Joanna Over-
ing (1983–84, 1989) notes that human life-giving powers were not their own,
but were magically transmitted to individuals from the gods by tribal leaders.
By means of powerful chants, the ruwang, the tribal leader, was uniquely able
to travel to the lands of the gods, whence he brought the forces for productivity
enclosed within “beads of life” and placed them in the people of his community.
Overing points out that this is no political economy in the sense that tribal lead-
ers control the labor of others. But as they absorbed more divine powers than
others, they were responsible for building the community: “Without the work
of the ruwang, the community could not be created, and because of his greater
creative power, he was also the most productive member of the community”
(1989: 172).
In such cultural-ontological regimes, where every variety of human social
success is thus attributed to metapersonal powers, there are no purely secular
authorities. Roger Keesing relates of an ambitious young Kwaio man that he
is well on his way to big-manship, as evidenced by his staggering command of
genealogies, his encyclopedic knowledge of traditions of the ancestors and their
feuds, his distinction as a singer of epic chants, and his acquisition of magi-
cal powers. Accordingly, he is “not only acquiring an intellectual command of
his culture, but powerful instruments for pursuing secular ambitions as a feast-
giver” (Keesing 1982: 208). Or for an Australian Aboriginal example: Helmut
Petri concludes that the reason certain Ungarinyin “medicine men” and elders
are leading and influential men of their communities is that they “are regarded
as people in whom primeval times are especially alive, in whom the great he-
roes and culture-bringers are repeated and who maintain an inner link between
mythical past and present” ([1954] 2011: 69). Not that those who so possess
or are favored by divine powers are necessarily placed beyond the control of
their fellows, for popular pressures may be put on them to use such powers be-
neficently. Here is where the famous “egalitarianism” of these peoples becomes
relevant. Tony Swain (1993: 52) notes that the native Australian elders’ shared
being with the land entails the obligation to make it abound with life—a duty
the people will hold them to. Swain is careful to insist that the leaders’ access
to ritual positions amounts to a certain control of “the means of production,”
hence that this is not the kind of communalistic, nonhierarchical society “im-
agined by early Marxists.” But then, ordinary people, without direct access to
60
ON KINGS
metapersonal sources of fertility, “can and do order ritual custodians to ‘work’ to
make them food: ‘You mak’em father—I want to eat.’” All of which brings us
back to the issue of mystification.
Earlier, I warned against too quickly writing off the human dependence on
gods, ancestors, ghosts, or even seal-persons as so much mistaken fantasy. Well,
nobody nowadays is going to attribute these notions to a “primitive mental-
ity.” And from all that has been said here, it cannot be claimed these beliefs
in “spirits” amount to an ideological chimera perpetrated by the ruling class in
the interest of maintaining their power—that is, on the Voltairean principle of
“There is no God, but don’t tell the servants.” Here we do have gods, but no rul-
ing class. And what we also distinctively find in these societies is the coexistence
in the same social reality of humans with metahumans who have life-giving and
death-dealing powers over them. The implications, as I say, look to be world-
historical. As is true of big-men or shamans, access to the metaperson authori-
ties on behalf of others is the fundamental political value in all human societies
so organized. Access on one’s own behalf is usually sorcery, but to bestow the
life-powers of the god on others is to be a god among men. Human political
power is the usurpation of divine power. This is also to say that claims to divine
power, as manifest in ways varying from the successful hunter sharing food
or the shaman curing illness, to the African king bringing rain, have been the
raison d’être of political power throughout the greater part of human history.
Including chiefdoms such as Kwakiutl, where,
The chiefs are the assemblers, the concentrators, and the managers of super-
natural powers. . . . The human chiefs go out to alien realms and deal with alien
beings to accumulate nawalak [generic life-giving power], and to concentrate it
in the ceremonial house. When they have become centers of nawalak the salmon
come to them. The power to draw salmon is equated with the power to draw
people. The power to attract derives from nawalak and demonstrates its posses-
sion. (Goldman 1975: 198–99)
It was not military power or economic prowess as such that generated the
dominance of the Abelam people over the various other Sepik communities of
New Guinea eager to adopt Abelam cultural forms; rather it was the “super-
natural power” that their successes signified. “Effectiveness in warfare and skill
in growing yams, particularly the phallic long yams,” Anthony Forge (1990:
162) explains, “were in local terms merely the material manifestations of a more
THE ORIGINAL POLITICAL SOCIETY
61
fundamental Abelam domination, that of power conceived essentially in magical
and ritual terms.” What enabled the Abelam yams to grow larger, their gardens
to be more productive, and their occupation of land once held by others was
their “superior access to supernatural power.” Accordingly, the political-cum-
cultural reach of the Abelam extended beyond their actual grasp. Beyond any
real-political or material constraints, the Abelam were admired and feared for
their superior access to cosmic power in all its forms, and notably for its “con-
crete expression” in rituals, buildings, and a great array of objects, decorations,
and aesthetic styles. Abelam culture was thus carried abroad by its demonstrable
command of greater force than its own (ibid: 163ff.).
Southeast Asian “tribals” and peasants are wel known for sacrificial “feasts
of merit” in which the display and/or distribution of livestock, foods, and ritual
valuables such as porcelain jars and imported textiles is the making of local au-
thorities. But it is not so much the economic benefits to the population at large
that constitute this authority—as if the people were rendered dependent on the
sponsor of the sacrificial feast for their own means of existence—as it is the priv-
ileged dependence of the feast-giver on the metahuman sources of people’s pros-
perity. As Kaj Århem comments in regard to the “ritual wealth” thus expended:
Such ritual wealth is regarded as objectivized spirit power—an indication that
the owner is blessed and protected by personal spirits. Spirit possession manifests
itself in good health and a large family. The blessings of the spirits are gained by
proper conduct—keeping the precepts of the cosmologically underpinned social
and moral order—and, above all, by continuously hosting animal sacrifices, the
so-called “feasts of merit.” Wealth, sacrifice, and spiritual blessing are thus linked
in an endless, positive feedback circuit. The implied reification of spiritual poten-
cy in the form of wealth and worldly power—its acquisition and accumulation as
well as its loss—is central to Southeast Asian cosmology and politics. (2016: 20)
Economic prowess is a metaphysical power.18 Then again, there are other well-
known ways, from the magical to the military, of demonstrating such metahu-
man potency. Even in the matter of kingship, the royal authority may have little
or nothing to do with the accumulation and disposition of riches. In certain
African stranger-kingships described elsewhere (see chapter 5 in this volume),
18. Geertz (1980) was right to speak of a Balinese “theatre state.” So were those who
criticized him for underplaying its material dimension.
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ON KINGS
power essentially rested on the ritual functions of ensuring the population’s pros-
perity: the authority to do so being dependent on descent from exalted foreign
sources, complemented usually by traditions of the dynastic founder’s exploits as
a hunter and warrior in the wild. As Shilluk, Lovedu, and Alur demonstrate, in
more than one African realm such stranger-kings “rained” but did not govern.
For all the superior foreign origin of an Alur chiefly dynasty, its connection
to the ancient great kingdom of Nyoro-Kitara, the Alur ruler, reported Aidan
Southall, was revered by his indigenous subjects more for his power to stop war
than to make it; “and the sanction to his ritual authority, which is always up-
permost in people’s minds, is his power to make or withhold rain rather than his
power to call in overwhelming force to crush an opponent” ([1956] 2004: 246):
Rain ( koth) stood for material well-being in general, and a chief ’s ability to dem-
onstrate his control over it was a crucial test of his efficacy. The chief ’s control
of rain and weather, together with his conduct of sacrifice and worship at the
chiefdom shrines, stood for his general and ultimate responsibility in the minds
of his subjects for both their material and moral well-being. ([1956] 2004: 239)
You will have noticed that I have come back full circle to Hocart’s Kings and
councillors. Government in general and kingship in particular develop as the or-
ganization of ritual. As said earlier, we scholars of a more skeptical or positivist
bent are at liberty to demystify the apparent illusions of the Others. We can split
up their reality in order to make society autonomous, expose the gods as fantasy,
and reduce nature to things. To put it in Chicagoese, we may say we know bet-
ter than them. But if we do, it becomes much harder to know them better. For
myself, I am a Hocartesian.
A final note in this personal vein. Written by one of a certain age, this pre-
tentious article has the air of a swan song. Similarly, for its concern with disap-
pearing or disappeared cultural forms, it is something of the Owl of Minerva
taking wing at dusk. Still, it does manage to kill those two birds with one stone.
CODA
Already copyedited, this text was on its way to the printer when by happy chance
I discovered that in 1946 Thorkild Jacobsen had formulated the concept of a “cos-
mic state” in reference to Mesopotamian polities of the third millennium bce.
THE ORIGINAL POLITICAL SOCIETY
63
Jacobsen’s discussion of a universal metapersonal regime in a city-state setting
indeed anticipates many of the attributes of “The original political society” as pre-
sented here—most fundamentally his observation that “the universe as an organ-
ized whole was a society, a state” ([1946] 1977: 149). Ruled by divine authorities,
human society was merely a subordinate part of this larger society, together with all
the other phenomena-cum-subjects inhabiting the cosmos, from beasts and plants
to stones and stars: all animate beings ( inua) likewise endowed with personality
and intentionality. Jacobsen depicts this hierarchical y organized world in which
personkind was the nature of things in a number of parallel passages. For example:
Human society was to the Mesopotamian merely a part of the larger society of
the universe. The Mesopotamian universe—because it did not consist of dead
matter, because every stone, every tree, every conceivable thing in it was a being
with a will and a character of its own—was likewise founded on authority: its
members, too, willingly and automatically obeyed orders which made them act
as they should act. . . . So the whole universe showed the influence of the essence
peculiar to Anu [Sky, king and father of the gods]. ([1946] 1977: 139)
By Jacobsen’s descriptions, this universal animism was classificatory—the per-
sonalities of elements of the same kind were instances of a master personality of
the species; and the scheme was hierarchical at multiple levels—species forms
were in turn inhabited by higher, divine forms, such that the world was gov-
erned through the indwelling being of cosmocratic gods in every existing thing.
While the whole universe manifested the essence of Anu, the goddess Nidabe
created and inhabited the useful reeds of the wetlands and by her presence made
them flourish. “She was one with every reed in the sense that she penetrated
as an animating and characterizing agent, but she did not lose her identity in
that of the concrete phenomena and was not limited to any or all the existing
reeds” (ibid.: 132). Note that this kind of philosophical realism, with the god as
personification of the class of which individuals are participatory members, is
a general logic of partibility or dividualism. The god is a partible person mani-
fest in various other beings—like the “myriad bodies” ( kino lau) of Hawaiian
gods—and at the same time exists independently of them. By the same token
(p
un intended), the several members of a divine class are at once manifestations
of the god and (in)dividuals in their own right and kind.
Following this classificatory logic, Jacobsen achieves a description of di-
vine kingship in Mesopotamia of the kind known from classic anthropological
64
ON KINGS
accounts in which, for all that the king is a certain god, the god is not the king.
Nyikang is Juok, but Juok is not Nyikang; Captain Cook is Lono, but Lono is
not Captain Cook. Just so, the Mesopotamian king is Anu, but Anu is not the
king. Indeed, given the partibilities involved, the Mesopotamian king in various
capacities is also Enlil, Marduk, or any and all the great gods. (Interesting that
Hocart [(1936) 1970: 88] recounted the analogous claim of an important Fijian
chief who, after enumerating the great gods of the chiefdom, said, “These are
all my names.”) This type of intersubjective animism is by far the most com-
mon type of divine kingship: the king as human manifestation of the god, as an
avatar of the god, rather than the human as the deity in his own person, such as
the self-made Roman god, Augustus. Jacobsen also thus testifies to the principle
that human authority is the appropriation of divine power. In the cult, the Mes-
opotamian king enacted the god and thereby controlled and acquired the god’s
potency. By a kind of usurpation, as it were, a man could “clothe himself with
these powers, with the identity of the gods, and through his own actions, when
thus identified, cause the powers to act as he would have them act” (Jacobsen
[1946] 1977: 199).
For the rest, Jacobsen’s text delivers on the usual ontological suspects of a
metapersonal cosmos: no subject–object opposition, and, a fortiori, no differen-
tiation of humans from nature—or can we not say: no culture–nature opposi-
tion? (Similar observations are made in the same volume by John A. Wilson
[(1946) 1977] on ancient Egypt and H. and H. A. Frankfort [(1946) 1977] on
ancient civilizations in general.) Given this universal subjectivity as a matter of
common experience, neither did the ancient Mesopotamians know a transcend-
ent, “supernatural” realm. “The Mesopotamian universe did not have ‘different
levels of reality’” (Jacobsen [1946] 1977: 149).