by Faun Rice
to his palace, his person identified with the crops and agricultural fertility, every
aspect of his life regulated by elaborate taboos (Meek 1931: 126–33, 153–63). It
seems Jukun kings were always in principle scheduled to die at the end of a seven-
year term, but in early times, unless they failed as warriors, this fate was always
postponed, and any disabling impurities they may have taken on were transferred
to a scapegoat slave killed in their stead (ibid.: 139–44; Muller 1990: 58–59). By
the time our evidence kicks in, in the 1930s, this scapegoat ritual had long since
fal en into abeyance. Instead it was the king himself who had become a potential
scapegoat; he could be executed for any number of reasons, whether for crop
failure or violation of taboos (see also Abraham 1933: 20; Lagercrantz 1950: 348).
Though the Jukun king was never referred to as a god but merely as a “son
of a god” (it is never said precisely which), and though all things surrounding
the divinity of the king are, as often, left vague, or kept secret, some notion of
godlike status seems consonant with the general tenor of the taboos that sur-
rounded him. These kept him from any regular contact with his people. The king
rarely left his compound, and then under carefully choreographed situations:
none might gaze at him directly, or touch anything he’d touched; most subjects
could never come into his presence at all, but only hope to communicate with
him through layers of officials. Not only contact between king and people, but
intimate contact between the king and surrounding world of any kind had to be
negated, hidden, or denied:
Jukun chiefs and kings . . . are not supposed to suffer from the limitations of
ordinary human beings. They do not “eat,” they do not “sleep,” and they never
“die.” It is not merely bad manners, but actual sacrilege to use such expressions
when speaking of a king. When the king eats he does so in private, the food be-
ing proffered to him with the same ritual as is used by priests in offering sacrifice
to the gods. . . .
30. I should emphasize this is my own reconstruction; earlier colonial historians saw
the Jukun as a fallen empire, and most contemporary Nigerian historians believe
that they were always more of a spiritual federation—as Afigo (2005) adds, with
a core group claiming autochthonous status as earliest settlers of the land. Isichei
(1997; see also Afolayan 2005: 144) suggested a gradual transformation from a
warlike power to a ritual one, on the model of Benin, which, she notes, took a
similar course. I have simply synthesized these views.
408
ON KINGS
The Jukun king must not put his foot on the ground or sit on the ground
without a mat, possibly because he is a god of the Upper Air or because his dy-
namism might escape into the ground and blast the crops . . . .31 It is taboo for
the king to pick up anything from the ground. If a Jukun king were to fall off his
horse, he would, in former times, have been promptly put to death. Being a god
it may never be said of him that he is ill, and if serious illness overtook him he is
quietly strangled. (Meek 1931: 126–27)
Any way that the royal body was continuous with or in contact with the physi-
cal world—eating, excretion, sex—was not only performed in secret, but had to
be treated as if it did not occur at all (excrement, hair or nail clippings, spittle,
even sandal-prints, had to be hidden away). The king could not directly touch
the earth, and was often referred to as an airy spirit: when he slept or died, he
was said to “return to the skies.”
While there was the usual ideology of the king’s absolute power,32 there’s
little indication of arbitrary executions or other high-handed behavior. Instead,
royal anger was seen as dangerous in itself:
It is a disastrous thing, also, for the Jukun king to fly into a rage, point his finger
at a man or strike the ground in wrath, for by doing so, he would let loose on the
community the anger of the gods immanent in his person, and the whole land
would be infected by blight. If the king were so far to forget himself the offenders
would immediately render their apologies and take steps to induce him to recall
or cancel his hasty word or act. They would request one of his sisters’ sons, the
king’s acolyte, to approach him and calm him, and persuade him to dip his fin-
gers in water in order to purge or rather quench the “fire of his hand,” and when
this rite had been performed the acolyte would withdraw backwards, sweeping
the ground in front of the king, in the same way as a priest withdraws when he
has offered sacrifice to the offended gods. (Meek 1931: 128)
31. It is often difficult in Meek’s text to know what is report and what is speculation,
but this does seem rooted in Jukun ideas, as we’ll see.
32. Meek notes that “the Jukun system of government is, in theory at least, of a highly
despotic nature” (ibid.: 332), but emphasizes this was in no sense true in practice. “If
the harvests were good people were prepared to put up with a moderate amount of
tyranny. But excessive tyranny would lead to a demand for his death even if harvests
were good” (ibid.).
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
409
This passage gives a particularly vivid glimpse of the intimate, indeed, mutu-
ally constitutive, relation between violence and sacralization. Jukun kings may
not be gods. but they bear within them a divine element, identical with their
power of command, or sovereignty, and which resides in the heart and right arm
(Young 1966: 147–49). Each new king acquires this power by consuming the
powdered heart of his predecessor, mixed in beer, during his coronation; the old
king’s right hand is also preserved as an amulet (Meek 1931: 168; Muller 1981:
241). This is presumably why pointing is considered so particularly dangerous.
It blights the crops. But in a broader sense the king—at least, his human, non-
divine element— is the crops: at public appearances he is regularly hailed as
“Our Corn, Our Beans, Our Groundnuts” (Meek 1931: 129, 172; Young 1966:
149–50). And if the crops fail for too long, rather than being mollified and pro-
pitiated, the king himself can be killed; whereon it is said—as it is always said
when any monarch dies—that he ascended to heaven and became a god owing
to the malice of his people (Meek 1931: 131; Young 1966: 148).33
All this clearly recalls the curious dialectic of hostility and sacralization we’ve
already seen in the myths and rituals surrounding the Shilluk reth. Nyikang
and his immediate successors, we are told, did not die; they ascended into the
heavens and became disembodied gods in the face of the rancor of their people.
Among the Jukun, all monarchs do this.
However, the ceremonial surrounding the king also suggests that such cos-
mological statements are themselves expressions of a deeper truth, inscribed
in the very nature of formal etiquette, hierarchical deference, and gestures of
respect. Recall that the formalities surrounding the Jukun king are simply more
elaborate versions of those surrounding chiefs and elders, on the one ha
nd, or
of gods, on the other. In fact, in their most basic elements, such formalities
can be said to have certain common structural features that can be observed in
forms of formal deference anywhere— indeed, the very nature of what we call
“formality.” I’ve offered an analysis of these structural features in an earlier work
(Graeber 1997); here I can only offer the barest summary.
33. “When the king became sick, or infirm, or broke any of the royal taboos, or proved
himself unfortunate, he was secretly put to death. Whether any king was, in the
olden days, permitted to die a natural death cannot be known” (Meek 1931: 165),
but “when a Jukun king dies (even if he has been secretly murdered as a result of a
famine) it is commonly said he has forsaken the world and gone back to the heavens
in consequence of the wickedness of men” (ibid.: 131).
410
ON KINGS
Essentially, the argument is that what anthropologists have traditionally
called “joking relations” and “relations of avoidance” are simply exaggerated
forms of a kind of playful familiarity, and formal respect, that might be consid-
ered among the universal building-blocks of human sociality. Deference tends
to expressed not only by the inferior party averting eyes, or otherwise avoid-
ing contact with the superior (gestures generally accompanied by feelings of
shame), or by the fact the superior party remains relatively free to engage in or
initiate such contact if desired, but also by a suppression of any acknowledg-
ment of ways that bodies, and particularly the superior’s body, are continuous
with the world around them, where, as Bakhtin (1984; cf. Stallybrass and White
1986; Mbembe 1992) so aptly put it, the borders between bodies in the world
become permeable or are cast into doubt entirely. These usually include eating
and drinking to a degree, but almost always they include sexual intercourse,
pregnancy and labor, excretion, mucus, mutilation, menstruation, death and de-
composition, flatulence, suppurating wounds, and so on. There is an enormous
degree of cultural variation in which of these are considered most shocking in
polite company, which relatively trivial; and, as Norbert Elias ([1939] 1978) so
carefully demonstrated, the borders of shame and embarrassment can advance
and retreat over time. Still everywhere, the basic list remains the same. And
topics considered shameful and suppressed in one context are exactly those to
which people will also appeal when making rude jokes, and celebrated in “jok-
ing relations,”34 which are less humorous than enactments of playful egalitarian
competition, insult, or hostility, in a kind of systematic inversion of the princi-
ples of avoidance. In such relations, that hierarchical superiority instead turns
into a constant game of back-and-forth—a sometimes literal wrestling in the
mud—where the very materiality of the interaction, the lack of clear borders
between bodies, also emphasizes the temporary, even momentary, nature of any
victory.35
To be sacred, as Émile Durkheim reminds us, means “to be set apart,” which
is also the literal meaning of the Tongan word “tabu. ” “Not to be touched.” By
constituting the object of hierarchical deference as a thing apart, and therefore
34. I should emphasize that “joking relations” of the classic anthropological variety are
often not all that funny; they tend to involve play fighting or simple insults (“my,
you’re ugly”) more than witty banter, though one could argue that witty banter is
the same thing in an attenuated form.
35. I should also hasten to add that I am not suggesting that all human behavior can be
placed on a continuum between joking and avoidance; it’s one axis among many.
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
411
at least tacitly as a perfectly self-contained and disembodied entity, floating
above the muck and mire of the world, such taboos effectively render that object
an abstraction. Hence it makes sense that kings, and gods, are so often rendered
homage in similar ways. But the logic of deference also helps explain an appar-
ent paradox: that the more exalted, hence more set apart, a superior is from his
surroundings, including his inferiors, the more he is also seen as hierarchically
encompassing those very same inferiors. Because “abstraction” in such situa-
tions always has a dual meaning. It does not just refer to disembodiment; it also
means being, as it were, moved upward on the taxonomic ladder.
Lévi-Strauss referred to this as “universalization” versus “particularization”
(1966: 161). An easy example will suffice: consider the difference in our own
society between the use of first and last names. A first name (Barack) is yours
alone, and is hence used to express familiarity; a family name encompasses a
plethora of first names, and is hence more generic, hence more formal and def-
erential (Mr. Obama)—and of course a title (Mr. President, et al.) is even higher
up the taxonomic ladder, hence more deferential yet.36 In this sense, Marshall
Sahlins’ language of “metabeings” is decidedly apt. Gods are often seen as almost
literally Platonic Forms: the Master of the Seals is also the generic form of all
seals, which are but tokens of their type. The same tacit logic is at play here as
well. Consider the common insistence that a sacred king be “without blemish”
or “physically perfect.” As noted in chapter 2, the very idea of physical perfec-
tion is itself a kind of paradox: Can one so perfectly embody the generic human
form that one is set apart from other humans as unique?
How does all this relate to sovereignty?
Wel , if nothing else, I think it now makes the opposition between clowns
and kings worked out in the last section begins to make a great deal more sense.
In my original essay (Graeber 1997), I emphasized how the great “reformation
of manners” in early modern Europe might best be considered a generalization
of avoidance relations, attendant on the rise of possessive individualism, which
posited everyone as self-contained within the circle and compass of his or her
property: hence, everyone was now to address everyone else as inferiors had once
addressed feudal lords. This was the exact opposite of the festive generalization
36. This is not to say that we are always talking about the relation of (profane) individual
and (sacred) office in the ritual surrounding sacred kings, as structural-functionalist
anthropology tended to assume, but rather that that relation is one specific form
this more general relation of particularization and universalization might take.
412
ON KINGS
of joking relations that Bakhtin referred to as “the carnivalesque.” (Obviously,
this equalization is never perfect. There is always a residual—women, the poor,
some racialized underclass—which the possessive individual also avoids talking
about in formal situations, in the same way as one pretends not to notice when
one’s superior blows his nose or farts.) But the opposition between clowns and
kings is different. Normally, joking and avoidance relations are between indi-
vidu
als, or sometimes between groups. One might say the sovereign clown is an
individual with a joking relation with absolutely everyone; the sacred king, in an
analogous way, is in a relation of avoidance with everybody else. Hence in the
first case, the violence essential to the nature of sovereignty is wildly exaggerated,
in a kind of mock chaos that actual y disguises a maintenance of a certain form
of order (the clowns double as police); in the second, it is largely euphemized,
along with all the bodily functions that clowns are so notoriously fond of cel-
ebrating—though, in fact, the form of the euphemization can itself become an
insidious form of violence: since the only way to render a human being a com-
plete abstraction, a self-enclosing Idea divorced from material entanglements,
is to destroy their body entirely (adverse sacralization taken to its last degree).
* * *
A case could be made that all etiquette has an element of potential violence
in it. When the rich and powerful feel utterly humiliated (it does sometimes
happen), it usually has to do with being discovered in some scandalous breach
of protocol or decorum. But clearly, not all sacralization is adverse. Systems of
deference overall tend to operate very much to the benefit of those who are
deferred to. To turn such a system so against itself is unusual. It almost only
happens to monarchs of one sort or another, or others at the very apex of some
sort of hierarchy. Why, then, does it happen to them?
In the Jukun case, the king seems to have been demoted from war leader to a
kind of fetish object, whose secular powers, while they did exist, appear to have
been entirely outbalanced by those of various palace women (particularly the
king’s mother and sister, who had their own court and observed similar taboos
but were never killed), a governing council, and a whole panoply of priests and
officials (Meek 1931: 333–45; Tamuno 1965: 203; Abubakar 1986). Any at-
tempt by the king to exercise his “absolute” power too aggressively would, Meek
noted, lead to those surrounding him claiming he had violated some taboo and
ordering him to be strangled in his sleep (ibid.: 333).
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
413
In this case, Frazerian sacred kingship was a consequence of political decline.