by Faun Rice
of entertaining stories not told as truths, nor in the social or ritual contexts
that suppose they are. The African “myth-legends” are the product of a simpler
dichotomy of true and fictional narratives: cosmic and historical traditions are
thus grouped together and distinguished as “historically true,” as distinguished
from folktales—by Yoruba, for example:
The Yoruba recognize two classes of tales: folktales ( alo) and myth-legends ( itan).
Myth-legends are spoken of as “histories” and are regarded as historically true;
they are quoted by the elders in serious discussions of ritual or political matters,
whenever they can assist in settling a point of disagreement. (1965: 11)
Note the implication: these “historically true” narratives function as paradig-
matic precedents.
Two different issues of historicity are entailed in these myths and legends:
whether they make history—that is, as paradigmatic precedents—or they are
history—that is, as reports of what actually took place. Too often, however, in
opting for one alternative, Western scholars are apt to ignore or discard the
other. Considering that the myths and legends are a priori true for the peo-
ple concerned, hence that they function continuously as precepts of order and
THE ATEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY
213
action, for some analysts (mainly but not exclusively anthropologists), whether
the events reported in the narrative truly happened is irrelevant. Alternatively,
in concluding that that these traditions are a priori untrue and could never have
happened, either because of their fabulous character or because they are merely
functional reflexes of existing institutions, other scholars (mainly but not exclu-
sively historians) eliminate them from historical consideration altogether, either
as being history or as making history. For reasons to be explained, I will here ar-
gue against both these extremes. But for the same reasons I would also reject the
common average scholarly refuge in “the answer lies somewhere in-between”:
that these traditions may well harbor some historical realities, which we can
determine by subtracting their obviously fantastic and irrational elements.
This common, average historical wisdom about myths might be labeled the
“kernel of truth” thesis. The supposition is that the traditions are more-or-less
valuable means of discovering real-historical events provided their fantastic as-
pects are debunked and discarded. The object is to find the “kernel of truth” in
an otherwise unbelievable story, upon which the rest of it is best ignored. Or
else, as in the case of certain traditions of stranger-king origins, the rest is writ-
ten off as a counterfeit claim of legitimacy. Among scholars of African history,
Jan Vansina (1985) has been the great master of this kind of historicist exegesis.
In an interesting way, it involves an inversion of the relation between “myth” and
“fact” that has been argued above concerning the analytic value of a demonstra-
ble discrepancy between traditions of origin and what actually transpired. In the
typical kernel-of-truth practice, one subtracts the “fanciful” from the “mythical”
in order to arrive at the “truly historical.” But if the so-called “myth” is known
to be the historical reality by the people concerned, what actually happened be-
comes the means of historical wisdom rather than the end: for the comparison
with the tradition shows how these happenings have been appropriated within
a given sociocultural scheme. The relationship between what happened and how
it was construed, which is also to say what historical effects it may have, is the
work of culture—or, more precisely, of people making what happened intel-
ligible by means of cultural standards of what there is. Too often, scholars have
worked from the tradition to the event by a process of rational abstraction, sup-
posing historical truth is factual; whereas a comparative anthropology would
work from the event to the tradition by a process of exegetical elaboration, sup-
posing the cultural truth is historical.
A parenthesis here, lest I be charged with the crude notion of relativism to
the effect of “any morality is as good as any other” by which critics too often
214
ON KINGS
slander an anthropological sensitivity to the ways other cultural orders, and cor-
relatively other histories, differ from our own (cf. MacGaffey 1976: 116f.). My
understanding of cultural relativism has always been the following:
Cultural relativism is first and last an interpretive anthropological—that is to
say, methodological—procedure. It is not the moral argument that any culture or
custom is as good as any other, if not better. Relativism is the simple prescription
that, in order to be intelligible, other people’s practices and ideals must be placed
in their own historical context, understood as positional values in the field of
their own cultural relationships rather than appreciated by categorical and moral
judgments of our making. Relativity is the provisional suspension of one’s own
judgments in order to situate the practices at issue in the historical and cultural
order that made them possible. It is in no other way a matter of advocacy. (Sahl-
ins 2012b: 46)
Cultural relativism is an anthropological way of discovering cultural differ-
ences, rather than a charitable way of granting them moral absolution. End of
parenthesis.
By contrast to “the answer lies somewhere in-between,” some scholars would
endorse the radical argument that since myths are sacred truths, all that matters
is that they function as historical paradigms, regardless of their factual status.
For Edmund Leach, what is structurally and historically effective about myth is
that the people believe it is true; that it may or may not have “really happened”
is “irrelevant.” In the Frazer lecture of 1988, he offered a most un-Frazer-like
take on the historical value of “myth”:
In the language of contemporary anthropology, the assertion that a particular
story (either oral or literary) is a myth need not imply that it is untrue. Stories are
myths if they are used as . . . justifications or precedents for social action, whether
secular or religious. Whether the precedent story in question was or was not true
as factual history is entirely irrelevant . . . . Myth is believed to be true by those
who use it. In this sense, all the Christian gospel stories are myth for Christians.
Although practicing Christians are deeply committed to a belief that the key
events recorded in the gospels “really happened,” the fact is that the historicity
of the stories (if any) is irrelevant for the religious implication of what the texts
contain. (2011: 283–84)
THE ATEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY
215
In his excellent treatments of history in the Kazembe kingdom of the Luapula
Valley, Cunnison comes to a similar conclusion, but with an important caveat
about the nature of the truth-values at issue:
What actually happened matters little unless the people concerned have means
of knowing that what they say hap
pened, did happen, or did not. The important
thing is this: what the Luapula people say now about the past is what they know
actually happened in the past. Simply to say they believed it happened in the past
is too weak, for they do not doubt it. (1959: 33)
It thus seems sociologically irrelevant whether the history is in quality possible,
improbable, or downright mythical . . . . What is important to Africans about
their histories is not their probability or reliability, which are unquestioned and
outside discussion, but it is the implication present in the form which the history
finally takes; and nowadays this conception has found currency among some
of the people by the use of the English word “meaning.” And in the mythical
histories of clans and subclans and tribes the meaning is the raison d’être for
the group’s coming there in the first place, of their position in regard to the oc-
cupation of land, and their relation to other neighboring groups, or groups with
whom they live together. (1951: 22)
Clearly Cunnison’s stronger contention that traditions of the past involve in-
dubitably known, objective judgments—this happened—is preferable to the
dubitable subjective propositions entailed in belief—I hold that this is what
happened. Moreover, given that this history organizes the relations between
groups, it also has to do with what will happen. Considering the sense of fiction
that ever attends the word, then, why continue to call these unquestionable nar-
ratives “myth”? Even Malinowski’s “charter myth” is an ethnological oxymoron,
inasmuch as a tradition that establishes the constitution of the society could not
be fictional in the society in which it so functions. On the other hand, if “belief ”
and “myth” are too weak for a proper anthropological understanding of these
origin stories, to say that their relation to what really happened is irrelevant
goes too far in just that anthropological respect. Especially if by archival or ar-
chaeological means one could determine a discrepancy between wie es eigentlich
gewesen and the tradition thereof, it would be an intellectual bonanza. To repeat:
it would expose the cultural work in the organization of a historical praxis, how
216
ON KINGS
what happened has been effectively recuperated in the terms of a particular
sociocultural order. What the discrepancy between “fact” and tradition would
reveal is the way—which is never the only possible way—the events have been
culturally construed by some social process of valuation. For historians and an-
thropologists both, the fundamental question is not what actually happened, but
what it is that happened.
But that cannot be a question addressed through the Kongo indigenous
traditions of the past according to Wyatt MacGaffey. MacGaffey could agree
with Leach and Cunnison that whether or not such narratives are factual is
irrelevant; for in his own view, they are not really about the past. Whatever
their relation to the actual past, they have no place in a historical account, since
historical is not what they are. Merely epiphenomenal is what they are: discur-
sive expressions of social institutions whose logic, purpose, and content they
embody, syntagmatically or metaphorically, explicitly or in disguise. For Mac-
Gaffey, to give charter traditions any historical credence is to make the major
methodological error of suborning the analytical position of the anthropologist
by an indigenous point of view beholden to its own structures and functions.
Speaking of conventional attempts to separate historical fact from the magical
aspects of traditions, he writes:
The conventional ethnographic view regards such magical details as accretions
upon an historical core. Tradition, that is to say, is implicitly sorted into a class of
events that seem likely to the European mind, and thus as possibly or probably
historical and a class of unlikely events that are discarded the procedure is arbi-
trary and unjustified . . . . Real history cannot be inferred from tradition in any
simple way. To accept as historical even such portions as look real to the foreign
eye is to submit unawares to the authority of indigenous cosmology as much as
though one had also accepted the magical portions as historically real. In fact,
there is no boundary between the two: the myth is all one piece and all of its
parts make sense from the same point of view. (1974: 420–21)
And since the traditions of stranger-kingship too are functionally dissolved in
and as religion or some other social institution, since they cannot be “real his-
tory,” everything is then written as if they had no temporality or historical sig-
nificance of their own.
The point of view from which BaKongo construct these traditions and
which thus comprises their native logic and substance is variously determined
THE ATEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY
217
by MacGaffey as ritual, political, sociological, religious, or cosmological. And
while any and all such kinds of narrative or practice cannot then be “historical
material,” in a recurrent deference to Marxist anthropologies they are deemed
to have ultimate sources in the relations of production and social reproduction.
In one of MacGaffey’s latest statements of this position, the dual system of
stranger-kingship featuring the complementary relations between immigrant
chiefs and autochthonous priests, as summarized for Kongo by Luc de Heusch
(2000), is referred to the even more abstract basis of Space and Time:
De Heusch dwells quite rightly on what he calls “dual systems,” but evidently the
pairing of earth-related and dynastic rituals is independent of the narratives that
purport to account for them . . . . The pairing can be understood sociologically,
in that every community exists both in space and time, which are the necessary
dimensions of production and social reproduction and will be ritualized to some
extent in every agricultural society. Space is the earth itself and the forces of na-
ture on which all depend in common. Time, on the other hand, is the source of
authority and the measure of social differentiation; reference to the past purports
to distinguish older from younger, first-comer from late-comer, aristocrat from
commoner. These two dimensions are what Victor Turner called communitas and
societas, although he thought of communitas as occurring only in marginal situa-
tions outside the reach of societas. As Michael Jackson put it, “The complemen-
tary principles of social organization which are variously called lineage/locality,
kinship/residence, ancestors/earth, descent/territoriality, can be abstractly and
heuristically polarized as a distinction between temporal and spatial modes of
structuring.” Not the origin of this polarity but how it works out in practice is a
contingent, historical question. (MacGaffey 2005: 195)26
We are not specifically informed either by Thornton or by MacGaffey how
one accounts for the particular attributes of stranger-kingship by the mode of
26. Speaking of Lele religious symbolism involving animals, Mary Douglas observed
that it is not relevant to ask how
accurate the observation of the creature’s behavior
need be.
A symbol based on mistaken information can be fully effective as a symbol, so
long as the fable in question is well known. The dove, it would seem, can be one
of the most relentlessly savage of birds. The pelican does not nourish its young
from its own living flesh. Yet the one bird has provided a symbol of peace, and
the other of maternal devotion, for centuries. (1959: 56)
218
ON KINGS
production. A Marxist “determination by the economic basis” involves the forc-
es and relations of production, but in this MacGaffey text all the explanation
we get by “production and social reproduction” is a generic reference to “agri-
cultural society.” As a technical means, agriculture does not entail any particular
structure of society. Certainly it does not specify that the working class of native
subjects monopolize the ownership and control of this primary means of pro-
duction by virtue of their forebears’ original settlement of the earth in life and
continued occupancy in death, such that the descendants of these first-comers
are uniquely able to ritually nurture the growth of crops which are in effect the
transubstantiation of their ancestors. Rather than explicating stranger-kingship
and its rituals by determinate properties of production, then, MacGaffey’s treat-
ment becomes more and more abstract. Now we are told that the dualism at is-
sue is an opposition between Time as the source of authority and of the measure
of differentiation and Space as the nature upon which we depend in common:
Time is to Space as societas is to communitas. But perhaps nowhere is space so
radically differentiated as in the pervasive African distinction between the hu-
man community of the settled and the wild populated by powerful evil and ben-
eficial forces—through the associations with which the stranger-king derives
the measure of his authority. Finally, we learn that not only are the dualisms of
stranger-kingship forms of Time and Space, but likewise the complementary
principles of lineage and locality, kinship and residence, ancestors and earth,
“can be abstractly and heuristically polarized as a distinction between temporal
and spatial modes of structuring.” We are thus encouraged to explain differences