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or communities competing for power within a larger galactic field, attempt to
trump their local adversaries by affiliating with a superior chief; they scale up
their own status to a higher register of the regional hierarchy. Or conversely, in
a process of “antagonistic acculturation,” a lesser group may attempt to resist the
14
ON KINGS
encroachment of a neighboring power by adopting the latter’s own political ap-
paratus and thus effect a stand-off—the way the Vietnamese long claimed their
own mandate of heaven as a “southern empire” on equal basis with the Chinese
“northern empire.” Note that in any case the elements of high political status,
including kingship, are disseminated by a mimetic process through the region
and on the initiative of the less powerful peoples.
Taken together with acculturative influences radiating outward from core king-
doms, galactic mimesis has the effect of creating hybrid societies whose political
and cosmological forms are largely not of their own devising and indeed sur-
pass any possible “determination by the economic basis.” Given the pervasive-
ness of core–periphery relations the world around, even in parts of the “tribal
zone,” this kind of hybridity or uneven development is more often the norm
of sociocultural order than the exception. The “superstructure” exceeds the
“infrastructure.”
THE POLITICAL ECONOMICS OF TRADITIONAL KINGSHIP
Kingship proprietary schemes are complex. On one hand, the country is divided
into local properties, of which the ancestors of the inhabitants, or the indigenous
spirits with whom the ancestors have made a pact, are the “true owners”—and
the decisive agents of the area’s fertility. Correlatively, the local subject popula-
tion, who have ritual access to these metaperson authorities through their initi-
ated elders or priestly leaders, are themselves deemed the “owners,” the “earth,”
the “land,” or some such designation of their founder rights to the country rela-
tive to the ruling aristocracy—especially in stranger-kingdoms, where the latter
are foreign by origin and ethnic identity. Although possessory in relation to the
rulers, the local people’s rights are only usufructuary in relation to the spiritual
inhabitants, whose ultimate ownership must be duly acknowledged by the cur-
rent occupants. (Notice that these relations between the local people and the
autochthonous spirits are themselves analogous to the larger structure of the
stranger-kingdom.) On the other hand, the ruling aristocracy and the king—
who by tradition may have been poor and landless originally except as they were
granted land by the native people—may also be “owners”; but here in the sense
of lordship over large landed estates and their inhabitants, giving them tribu-
tary rights to a portion of product and manpower generated by the underlying
THESES ON KINGSHIP
15
population. Whereas the subject people’s relation to the process is productive,
by virtue of their control of the primary means, the rulers’ relation to the process
is extractive, by virtue of their domination of the producing people. As the East
African Nyoro people put it: “The Mukama [the king] rules the people; the
clans rule the land” (Beattie 1971: 167).
Accordingly, the kingdom economy has a dual structure, marked by fundamen-
tal differences between the oikos economics of the underlying population and
the specifically political economics of the palace and aristocracy, undertaken
with an eye toward the material subsidization of their power. Devoted rather
to a customary livelihood, the primary sector is organized by the kinship and
community relations of the subject people. The ruling class is principally con-
cerned with the finished product of the people’s work in goods and manpower,
on which it takes a toll that helps fund an elite sphere of wealth accumulation,
oriented particularly to the political finalities of strengthening and extending
its sphere of domination. Labor in this sphere is organized by corvée, slave,
and/or client relations. Beside support of an imposing palace establishment, it
is notably employed in the accumulation of riches from extramural sources by
means of raid, trade, and/or tribute. Employed, then, in conspicuous consump-
tion, monumental construction, and strategic redistribution—and possibly in
further military exploits—this wealth has subjugating effects, both directly, as
benefiting some, and indirectly, as impressing others. Moreover, the material
success of the king is the sign of his access to the divine sources of earthly pros-
perity, thereby doubling the political effects of his wealth by the demonstration
of his godly powers.
Kingship is a political economy of social subjugation rather than material coer-
cion. Kingly power does not work on proprietary control of the subject people’s
means of existence so much as on the beneficial or awe-inspiring effects of royal
largess, display, and prosperity. The objective of the political economy is the
increase in the number and loyalty of subjects—as distinct from capitalist en-
terprise, which aims at the increase of capital wealth. To paraphrase a Marxian
formula, the essential project of kingship economics is P–W–Pʹ—where the po-
litical command of people gives an accumulation of wealth that yields a greater
command of people—by contrast to the classic capitalist formula, W–P–Wʹ—
where the proprietary control of productive wealth (capital) gives the control of
people (labor) in the aim of increasing productive wealth.
16
ON KINGS
One might justly say that “spirits own the means of production,” were it not
that in the form of plants, animals, significant artifacts, and even land, and the
natural forces of growth, these so-called “spirits,” and more properly called
“metapersons,” are the means of production. Having their own dispositions and
intentions, they are indeed their own persons, and, together with divinities, an-
cestors, and other such metaperson powers, they are known to be responsible
for the success or failure of human work. Accordingly, the “means of production”
characteristically includes ritual, especially sacrificial ritual, as an essential part
of work—as in the famous Tikopian “work of the gods.”
It also follows that the political benefits of material success—the rewards in
status and influence—go to the shamans, priests, elders, lineage heads, big-men,
chiefs, or kings, who have by ascription or achievement priority of access to
these metahuman sources of human prosperity—but not necessarily, or only
to a lesser extent, to the hunters, gardeners, or others who did the work. The
alienation of the worker from his product was a general condition long before
its notoriety in capitalism. So far as the social credit goes instead to the reign-
ing politicoreligious authorities, political power may thus have an “economic
basis”—although the “economic basis” is not economic.
Also by the way, cannibalism is a widespread condition, even among many so-
cieties that profess to abhor it.
Cannibalism is a predicament of the animistic
hunter or gardener, who must live by consuming animals or plants which (who)
are essentially persons themselves. Hence the taboos and other ritual respects
accorded to these species and their metaperson masters—again as a necessary
condition of “production.”
ON SHOPWORN CONCEPTS THAT HAVE OUTLIVED THEIR
USEFULNESS
“Cultural relativism,” properly understood, has not outlived its usefulness. What
is useless is the vulgar sense of relativism to the effect that the values of any soci-
ety are as good as, if not better than, the values of any other, including our own.
Properly understood, cultural relativism is an anthropological technique for un-
derstanding cultural differences, not a charitable way of granting moral absolu-
tion. It consists of the provisional suspension of our own moral judgments or
THESES ON KINGSHIP
17
valuations of other people’s practices in order to place them as positional values
in the cultural and historical contexts that gave rise to them. The issue is what
these practices mean, how they came about, and what their effects are for the
people concerned, not what they are or are worth in our terms.
In this same relativist regard, the local people’s ontological scheme, their sense
of what there is, must likewise be considered in itself and for itself, and not
be distorted by analytic concepts that substitute our certainties of “reality” for
theirs. Take the category of “myth,” for example. In standard English, to label
a statement as “myth” means it’s not true. Hence in speaking of other people’s
“myths,” we characteristically assert that what they know as sacred truth, and
upon which they predicate their existence, is fictional and unbelievable—for us.
Having thus debunked the constitutional basis of their society—as in the eth-
nological oxymoron “mythical charter”—we are given liberty to write it off as
essentially unreal for them too: an epiphenomenal mystification of their actual
sociopolitical practice. What is then typically left to the scientific project is a
more or less feckless search for the “kernel of historical truth” in a narrative riven
with irrelevant fantasy—in this way ignoring that the concepts thus devalued
are the true history at issue. For taken in that veridical capacity by the people
concerned, the so-called “myth” is truly organizing their historical action.
“Life, after all, is as much an imitation of art as the reverse.” So commented
Victor Turner (1957: 153) in regard to the way Central African Ndembu villag-
ers applied principles from the traditions of Lunda kingship they had learned
as children to their current social relations. Or again, this is how important
political leaders likewise inform and structure their own public actions by the
relations encoded in dynastic epics. The past is not simply prologue, but, as
Turner says, it is “paradigm.” Historical causes in the mode of traditions have no
temporal or physical proximity to their effects: they are inserted into the situ-
ation, but they are not of it. Embedding the present in terms of a remembered
past, this kind of culturally instituted temporality is a fundamental mode of
history-making, from the omnipresent Dreamtime of Australian Aboriginals
to the state politics of Kongo kings. But then, what actually happens in a given
situation is always constituted by cultural significations that transcend the pa-
rameters of the happening itself: Bobby Thomson didn’t simply hit the ball over
the left-field fence, he won the pennant. The better part of history is atemporal
and cultural: not “what actually happened,” but what it is that happened.
18
ON KINGS
This does not mean that just because Nuer now insist they are all descended
from a man named “Nuer” who lived ten generations ago, we must ignore docu-
mentary evidence of the existence of Nuer before 1750. It does mean that if we
do not care what being Nuer means to Nuer, then or now, we have no business
speaking about “Nuer” at all.
Shopworn economic concepts
“Things,” for example. The Cartesian distinction of res cogitans and res extensa,
subjects and objects, is not a good description of ontological schemes largely
constituted on grounds of human attributes or personhood. As already repeat-
edly noted, in the societies at issue in this work the features of the environment
with which people are significantly engaged, and even important productive
artifacts of their own making, have the inner and essential qualities of human
persons. The conventional anthropological concept of “the psychic unity of hu-
manity” has to be extended to the subjectively infused universe for many or most
of these societies. It was a distinctive Judeo-Christian conceit that the world
was made of nothing, that spirit or subjectivity was not immanent in it—and for
Adam’s eating an apple humans would be condemned to wearing themselves to
death working on obdurate matter, thorns, and thistles. For most of the world,
economic praxis has necessarily entailed intersubjective relations with the be-
ings on which (with whom) people work and which (who) decide the outcome.
The plants that the Achuar women of Amazonia nurture are their children, even
as the success of their efforts is due to the goddess of cultivation. Here it is not
simply that human skills are a necessary but not sufficient cause of the successful
outcome, but that human skills are the signs of divinely endowed powers. Our
own parochial economic science of a Cartesian world notwithstanding, in this
respect there are no simple “things:” the so-called “objects” of people’s interest
have their own desires.
Likewise “production”: the notion of a heroic individual working creatively on
inert matter, thereby transforming it into a useful existence by his own effort
according to his own plan, does not describe an intersubjective praxis in which
metaperson-alters are the primary agents of the process (Descola 2013: 321ff.).
It is more accurate to say that people receive the fruits of their efforts from these
sources than that that they create them (e.g., Harrison 1990: 47ff.). The forces
THESES ON KINGSHIP
19
that make gardens grow, animals available, women fertile, pots come out intact
from the kiln and implements from the forge—forces variously hypostasized as
mana, semangat, hasina, nawalak, orenda, etc.—are not of human origin. Conventional notions of the supposed functional effects of the relations of produc-
tion on the larger relations of society are nonstarters in regard to the many
societies so ontologically constituted.
Our notion of “production” is itself the secularization of a theological concept,
but it derives from a very specific theology, in which an all-powerful God cre-
ates the universe ex nihilio (Descola 2013: 321ff.)—an idea which is maintained
in our cosmology in multiple ways even after God has been ostensibly taken out
of the picture. But consider the hunter, forager, or fisher. Does she “produce” an-
ything? At what point does a trapped fish or uprooted tu
ber stop being a “natu-
ral” phenomenon and start being a “social product”? We are speaking of acts of
transformation, attack, propitiation, care, killing, disarticulation, and reshaping.
But the same is ultimately true of making automobiles. It’s only if one imagines
the factory as a black box, the way a man who doesn’t know very much about
the full course of pregnancy might imagine a woman’s womb as “producing”
(etymologically, “pushing out”) something fully formed through one great burst
of “labor,” that it’s possible to say “production” is the true basis of human life.
Shopworn concepts of sociocultural order
As implied in the preceding discussion—and amplified in the body of this
work—several conceptual dichotomies of broad application in the human sci-
ences are not receivable for the societies under consideration here, inasmuch
as these binaries are not substantially differentiated, opposed, or otherwise on-
tologically pertinent. Typically, they are inappropriate ethnocentric projections
onto culturally distinct others. But the peoples concerned do not distinguish:
R5 “Humans” from “spirits.” So-called “spirits” (metapersons) have the essential
qualities of persons.
R5 “Material” from “spiritual.” They are largely and fundamentally alike on the
common ground of humanity.
R5 “Supernatural” from “natural.” Populated and activated by embodied per-
sons, there is no subjectless “natural” world: a fortiori, no transcendent realm
of “spirit.”
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ON KINGS
R5 Hence, “this world” from an “otherworld.” Metaperson-others are in peo-
ple’s everyday—and in dreams, every night—experience. People are known
to communicate with so-called “spirits” and have customary social relation-
ships with them, including sex and marriage.
There are no egalitarian human societies. Even hunters are ordered and domi-
nated by a host of metaperson powers-that-be, whose rule is punitively backed
by severe sanctions. The earthly people are dependent and subordinate compo-
nents of a cosmic polity. They well know and fear higher authority—and some-
times they defy it. Society both with and against the state is virtually a human
universal.
This does not mean the famous egalitarian ethos of so many hunting socie-