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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

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  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

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  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

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  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-

 

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