onkings

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)
/>   Centrifugal dissemination of influential political, ritual, and material forms

  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,