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some insisted their own Fool Society used to hold police powers in the summer
months (1909: 72)—but ended up concluding that despite frequent conver-
gences between “clowning” and “police functions” across the Plains, there was no
systematic relationship between the two.14 In fact, warrior societies, ritual fools
or contraries, and temporary police associations seem to have largely split apart,
and there no longer seems to have been any sense in which those assigned police
powers embodied deities of any sort.15
We can observe, then, three stages of a logical progression:
1. (California) clowns as embodiments of divine power, with a moral logic
external and contrary to society, wielding arbitrary powers of command and
punishment, but only during the course of rituals.
2. (Northwest Coast) Fools as delegates of divine power, with a moral logic
external and contrary to society, wielding arbitrary police powers during cer-
emonies that extended across the ritual season.
3. (Plains) temporary police societies, no longer divine or external, but wield-
ing arbitrary powers of enforcement delegated to them over the course of
the ritual season, but not limited to the rituals themselves.
14. “Clownish behavior and police functions likewise occur in varying combinations
and cannot be taken to define any one type of organization of the Plains Indians”
(Lowie 1909: 98).
15. “During the Sun Dance police were selected for the preservation of order by the
Dakota, Crow, Assiniboine, Blackfoot, Sansi, Iowa, Plains-Cree, and the Kansa;
among some of the groups these police also supervised the conduct of the dance
ritual” (Provinse 1937: 348). Often in that specific context their power was delegated
by the officiating priest or master of ceremonies, but they do not seem to have been
themselves in any sense an extension of metahuman beings.
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
389
I should emphasize that this is a logical progression, and in no sense an attempt
at historical reconstruction. The actual course of events, in any given instance,
was likely far more complicated.16 Still, it represents one way that sovereign
power could, as it were, burst through the its frame, even while still being care-
fully contained within the ritual season in such a way that it could not, as in the
modern state, suffuse and inform the entirety of everyday existence.
In fact, why it did not was precisely Lowie’s problem. Lowie’s 1948 Huxley
Lecture, “Some aspects of political organization among the American Aborigi-
nes” (1948b), was specifically concerned with why states had largely failed to
develop in the Americas, and concludes that indigenous Americans had created
institutional arrangements to ensure that they did not. If this sounds similar to
Pierre Clastres’ argument in Society against the state (1977), that chiefship among
most North and South American societies was constructed in such a way that
arbitrary, sovereign power—authority that could not be questioned since it was
ultimately backed up by force—could not possibly develop out of it, there is a
reason. Clastres’ argument was directly taken from Lowie.17 Clastres even ended
his own essay in the same way as Lowie’s Huxley Lecture: by concluding that
since secular chiefship was designed to prevent the emergence of powers of
command, the latter could only have emerged from the religious sphere, from
prophecy, or some similar appeal to exterior cosmic authority (Lowie 1948b:
21–2; P. Clastres 1977: 183–86).
As far as I know, no one has really developed a theory of the prophetic origin
of the state. Presumably this is because there’s so little evidence to support it.
One of the few to have taken the argument seriously, Fernando Santos-Granero
(1993), makes the obvious point that this kind of charismatic authority is no-
toriously unstable, and that even in those places where it does seem to have
become institutionalized, such as among the Amuesha of the Peruvian Amazon,
16. Morphological y, the Plains societies, with their extreme seasonal variation and
annual concentration for hunting of megafauna, probably are (despite their limited
reliance on agriculture) if anything more analogous for Paleolithic societies across
much of Eurasia, while the Californians and Northwest Coast societies would, at least
in comparison, be more Mesolithic. But such analogies are always extremely inexact.
17. In his first exposition of the idea in L’Homme, Clastres does acknowledge the debt,
noting for instance that his list of chiefly functions is taken directly from Lowie’s 1948
essay (Clastres 1962: 53, 55, 58), but the relationship has been ignored by Clastres’ later
avatars (with a few exceptions: e.g., Santos-Granero 1993; Wengrow and Graeber
2015). What Lowie cal ed “libertarianism,” Clastres referred to as “anarchism,” but in
the context of their times, the two words meant pretty much the same thing.
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ON KINGS
it leads to a kind of constant gumsa/ gumlao-like rise and collapse of priestly do-
mains.18 While there are examples of prophets founding states (Muhammad is
an obvious example), such events are surprisingly rare in human history.
Still, the insight does ring true in a certain very broad sense. The principal
example Clastres himself invoked were the Tupí-Guaraní prophets who up-
rooted whole communities to go off in search of a “land without evil,” in which
the basic dilemmas of death and reproduction would be finally resolved and the
sundering of the worlds of gods and men undone (see also H. Clastres 1995).
This kind of utopian vision does, indeed, seem to lie behind the very project of
creating kingdoms and, later, states. I have myself noted the analogy of the role
of Nuer prophets, and the Shilluk reth: one might say that where prophets fore-
tell a total resolution of the great dilemmas of human existence in the future,
divine kings embody a partial resolution of those same dilemmas in the present,
their courts constituting a kind of paradise.
Does this mean that divine kingship represents the final explosion of the
divine into the human domain, a kind of final shattering of its ritual, or seasonal,
containment? I think this is true only to a very limited degree. Ordinarily, we are
speaking only of a frail and diminutive sort of paradise.
To illustrate, let me turn to one final North American example, the Natchez
kingdom of what’s now southern Louisiana. It is considered the only genuinely
unambiguous example of divine kingship north of the Rio Grande.
The divine kingship of the Natchez
In 1739, the Jesuit missionary Father Maturin Le Petit put forth the argu-
ment that the Natchez, who called themselves Théoloël or “People of the Sun,”
were the only American people to have a system of beliefs worthy of the name
“religion.”19 Natchez religion, he observed, centered on two enormous earthen
platforms that dominated their Great Village; on top of one of them was a Tem-
ple, atop the other, the house of their ruler, known as the Great Sun, capable of
holding perhaps four thousand people—that is, the entire Natchez popula
tion
at the time. A spacious plaza lay between. The Temple contained carved images
18. Santos-Granero suggests one might see the emergence of states when the prophets
ally with autonomous warrior bands, and become self-reproducing lineages. But
again, this is basically speculation.
19. It would appear that “Natchez” was really just the name of what the French called
the “grand village” in which the Sun resided.
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
391
and an eternal flame, as well as baskets holding the charred remains of the for-
mer rulers and their servants; common people brought offerings to ancestors
buried within, but aside from four temple guardians, only members of the royal
family were allowed to enter:
The Chief of this Nation, who knows nothing on earth more dignified than him-
self, takes the title of brother of the Sun. To enable them better to converse to-
gether, they raise a mound of artificial soil, on which they build his cabin, which
is of the same construction as the Temple. The door fronts the East, and every
morning the great Chief honors by his presence the rising of his elder brother,
and salutes him with many howlings as soon as he appears above the horizon.
Then he gives orders that they shall light his calumet; he makes him an offering
of the first three puffs which he draws; afterwards raising his hand above his
head, and turning from the East to the West, he shows him the direction which
he must take in his course . . . . (Le Petit 1848: 269–70)
Le Petit’s description is matched by many others. We have multiple accounts
of the protocol surrounding the Great Sun, as he was ordinarily called, and his
close relatives, also called Suns. “Their subjects, and even the chiefs of the vil-
lages, never approach them but they salute them three times, setting up a cry,
which is a kind of howling”—that is, hailing the Great Sun exactly as he himself
greets the Sun each morning. “They do the same when they retire, and they
retire walking backwards” (Charlevoix 1763: 315). None might eat with the
Sun, nor touch any plate or vessel he had touched; his meals were meticulously
choreographed; when he left his house, carried on his warriors’ shoulders on a
litter, his subjects had to prostrate themselves and call out when he passed.
Similar but less stringent etiquette surrounded the Tattooed Serpent, the
Great Sun’s brother and military commander, and the White Woman, his eldest
sister, whose child (the Natchez being matrilineal) was to be the next Great Sun.
All three, they emphasized, had the power of life and death over their subjects.
“As soon as anyone has had the misfortune to displease any of them, they order
their guards, whom they call allouez, to kill him. ‘Go and rid me of that dog,’ say
they, and they are immediately obeyed” (ibid.). The Suns could also help them-
selves to their subjects’ possessions.
The submissiveness of the savages to their chief, who commands them with the
most despotic power, is extreme. They obey him in everything he may command
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ON KINGS
them. When he speaks they howl nine times by way of applause and to show
him their satisfaction, and if he demands the life of any one of them, he comes
himself to present his head. (Dumont in Swanton 1911: 104)
Similarly, Le Petit:
The people blindly obey the least wish of their great chief. They look upon him
as absolute master not only of their property but also of their lives, and not one
of them would dare refuse him his head. (1848: 271)
The Suns were divine in every sense of the term. They were literally gods—de-
scendants of two children of the Sun, a radiant brother and sister, who had come
to earth to establish peace by creating the institutions of government—and they
were also divine in the broader sense that they could act with absolute arbitrari-
ness and impunity. The only limit, in fact, on the actions of Suns is that they ap-
pear to have been forbidden to do violence toward other Suns: members of the
royal family, who numbered perhaps twenty, could not be harmed under any cir-
cumstances. One unusual result was that royals, and apparently some of the lower
grades of nobility as well, could only marry commoners—since a Sun’s wives
or husbands, along with their servants and retainers, all had to be put to death
as part of the obloquies at their funeral, and this would be impossible if they
had themselves been of equal rank. The result was a complex system of sinking
status: while the children of female Suns remained Suns, children of male Suns
descended one rank down each generation (to “Noble,” then “Honored” status)
until their great-grandchildren became commoners again. The actual dynamics
of this system (it was complicated by the fact it was also possible to move up
ranks by accomplishment in war) have kept anthropologists busy for generations
trying to figure out exactly how it could work in practice, without the top three
classes eventually running out of commoners to marry (on the “Natchez para-
dox,” see MacLeod 1924; Josselin de Jong 1928; Haas 1939; Davis 1941; Hart
1943; Quimby 1946; Tooker 1963; J. L. Fisher 1964; Mason 1964; Brain 1971;
D. R. White, Murdock, and Scaglion 1971; Knight 1990; Lorenz 2000: 153–57).
The technicalities need not concern us.20 Suffice it to say the divine qual-
ity of even male Suns was passed on, but only to a certain attenuated degree.
20. In fact there’s no particular reason to assume Noble and Honored classes could
only marry commoners in the first place (MacLeod 1924; Tooker 1953; Mason
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
393
Scandalized French observers noted how women of the ruling matrilineage could
take lovers as they pleased, but order their commoner husbands’ heads be clapped
against blocks of wood if they so much as suspected them of infidelity; such
husbands, one observed, took on the air of masters among the numerous house-
hold servants but stooped like slaves in the presence of their wives, on whose
death they would, like the rest of the household, be strangled. All members of
the royal family were assigned servants at birth, many culled from infants born
on the same day, who were expected to form part of their household in life, and
accompany their master or mistress in death, along with any “voluntary slaves”
(Swanton 1911: 100; Milne 2015: 38) who joined the household afterward.
This seems as close to absolute sovereignty as one might imagine. There
seems no check at all on royal power. But if one reads the original sources
carefully, cracks in this façade begin to show. Take the word “Stinkard.” In the
anthropological literature, the commoner class is regularly referred to as “the
Stinkards,” since the French sources regularly use the term, but it turns out this
word was just one of many ways the nobles expressed contempt for ordinary
people when speaking with each other. It was never used before the commoners
themselves:
The Natchez Nation is composed of nobility and people. The people are called in
their language Michi-Michi-Quipy, which signif
ies Puant (“Stinkard”), a name,
however, which offends them, and which no one dares to pronounce before
them, for it would put them in a very bad humor. The Stinkards have a language
entirely different from the Nobility,21 to whom they are submissive in the last
degree. (Du Pratz 1774: 328, translation after Swanton 1911: 108)
“Submissive in the last degree,” that is, unless one used a word they didn’t like.
Such apparently contradictory statements are commonplace in early
European accounts of distant kingdoms. One encounters them in descriptions
1964), or that “Honored” were a class at all, for that matter. For what it’s worth,
I find Knight’s (1990) argument that the Natchez system is a transformation of a
ranked exogamous clan system of a sort that had likely been common within the
Mississippian civilization, and Lorenz’s reconstruction (2010: 153–57) of how the
system might have worked, largely convincing. The phenomenon of sinking status
will be discussed in greater detail in the final part of this essay.
21. This does not appear to have been true, though there were certain differences in
vocabulary.
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ON KINGS
of courts in Asia, Africa, and the Americas alike. In much the same way that
European observers would often assert that a given people “go naked”—and
then go on to describe their clothes—they would often first insist on the un-
limited, “despotic” power of their king—and then go on to elaborate its (often
very considerable) limits. In the case of the Thécloëls, the confusion has caused
most recent authorities (e.g., Hudson 1978: 210; Lorenz 2000: 158–59; Balvay
2008; Milne 2015: 33–38) to conclude that French observers—who were, after
all, loyal subjects of their own Sun King, Louis XIV—were simply confused
by unfamiliar forms of deference, and that their assertions of the Great Sun’s
absolute power had almost nothing to do with the Natchez at all, but were mere
projections of their own absolutist monarchy.
This is not entirely untrue. Certainly, in purely political terms, the Great
Sun’s power was sharply limited.22 War councils would often ignore his advice;
most of the six subordinate districts—even the three that had members of the
royal family imposed as governors—pursued independent trade and foreign