by Faun Rice
from its early modern European expressions.
Notwithstanding the superiority and perpetual foreign ethnicity of the ruling
aristocracy, they are often not dominant linguistically or culturally, but are as-
similated in these respects by the indigenous population. Correlatively, the iden-
tity of the kingdom is usually that of the native people.
European colonization is often in significant aspects a late historical form of
indigenous stranger-kingship traditions: Captain Cook, Rajah Brooke, and
Hernando Cortés, for example.
KINGSHIP POLITICS
In general
Political struggle over the power of the king generally takes the form of a battle
between two principles: divine kingship and sacred kingship. In practice, divine
kingship is the essence of sovereignty: it is the ability to act as if one were a god;
to step outside the confines of the human, and return to rain favor, or destruc-
tion, with arbitrariness and impunity. Such power may be accompanied by the
theory that the king by doing so demonstrates he is an actual embodiment of
8
ON KINGS
some already-existing metahuman being. But it may not be; it could as easily
be that by acting in this way, the king himself becomes a metahuman being.
Japanese shoguns (a few anyway), Roman emperors, or Ganda kabaka could all
become gods in their own right. To be “sacred,” in contrast, is to be set apart,
hedged about by customs and taboos; the restrictions surrounding sacralized
kings—“not to touch the earth, not to see the sun” in Frazer’s famous dictum—
are ways not only of recognizing the presence of unaccountable divine power,
but also, crucially, of confining, controlling, and limiting it. One could see these
two principles as refractions of different moments of the stranger-king narra-
tive: the first, of the terrible power of the king on his arrival; the second, his
encompassment and defeat by his subjects. But in this larger sense, both are
always present simultaneously.
All the classic issues of divine kingship, then—the royal displays of arbitrary
power, the king as scapegoat, regicide (by duel or sacrifice), the use of royal ef-
figies, the oracular role of dead monarchs—can best be understood as different
moves in a continual chess game played between king and people, in which the
king and his partisans attempt to increase the divinity of the king, and the pop-
ular factions attempt to increase his sacralization. Stranger-kingship provides
the deep structural foundations for a vernacular politics in which representatives
of humanity (often literally) did battle with their gods, and sometimes prevailed.
The chief weapon in the hands of those who oppose the expansion of royal
power might be termed “adverse sacralization”—to recognize the metahuman
status of the monarch, to “keep the king divine” (Richards 1968), requires an
elaborate apparatus which renders him, effectively, an abstraction, by hiding,
containing, or effacing those aspects of his being that are seen as embodying
his mortal nature. Kings become invisible, immaterial, sealed off from contact
with their subjects or with the stuff and substance of the world—and hence,
often, confined to their palaces, unable to exercise arbitrary power (or often any
power) in any effective way.
Royal regicide is just the ultimate form of adverse sacralization.
When popular forces win, the result can thus take the form of Frazerian sacred
kingship, or the reduction of the monarch to ceremonial figurehead, like the
latter-day Zhou emperor or present-day queen of England.
THESES ON KINGSHIP
9
When kings definitively win (e.g., by allying with a newly emerging civil or
military bureaucracy), a different range of conflicts ensue, largely, between the
living and the dead. Having overcome boundaries in space, kings will regularly
attempt to similarly overcome boundaries in time, and translate their metahu-
man status into some form of genuine immortality. Insofar as they are success-
ful, they create a series of dilemmas for their successors, whose legitimacy is
derived from their ancestry, but who at the same time are necessarily placed in
a position of rivalry with them.
Anthropologists have long remarked on the phenomenon of sinking status. Over
time, the progressive distancing of cadet persons and branches from the main
line of succession is an endemic source of strife in royal lineages, often lead-
ing to fratricidal violence—especially among paternal half-siblings, each backed
by their own maternal kinsmen (cf. Geertz and Geertz 1975). The succession
chances of the junior princes of each generation become increasingly remote,
unless they seize by force and guile the kingship to which they have diminish-
ing claim by right. Beside the violence of an interregnum, the effect is often a
centrifugal dispersion of royals—those who withdraw or are defeated—into the
outer reaches of the kingdom or even beyond, where they may take power in a
lesser realm of their own. This is a major source of stranger-king formation and
of regional configurations of core–periphery relations (galactic polities). It may
also play a role in the formation of so-called “empires.”
This problem is complicated even further by a central contradiction between
two forms of sinking status: horizontal and vertical. On the one hand, each col-
lateral line that breaks off from the dynastic core descends ever lower in status as
new ones are constantly produced, unless some radical means of self-promotion
succeed in at least temporarily reversing their decline. On the other hand, the
central line itself is usually seen as declining steadily in status, as the current
ruler becomes ever more distant from the founding hero, god, or stranger-king.
As a result, the branch of the royal line identified with the highest-ranking an-
cestor (the oldest) is also the lowest-ranking branch of the royal line.
The inevitability of sinking status over time leads to the dilemma of how to
manage the royal dead. Deceased members of the dynasty are likely to be pre-
sent in political life through shrines, mummies, relics, tombs, or even palaces; to
communicate their will and perspectives through mediums, oracles, or similar
10
ON KINGS
means. The paradox of horizontal and vertical sinking status—that older ances-
tors rank higher for the same reason their descendants rank lower—becomes
all the more acute the more active the role of the dead in contemporary politics
becomes. This role can be very active indeed: Inca royal mummies continued
to own the same palace, lands, and retinues of retainers they had possessed in
life, forcing each new ruler to conquer new territories to support his own court.
In all such systems, if things were left to their own devices for too long, living
kings would be crowded out and overwhelmed by legions of the dead. So the
dead had to be controlled, limited, contained—even purged. Like living kings,
they had to be rendered more sacred, more bounded by restrictions that were
restrictive of their power—even if those restrictions were ultimately constitutive
>
of that power.
It is a general sociological principle that the more ancestors are seen as funda-
mentally different sorts of being from present-day mortals, the more they are
likely to be seen as a source of power; the more similar, the more they are seen
as rivals and sources of constraint. The memory of a totemic killer whale ances-
tor, or witchetty grub, is in no sense an imposition on the living; by contrast,
the memory of a man remembered and venerated by his many descendants is
very much a rival for any descendant whose life project is to achieve exactly the
same thing. Only so many ancestors can become famous. Still, there is always a
balance here: if ancestors are entirely effaced, their descendants lose all status; if
they have too much power, they are seen as stifling those same descendants’ self-
realization. The result is often another variant of the politics of ritual subterfuge
so typical of dealing with life-giving gods: they must be contained, driven off, or
even destroyed, all in the ostensible name of honoring them.
Ordinary mortals may or may not face this problem (it all depends on how they
see themselves in time and history), but kings, whose legitimacy is based at least
in part on descent from other kings, must always face it. To flee one’s domain
and become a stranger-king elsewhere is in fact one way to escape the choke-
hold of the dead, but a stranger king’s descendants will begin to have the same
problem, and it will only get worse as time goes on.
Much of the more extravagant behavior of the rulers of powerful kingdoms or
“early states” can be seen as attempts to escape this chokehold, that is, as modes
of competition with the dead. One might attempt to efface the dead, or become
THESES ON KINGSHIP
11
the dead, but this is rarely entirely effective. One might enter into direct com-
petition in the creation of timeless monuments, in conquest, or in the ritual
sacrifice of ever greater numbers of subjects in attempts to manifest ever greater
arbitrary sovereign power. One might even—this is sometimes done—attempt
to reverse the direction of history entirely, and invent a myth of progress. All of
these expedients create new problems.
The ordinary balance of power between king and people is often maintained
through intense emotional engagements: love, hatred, or some combination of
the two. These often take the form of paradoxical inversions of what would
normally be expected to be the result of those emotions: Shilluk or Swazi kings
took on divine status at the moment people united in hatred against them; the
nurturant love of Merina toward infantilized rulers might alternate between
indulgence for acts that might otherwise be seen as atrocities, and harsh chas-
tisement when they were seen as overstepping bounds.
The perfection of the king, his court, palace, capital, or immediate surround-
ings, is not precisely a model of the universe; it is a model of the universe
restored to a state of abstract Platonic perfection, one which it lacks in ordi-
nary experience. Perhaps it once had this state. Perhaps it is felt it someday
wil again. The newly founded royal city, a projection of a single human vision
imposed on the material world, can thus be seen as the prototype for al future
utopias: an attempt to impose an image of perfection not just onto the physical
world but also into the lives of those mortal humans who actual y lived in it.
Ultimately, of course, this is impossible. Humans cannot be reduced to Platonic
ideals, and the fundamental quandaries of human life, revolving as they do
particularly around reproduction and death, cannot be legislated away; such
states of transcendent perfection can perhaps be attained in moments of ritual
performance, but no one can live in such a moment for their entire life, or even
any substantial part of it. Some royal capitals try to exclude birth, infirmity,
and (natural) death from the royal settlement entirely. Going that far is unu-
sual. But something along these lines always happens. At the very least, royal
courts wil be marked by elaborate codes of etiquette which require that even
everyday social interaction be governed by the pretense that such things do not
exist. These codes set standards of comportment that are then realized at ever
greater degrees of imperfection the further one travels (social y or physical y)
from the royal court.
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ON KINGS
In this way, where prophets foretell the total future resolution of the contradic-
tions and dilemmas of the human condition, kings embody their partial pre-
sent-day resolution.
The arbitrariness of stranger-kings is, however paradoxical y, the key to their abil-
ity to establish themselves as avatars of justice. The ability to seize or destroy any-
thing, even if only very occasional y deployed, is structural y similar to the owner-
ship of everything; it is an undifferentiated relation between the monarch and
everyone and everything else. This indifference is also impartiality, since such an
absolute monarch has—in principle at least—no particular interest which might
bias his judgment in disputes between his subjects. They are all the same to him.
For this reason, kings wil always claim some kind of absolute despotic power, even
if everyone is aware such claims mean next to nothing in practice—since other-
wise, they would not be kings. At the same time, the al -encompassing nature of
such claims renders the very power of the king potentially subversive of existing
social arrangements. While kings will, generally, represent themselves as embodi-
ments and bastions of al existing hierarchies and structures of authority (e.g., by
insisting that he is “Father of his People,” the monarch above all confirms the au-
thority of actual fathers over their wives, children, and dependents), the ultimately
undifferentiated nature of their power also meant all subjects were, ultimately, the
same—that is, equal. As the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Henry Home
(Lord Kames) was perhaps first to point out, the difference between absolute des-
potism, where al are equal except for one man, and absolute democracy, is simply
one man. There is thus a deep structural affinity between the contemporary notion
that al citizens are “equal before the law” and the monarchical principle that they
are equal as potential victims of purely arbitrary royal depredation.
In political life, this tension can take many forms. Commoners may appeal to
the king against his “evil councilors.” Kings or emperors may frame themselves
as popular champions against the interests of the aristocracy. Alternately, every-
one, regardless of status, can unify against the king.
As a result, even when kings are gone—even when they are deposed by popular
uprisings—they are likely to linger in ghostly form, precisely as such a unifying
principle. Royal spirit mediumship in much of Africa and Madagascar, and the
modern notion of “popular sovereignty,” are both contemporary examples of
this principle.
THESES ON KINGSHIP
13
Core–periphery relations (galactic polities)
from central kingdoms often evokes a centripetal attraction and movement of
peoples from the hinterlands. Peripheral societies have been rendered subordi-
nate culturally while still independent politically. It is probably a law of political
science that all great kingdoms were marginal once. Originally oriented to a
powerful center from the peripheries, they succeed by some advantage—as in
trade or warfare—in replacing their erstwhile superiors.
Indeed, in these core–periphery configurations centered on dominant king-
doms, there are endemic impulses of “upward nobility” at every level of the
intersocietal hierarchy. The apical kingdoms themselves are competitively coun-
terposed in a larger geopolitical field, which they seek to dominate by universal-
izing their own claims to power. On one hand, they engage in what is variously
described in these pages as “utopian politics” or “the real-politics of the mar-
velous” by tracing their origins to world-historical heroes (such as Alexander
the Great), legendary god-kings (such as Quetzalcoatl), fabled cities (such as
Troy or Mecca), ancient or contemporary world powers (such as the Roman
or Chinese empires), and/or great gods (such as Shiva). On the other hand,
they demonstrate their universality by acquiring—through tribute, trade, or pil-
lage—and domesticating the wild, animistic powers ensouled in the exotic ob-
jects of the barbaric hinterlands.
In a famous ethnographic case reported by Edmund Leach (1954), chiefs of the
Kachin hill tribe of Burma have been known to “become Shan”: that is, to ally
with and adopt the lifestyle of Shan princes. For their part, Shan princes take on
the political and ritual trappings of Burmese or Chinese kings—some of which
may also filter up to the hill peoples. This phenomenon of “galactic mimesis,”
in which lesser chiefs assume the political forms of their proximate superiors,
is a prevalent dynamic of core–periphery systems, impelled by competition
within and between political entities throughout the intersocietal hierarchy. The
competition takes one of two common forms. In a process of “complementary
schismogenesis,” individuals contending for leadership in a given community,
