by Faun Rice
Prussian court imitated the French; the Nilotic rulers of Nyoro assimilated to
their Bantu predecessors of fabled Kitara; many a Khmer, Siamese, or Malay
ruler became an Indic king, and some of the latter became Islamic sultans; and
so on.
As already noted, the phenomenon is endemic in core–periphery relations. A
certain impetus of “galactic mimesis” runs through the regional system, whereby
outlying rulers assume the political culture of the higher powers with which
they are engaged. Virtually a law of political science, this dynamic is in play at
every level of the intersocietal hierarchy: down to the pretensions of peripheral
tribal headmen like the Kachin chiefs who famously “become Shan [princes]”;
whereas, for their part, the Shan princes rule in the style of Burmese or Chi-
nese kings—which perhaps accounts for the rudimentary forms of the imperial
Chinese temples of Heaven and Earth in certain villages of Kachin hill people
(Leach 1954; cf. Scott 2009). The same acculturation from below is current even
in purely tribal zones, absent a dominant civilization, as in the avidity of various
Sepik peoples for the cultural powers of the Abelam or the Iatmul. In any case
and every place, however, the spread of the cultural forms of dominant societies
370
ON KINGS
is not all of their own doing. Something has to be said for this demand of higher
culture from below.
This mimetic process is notably in evidence in the Greater East Asian
Galactic Polity. James C. Scott documents many particular instances in his trea-
tise on relations between the greater states of the region and upland tribal peo-
ples. More generally he writes:
We have often noted what might be called the great chain of mimicry that ex-
tends from Angkor and Pagan through pettier and pettier states right down to
hamlets with the slightest pretensions among, say, the Lahu or Kachin. The clas-
sical states similarly modeled themselves after the states in South Asia. (2009:
306; see also above)10
The cultural exchanges in core–periphery systems do not emanate from the
higher centers alone. Motivated especial y by local political conflicts, there is
agency at every level of the galactic hierarchy in the course of which politico-
religious forms of ruling societies are appropriated by subordinate ones, thus
migrating downward through the system without the benefit of compel ing
initiatives from above. The soft power of dominant societies may thus be po-
tentiated by the people subject to it—inasmuch as it also empowers them. This
galactic mimesis develops either as a mode or resistance to the encroachment
of a higher power, a dynamic George Devereaux and Edwin Loeb (1943)
cal ed “antagonistic acculturation,” or by something like the “symmetrical
schismogenesis” of Gregory Bateson’s devising (1935, 1958), wherein local
rivals try to outdo each other by scaling up the competition to another level.
We have already seen instances of both—some of which suggest both were in
play at once.
Antagonistic acculturation: by matching point for point a Southern Empire
against the Chinese Northern Empire, Vietnamese rulers of the eleventh cen-
tury took the contrarian process to a remarkable structural extent. Making their
own polity the same as and yet different from the ostensibly superior Chinese
realm, the Ly dynasty kings thus undertook to separate from the latter and
ward off its colonizing ambitions. Subsequent Vietnamese dynasties continued
10. Curiously, neither here nor elsewhere in his major work (2009) on relations between
upland and lowland peoples in Southeast Asia, and despite his occasional use of the
term, does Scott refer to Tambiah’s work on “galactic polities.”
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF CORE–PERIPHERY RELATIONS 371
to differentiate their realm from the Chinese by the fact that they had their own
Chinese imperium—as in this 1428 proclamation by a Le dynasty official, upon
the eviction of a Ming administration of two decades standing:
Now our Great Viet is truly a cultured country;
The features of our mountains and our rivers are different,
Just as the customs of the North [China] and South [Vietnam] are also different.
From the time of the Viet, Trieu, Dinh, Ly, and Tran dynasties’ establishment of our
state,
And from the time of the Han, Tang, Song, and Yuan dynasties of the North,
Each emperor has ruled over his own quarter.
(Dutton, Werner, and Whitmore 2012: 91)
Not that antagonistic acculturation is imperial politics only, for it is also en-
countered in the outlying tribal societies—which in the Southeast Asian up-
lands may resist lowland states with their own kingdoms, whether legendary
ones of the past, messianic ones of the future, or current imitations of the greater
regional powers. Like the Karen of Burma, whose history, writes James C. Scott,
“seems to illuminate the preservation of a culture liberation and dignity fash-
ioned, for the most part, from the cosmology of lowland [Shan and Burmese]
states” (2009: 285). He cites verse from a prophetic tradition:
That a Karen King would yet appear
The Tabin [Mon] Kings have had their season
The Burmese Kings have had their season
And the foreign Kings will have their season
But the Karen King will yet appear
When the Karen King arrives
There will only be one monarch . . .
(2009: 287)
Just so, F. K. Lehman describes the characteristic polity of the Kayah, a Karen
people of eastern Burma, as “a quasi-state level political system developed among
an essentially tribal people as an adaptation to the Shan-Burmese environment”
(1967: 15). By common local traditions, these states were formed when a Kayah
chief was victorious in a skirmish with a Burmese force; whereupon an honor-
able peace was negotiated, recognizing the boundaries of the Kayah domain and
372
ON KINGS
of its ruler under the title of a Shan prince (Sawbwa) or lord (Myasa). Over time
the differences and similarities increased together: the Kayah founder’s victory
over the Burmese was celebrated as a miraculous feat, even as this charter narra-
tive was coupled to a Kayah regime with a Burmese cast—including courts that
interfered in otherwise independent affairs of the villages. As Lehman observed,
“This was essentially an exercise in foreign power within or attached to Kayah
society” (ibid.: 26) It was an imitation of Shan princely practice, including the
organization of the Kayah chief ’s house in the ritual form of a Sabwah’s palace,
with the aim of contracting marriages between Kayah and Shan ruling families.
Seeking alliances with lowland Shan nobility, however, suggests something
other than resistance is in play. Consider the common report that the preten-
sions of Kayah chiefs to Shan princely status are a matter of competition within
their own communities, “something the leaders and would-be leaders were con-
stantly contending for” (ibid.: 30). The suggestion is that beside the opposition
to foreign superior others that drives imitation of t
hem—by way of antagonis-
tic acculturation—competition with similars likewise drives identification with
foreign superior others—by way of symmetrical schismogenesis:
The acquaintance with foreign social and economic techniques of organization
gave the Kayah leaders several sorts of advantage at home. In the first place,
it gave them charismatic authority among their Kayah followers. That is, in-
sofar as they remained successful in dealing with the Shan and Burmans with
some measure of economic advantage to their Kayah “subjects,” they came to
be thought of as phre phraw. This expression means wonder-worker, miraculous
person, seer, prophet, supernaturally endowed, and of miraculous birth . . . . As
a result, those villages and persons who acknowledge a particular Sawbwa often
had a considerable attachment to him, and in principle to his line. (Lehman
1967: 26)
Miraculous person, wonder-worker: notice that this is still a real-politics of the
marvelous, in which the dividend of successful upward nobility is the assimila-
tion of the metahuman powers of the “cosmological outside”–giving a hold,
then, on the people inside.
Where antagonistic acculturation involved conflictual relations between
lower and higher or outer and inner peoples, symmetrical schismogenesis is typ-
ical of the competition between more or less equivalent parties at a given level
of the regional hierarchy. The adversaries may be individuals or factions within
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF CORE–PERIPHERY RELATIONS 373
the same group with the leadership thereof at stake; or they may be groups
of the same order in the galactic hierarchy contending for a superior position
therein. The way Bateson described it, symmetrical schismogenesis works on the
principle of “anything you can do, I can do better,” as in an arms race where each
side strives to accumulate more destructive power than the other. Rather than
“the same as and different from,” the favored competitive move here is “equal to
and better than.” Indeed, the best move is to “go outside the box,” to introduce
an unprecedented lethal weapon into the conflict, thereby trumping any and
all adversaries competing by only conventional means. Or as Clifford Sather
(1996: 92) reported of Iban of Kalimantan, competition among members of
the community is essentially waged outside of it: “It is largely through deeds
performed beyond the boundaries of the long house that unequal status within
it was, and continues to be, measured.” In the context of galactic systems, the
privileged tactic is to go above and beyond one’s own group to acquire the cos-
mopolitical powers of proximate superiors—whether by identification, alliance,
predation, or some such mode of cultural assimilation.
Motivated thus by internal competition, these aspirations for the marve-
lous powers of galactic superiors have been effective means of cultural mimesis
in core–periphery relations. As has been noted elsewhere (Sahlins 2010), they
are a recurrent mode of stranger-king formation worldwide: native rulers who
become foreigners rather than foreigners who become native rulers. The self-
Hinduization of Southeast Asian kings is a case in point. Another is the Malay
sultans contending for local supremacy by adopting Alexandrian bona fides.
An example so good I have already used it more than once concerns Hawai‘i,
where, within a decade of Cook’s death in 1779, three of the island paramounts
had named their sons and heirs “King George”; and even before the great con-
queror Kamehameha ceded the archipelago to his “brother” King George in
1793, he was flying the Union Jack from his house and canoe. Early in the nine-
teenth century, the prime minister of the Sandwich Island kingdom was Billy
Pitt Kalaimoku, the governor of Maui was Cox Keeaumoku, and John Adams
Kuakini ruled Hawai‘i Island (Sahlins 1981a, 1992). Instances could easily be
multiplied, but for convenience I cite one of James C. Scott’s general notices of
the phenomenon in Southeast Asia—with the added indication of the major
powers’ own interest in the politicization of the uplands:
The State’s desire for chiefs and the ambitions of upland local strongmen co-
incided often enough to create imitative state-making in the hills, though such
374
ON KINGS
achievements were seldom durable. Local chiefs had ample reasons to seek the
seals, regalia, and letters conferred by a more powerful ruler; they might over-
come rivals, and confer lucrative trade and tribute monopolies. Recognition of a
lowland ruler’s implied charisma was, at the same time, entirely compatible with
remaining entirely outside its administrative reach. (2009: 114)
Like Scott, virtually all the scholarly chroniclers of the region have stressed
the endemic instabilities of core–periphery relations: egalitarian ( gumsa) revolts
against the pretensions and exactions of ( gumlao) local chiefs who assume the
style of superior foreign rulers; underlying villages or principalities that switch
allegiance from declining to rising outside powers; the overthrow of local rul-
ers affiliated with an external power by a rival party affiliated with a different
realm; high-level competition resulting in the defeat and displacement of one
apical state by another. As many of these shifts suggest, an intrinsic evolutionary
impulse is generated throughout the system by the cultural politics of galactic
mimesis. Indeed there is always the potential that marginal societies, by virtue
of some strategic advantage—military, commercial, or other—will fully realize
in practice the greater foreign regime they had previously identified with by
now overcoming and succeeding it. It may be that as a general rule, all great
civilizations were peripheral once, outliers of galactic polities: like the Mongols
and the Manchus were to China; or the Siamese kingdoms were to Khmer
predecessors, who were themselves marginal to South Asian realms. For that
matter, the Greeks were marginal relative to the Persians; the Romans to the
Greeks; and the Gauls, Franks, and Britons to the Romans; and so on. Virtually
all of this begins in soft-power politics, moreover, set up by the demonstrable
cosmic potency of dominant centers, to which peripheral societies are oriented
and subordinated culturally while they are still independent politically.
Recall, moreover, that there is a reciprocal search for vital power, from above
as well as from below: a centrifugal expansion from the center outward toward
the peripheries, as well as a centripetal movement from the peripheries toward
the center. As Tambiah observed, while the central kingdom moves outward
to incorporate the lower-standing territories of the “wild” hinterlands, “in the
opposite direction, the lower attempts to raise itself by emulation of, and con-
tact with, the immediately superior” (1985: 322). Except that typically there
is no political “incorporation” of the hinterlands by the central kingdom, al-
though, as a consequence of diffusion of its “high culture,” there is an interest-
ing disconformity between the cosmopolitical superstuctures and the material
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF CORE–PERIPHERY RELATIONS 375
infrastructures of societies throughout the field of core–periphery relations.
Given the pervasive operation of galactic mimesis, the political and cosmologi-
cal order of the greater states is more or less replicated beyond their borders
through a wider domain of effective influence than their practical means of
domination could reach; whereas, by the same mimetic token, the lesser socie-
ties know more developed institutions of governance than their own “economic
basis” could generate. “One major characteristic of any of the hill societies of
Southeast Asia that live in symbiosis with civilizations,” as F. K. Lehman ob-
served, “ is the marked disparity between what their supravillage political system
attempts to be, on the models provided it by its civilized neighbors, and what
its resources and organizational capacity readily permit it to achieve” (1967:
34). All this is to say that the conventional notions of the systematic coher-
ence of the sociocultural totality, these paradigms of “anthropology-cultures”
or “national-cultures,” whether Marxist, Durkheimian, structural-functional,
cultural-materialist, or whatever, supposing as they do in one way or another
that the political and spiritual forms of any given society are reflexes of more
fundamental social or material realities, are inappropriate to the uneven devel-
opment of structural registers in societies situated in galactic polities.
We are back to the beginning of this essay and a repeated theme of this book:
the specious assumption that societies are all alone and self-generating; and, ac-
cordingly, left thus to their own devices, they develop functionally consistent
cultural wholes. But the diverse societies set in hierarchical core–periphery sys-
tems are nether isolated nor sui generis. They are interdependent structurally to
the extent that their cosmological and political forms are in significant respects
not of their own making, and accordingly without basis in the coexisting infra-
structures. Uneven development is the structural norm in galactic polities. And
since, as far as we know, human societies virtually everywhere and everywhen
have been situated in such fields of core–periphery interactions, our main theo-