by Faun Rice
ties, and not just them, is an illusion. Just as assertions of the absolute power
of the sovereign are also, tacitly, assertions of the absolute equality of his sub-
jects (at least in relation to him), so assertions of metahuman power are also
ipso facto ways of asserting that mortal humans are—in all the most important
ways—the same. The difference is that a flesh-and-blood Sun King needs an
apparatus of rule (which almost invariably becomes the primary object of hatred
of his subjects); if the actual sun is king, well, human beings are pretty much all
equal compared to the sun. The first ideals of political equality— especially, the
refusal to give and take orders between adults, so well documented among many
societies with particularly terrifying cosmic powers—are themselves an effect
of the cosmic polity such men and women inhabit. This no less makes them
pioneers of human freedom.
Note the disproportions in structure and power between the cosmic polity gov-
erning the human community—including divine beings with ultimate life-and-
death powers over the people—and the organization of the human society itself.
In both morphology and potency there is no equivalence between the human
social order and the cosmic authors of its fate. Great gods on whom human
life depends are known to peoples in the Arctic, the New Guinea Highlands,
and Amazonia: as was said earlier, there are kings in heaven where there are
not even chiefs on earth. Neither do kings on earth have the hegemonic scope
and powers of the gods they imitate. This structural disproportion is one reason
(among others) that the common human science of the “supernatural realm”
THESES ON KINGSHIP
21
as a discursive ideological reflex of the people’s sociopolitical order, being de-
signed to functionally support it whether by mystification or replication, is a
theoretical practice as seriously flawed as it is habitually repeated. Durkheim
notwithstanding.
Human societies of all kinds are never alone in another sense. Engaged in re-
gional fields with societies of cultural others, they are largely formed in respect
of one another. As noted above, even apart from imperial systems or galactic
polities centered in dominant kingdoms, core–periphery relations are known in
the “tribal zone”—as in the classic “culture areas” of the Native Americas, with
their respective “cultural climaxes” (Kroeber 1947)—such that the structures
and practices of any given society are predicated on those of other societies. Be-
sides diffusion and acculturation by domination, a variety of other intercultural
dynamics may be in play: including complementary schismogenesis, whereby
interacting peoples take contrary cultural forms, whether in the mode of com-
petition or interdependence; or the aforementioned galactic mimesis, whereby
peripheral peoples take on the cosmopolitical forms of hierarchical superiors.
The scandal is that while human societies are thus never alone, the human sci-
ences have long pretended that they are. With few exceptions, such as recent
world system and globalization theories, all our major paradigms of cultural
order and change imagine that societies are self-fashioning monads—autono-
mous and sui generis. Durkheimian sociology is not the only one. Likewise,
Malinowskian functionalism; the structural functionalism of Radcliffe-Brown;
the Marxism of base and superstructure; evolutionism from Herbert Spencer to
Leslie White and Julian Steward; Benedictian patterns of culture; even post-
structuralist discourses and subjectivities: they all suppose that the forms and
relations they are explicating are situated within a solitary sociocultural order
and that the articulations and dynamics of that order are the critical matters at
issue. The concept of culture has been unfortunately tied to a politics of nation-
alism since Johann Gottfried von Herder and his followers formulated it in that
context.
And so, finally, we pass to that intellectual fetish whose worship today tran-
scends even that of “the nation”—that is, its twin companion, “the state.” Ask-
ing whether a kingdom is a state or not rarely tells you very much at all about
its politics or constitution. Surely we have learned all there is to learn from the
22
ON KINGS
endless theorizing on “the origins of the state” or “the process of state formation”
that so dominated theoretical debates of the twentieth century. In retrospect,
we may well discover that “the state” that consumed so much of our attention
never existed at all, or was, at best, a fortuitous confluence of elements of entirely
heterogeneous origins (sovereignty, administration, a competitive political field,
etc.) that came together in certain times and places, but that, nowadays, are very
much in the process of once again drifting apart.
chapter 1
The original political society
Marshall Sahlins
I am a Cartesian—a Hocartesian. I want to follow Hocart’s lead in freeing
oneself from anthropological conventions by adhering to indigenous traditions.
“How can we make any progress in the understanding of cultures, ancient or
modern,” he said, “if we persist in dividing what people join, and in joining
what they keep apart?” ([1952] 1970: 23). This essay is an extended commen-
tary on the Hocartesian meditation encapsulated in Kings and councillors by “the
straightforward equivalence, king = god” ([1936] 1970: 74). I mean to capi-
talize on the more or less explicit temporality entailed in the anthropological
master’s exegesis of this equivalence, as when he variously speaks of the king as
the vehicle, abode, substitute, repository, or representative of the god (Hocart
1933, [1936] 1970, [1950] 1968). The clear implication is that gods precede the
kings who effectively replicate them—which is not exactly the common social
science tradition of cosmology as the reflex of sociology. Consider time’s arrow
in statements such as: “So present was this divine and celestial character to the
Polynesian mind that they called the chiefs lani, heaven, and the same word
marae is used of a temple and a chief ’s grave” (Hocart [1927] 1969: 11). Kings
are human imitations of gods, rather than gods of kings.
24
ON KINGS
That was the dominant view in Christendom for a long time before the
modern celestialization of sovereignty as an ideological expression of the real-
political order. From Augustine’s notion of the Earthly City as an imperfect
form of the Heavenly City to Carl Schmitt’s assertion that the significant con-
cepts of the modern state are “secularized theological concepts” ([1922] 2005:
36), human government was commonly considered to be modeled on the king-
dom of God. Based on his own view of the ritual character of kingship, however,
Hocart’s thesis was more far-reaching culturally and historically: that human
societies were engaged in cosmic systems of governmentality even before they
instituted anything like a political state of their own. From the preface of Kings
and councillors:
The
machinery of government was blocked out in society long before the ap-
pearance of government as we now understand it. In other words, the func-
tions now discharged by king, prime minister, treasury, public works, are not
the original ones; they may account for the present form of these institutions,
but not for their original appearance. They were original y part, not of a system
of government, but of an organization to promote life, fertility, prosperity by
transferring life from objects abounding in it to objects dependent on it. ([1952]
1970: 3)
In effect, Hocart speaks here of a cosmic polity, hierarchically encompassing
human society, since the life-giving means of people’s existence were supplied
by “supernatural” beings of extraordinary powers: a polity thus governed by so-
called “spirits”—though they had human dispositions, often took human bodily
forms, and were present within human experience.
The present essay is a follow-up. The project is to take the Cartesian the-
sis beyond kingship to its logical and anthropological extreme. Even the so-
cal ed “egalitarian” or “acephalous” societies, including hunters such as the
Inuit or Australian Aboriginals, are in structure and practice cosmic polities,
ordered and governed by divinities, the dead, species-masters, and other such
metapersons endowed with life-and-death powers over the human popula-
tion. There are kingly beings in heaven where there are no chiefs on earth.
Hobbes notwithstanding, the state of nature is already something of a po-
litical state. It follows that, taken in its social totality and cultural reality,
something like the state is the general condition of humankind. It is usual y
cal ed “religion.”
THE ORIGINAL POLITICAL SOCIETY
25
FOR EXAMPLE: CHEWONG AND INUIT
Let me begin with a problem in ethnographic perspective that typically leads
to a cultural mismatch between the ancestral legacy of the anthropologist and
her or his indigenous interlocutors. I know this is a problem, since for a long
time I lived with the same contradiction I now see in Signe Howell’s excellent
study of the Chewong of the Malaysian interior. Although Chewong society is
described as classically “egalitarian,” it is in practice coercively ruled by a host of
cosmic authorities, themselves of human character and metahuman powers. The
Chewong are a few hundred people organized largely by kinship and subsisting
largely by hunting. But they are hardly on their own. They are set within and
dependent upon a greater animistic universe comprised of the persons of ani-
mals, plants, and natural features, complemented by a great variety of demonic
figures, and presided over by several inclusive deities. Though we convention-
ally call such creatures “spirits,” Chewong respectfully regard them as “people”
( beri)—indeed, “people like us” or “our people” (Howell 1985: 171). The obvious
problem of perspective consists in the venerable anthropological disposition to
banish the so-called “supernatural” to the epiphenomenal limbo of the “ideo-
logical,” the “imaginary,” or some such background of discursive insignificance
by comparison to the hard realities of social action. Thus dividing what the
people join, we are unable to make the conceptual leap—the reversal of the
structural gestalt—implied in Howell’s keen observation that “the human social
world is intrinsically part of a wider world in which boundaries between society
and cosmos are non-existent” (2012: 139). “There is no meaningful separation,”
she says, “between what one may term nature and culture or, indeed, between
society and cosmos” (ibid . : 135).
So while, on one hand, Howell characterizes the Chewong as having “no
social or political hierarchy” or “leaders of any kind,” on the other, she describes
a human community encompassed and dominated by potent metapersons with
powers to impose rules and render justice that would be the envy of kings. “Cos-
mic rules,” Howell calls them, I reckon both for their scope and for their origins.
The metahuman persons who mandate these rules visit illness or other misfor-
tune, not excluding penalty of death, on Chewong who transgress them. “I can
think of no act that is rule neutral,” Howell writes; taken together, “they refer
not just to selected social domains or activities, but to the performance of regu-
lar living itself ” (ibid . : 140). Yet though they live by the rules, Chewong have no
part in their enforcement, which is the exclusive function of “whatever spirit or
26
ON KINGS
non-human personage is activated by the disregard of a particular rule” (ibid . :
139). Something like a rule of law sustained by a monopoly of force. Among
hunters.
When Signe Howell first visited the Chewong in 1977, she found them ob-
sessively concerned with a tragedy that happened not long before. Three people
had been killed and two injured for violating a weighty taboo on laughing at
animals: a prohibition that applied to all forest creatures, the breach of which
would potentially implicate all Chewong people. The victims had ridiculed some
millipedes that entered their lean-to; and that night a terrific thunderstorm
uprooted a large tree, which fell upon them. Here it deserves notice that while
the Chewong profess to abhor cannibalism, like animist hunters generally, they
nevertheless subsist on “people like us,” their animal prey. Likewise similar to
other hunters, they manage the contradiction by the ritual respects they accord
wild animals: in this case, by the prohibition on ridiculing forest creatures—
which also, by positioning the animals outside familiar human relations, appar-
ently erases the cannibal implications from overt consciousness (cf. Valeri 2000:
143). Since the forest animals are not really like us, we can beat the cannibal rap.
The severe punishments for disrespecting forest creatures originated with
certain immortals of the Above and the Below: the male Thunder God, Tanko,
and the female Original Snake, whose abode is the primordial sea under the
earth—and who is most responsible for maintaining rules of this type. There were
never any humans the likes of Tanko and the Original Snake among Chewong
themselves: no such human powers, whatever the conventional wisdom says
about divinity as the mirror image of society. Tanko lives in the sky, whence the
thunder he unleashes on taboo-violators is aptly said to be the sound of him
laughing at the human predicament. His thunderbolts are also known to punish
incest, causing severe joint pain and, if the behavior persists, death. On his fre-
quent visits to earth, he indulges in contrasting sexual behavior—relations with
distantly rather than closely related women—and with beneficial rather than
fatal results: for without his sexual exploits there could be no Chewong people.
Tanko descends to have intercourse with all human and animal females, which
is what makes them fertile. Menstrual blood represents the birth of children he
has sired, children unseen and unknown to their mothers, as they ascend to the
heavens to
live with their father. The semen of human males, however, is unable
to procreate children until Tanko has copulated with the women concerned,
which is to say until they have menstruated—from which it follows empirically
that the god was indeed the condition of possibility of human reproduction.
THE ORIGINAL POLITICAL SOCIETY
27
The Original Snake is sometimes identified as the sky-wife of Tanko, a cul-
ture heroine who gave Chewong fire, tobacco, and night; but in her more usual
form of a huge snake dwelling in chthonian waters, she is especially known for
her malevolent powers. Knocking down trees and houses, her breath creates the
destructive winds that punish people who violate the ordinances on the treat-
ment of animals. She may also be provoked into moving while in the subter-
ranean sea, causing an upwelling of waters that drowns the offenders—upon
which she swallows them body and soul.1 Not that the Original Snake is the
only man-eater among the myriad indwelling and free-ranging metahumans
whom Chewong encounter, more often for worse than for better. Without rep-
licating the extraordinary catalogue compiled by Howell (1989), suffice it for
present purposes to indicate the range: from female familiars who marry the
human individuals for whom they serve as spirit guides; through various kinds
of ghosts especially dangerous to small children and the creatures upon whose
good will fruits bear in season; to the twenty-seven subtypes of harmful beings
who were once human, and of whom Chewong say, “They want to eat us” (ibid.:
105). If there is indeed no boundary between the cosmos and the socius, then it’s
not exactly what some would call a “simple society,” let alone an egalitarian one.
I hasten to reply to the obvious objection that the potent deities of the
Chewong reflect a long history of relationships with coastal Malay states by
noting that basically similar cosmologies are found among basically similar
societies situated far from such influences. For an initial example the Cen-
tral Inuit; thereafter, Highland New Guineans, Australian Aboriginals, native
Amazonians, and other “egalitarian” peoples likewise dominated by metaper-
son-others who vastly outnumber them.
Of the Inuit in general it is said that a person “should never push himself
