by Faun Rice
to them. Some decades ago, Jonathan Friedman and Michael Rowlands put
the matter generally for “tribal” peoples: “Economic activity in this system can
only be understood as a relation between producers and the supernatural. This
is because wealth and prosperity are seen as directly controlled by supernatural
spirits” (1978: 207).
Of course we are speaking of the people’s own notions of what there is and
how it comes to be: a culturally informed reality they share with metaperson-
others to whom they are subjected and indebted for life and livelihood. When
faced with the assurance of Kwaio people that their prosperity is “a result of
ancestral support,” Roger Keesing refrains from the temptation “to say that
the sacred ancestral processes are a mystification of the real physical world,”
for, “in a world where the ancestors are participants in and controlling forces
of life, this conveys insights only at the cost of subjective realities” (1982: 80).
But why, then, “subjective realities”? If the ancestors participate in and control
the people’s everyday existence—if they are “empirical,” as Fredrik Barth might
say—the demystification would shortchange the “objective” realities.15 Not to
14. “In the Amerindian case . . . the possession of objects must be seen as a particular
case of the ownership relation between subjects, and the thing-artefact as a particular
case of the person-artefact” (Fausto 2012: 33).
15. Later in the same monograph, Keesing attempts to recuperate these “political insights”
in favor of the conventional view that the spiritual powers are an ideological reflex
of the Kwaio big-man system. But aside from the fact that the Kwaio spirit-world
THE ORIGINAL POLITICAL SOCIETY
53
worry, however: in due course, with a few pertinent ethnographic notices in
hand, I consider what scholarly good or harm would come from crediting such
“determination by the religious basis.”
It is not as if the producing people had no responsibility for the economic
outcome—even apart from their own knowledge and skill. The Inuit shaman
explains that: “No bears have come in their season because there is no ice; and
there is no ice because there is too much wind; and there is too much wind
because we mortals have offended the powers” (Weyer 1932: 241). Even so,
something then can be done. Around the world, the common recourse for this
dependence on the metaperson agents of people’s prosperity is to pay them an
appropriate tribute, as in sacrifice. Sacrifice becomes a fundamental relation of
production—in the manner of taxation that secures benefits from the powers-
that-be. As Marcel Mauss once put it, since spirits “are the real owners of the
goods and things of this world,” it is with them that exchange is most necessary
([1925] 2016: 79). A Tifalmin man tells how it works:
When we bring secretly hunted marsupial species into the anawok [men’s cult
house] during ceremonies, we tell the amkumiit [ancestral relics] and the pig
bones [of feasts gone by], “you must take care of us and make our pigs grow
fat and plentiful, and our taro immense.” As soon as we told them this, shortly
afterwards we see the results in our gardens. They do just what we petitioned.
(Wheatcroft 1976: 392)
For all this hubris, however, the Tifalmin are not really in control. Edmund
Leach notably remarked of such sacrifices that the appearance of gift and reci-
procity notwithstanding, the gods don’t need gifts from the people. They could
easily kill the animals themselves. What the gods require are “signs of submis-
sion” (Leach 1976: 82–93). What the gods and the ancestors have, and peoples
such as the Tifalmin seek, is the life-force that makes gardens, animals, and peo-
ple grow. The metahuman powers must therefore be propitiated, solicited, com-
pensated, or otherwise respected and appeased—sometimes even tricked—as a
necessary condition of human economic practice. Or as Hocart had it, based on
his own ethnographic experience: “There is no religion in Fiji, only a system that
in Europe has been split into religion and business.” He knew that in Fijian, the
is much more complex morphologically than Kwaio society, there are no Kwaio big-
men with the life-and-death powers even of their ancestral predecessors.
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ON KINGS
same word ( cakacaka) refers indiscriminately to “work”—as in the gardens—or
to “ritual”—as in the gardens.
So why call it “production”? How can we thus credit human agency if the
humans are not responsible for the outcome: if it is the ancestors according
to their own inclinations who make the taro grow; or if it is Sila Inua, the
Air, and the bears themselves who make hunting successful? In a golden few
pages of his recent work Beyond nature and culture (2013), Philippe Descola
argues persuasively that our own common average native notion of “production”
fails to adequately describe human praxis in a metahuman cosmos. Where even
animals and plants are thinking things, the appropriate anthropology should
be Hocartesian rather than Cartesian. Rather than a subject–object relation in
which a heroic individual imposes form upon inert matter, making it come-to-
be according to his or her own plan, at issue here are intersubjective relations
between humans and the metaperson-others whose dispositions will be decisive
for the material result. Descola can conclude from his Amazonian experience
that it is “meaningless” to talk of “agricultural production” in a society where the
process is enacted as interspecies kinship:
Achuar women do not “produce” the plants that they cultivate: they have a per-
sonal relationship with them, speaking to each one so as to touch its soul and
thereby win it over; and they nurture its growth and help it to survive the perils
of life, just as a mother helps her children. (2013: 324)
Not to forget the mistress and mother of cultivated plants, Nankui, described
by Descola elsewhere (1996: 192ff.): the goddess whose presence in the gar-
den is the source of its abundance—unless she is offended and causes some
catastrophic destruction. Hence the necessity for “direct, harmonious, and con-
stant contact with Nankui,” as is successfully practiced by women who qualify
as anentin, a term applied to persons with the occult knowledge and ritual skills
to develop fruitful relations with the goddess.
The way Simon Harrison describes the agricultural process for Manambu
of the Middle Sepik (New Guinea), people do not create the crops, they re-
ceive them from their ancestral sources. “What could pass for ‘production,’” he
writes, “are the spells by which the totemic ancestors are called from their vil-
lages by clan magicians to make yams abundant, fish increase, and crocodiles
available for hunting” (1990: 47). For “yams are not created by gardening,” but,
like all cultivated and wild foods, “they came into the phenomenal world by
THE ORIGINAL POLITICAL SOCIETY
55
being ‘released’ from the mythical villages by means of ritual” (ibid.: 63). Note
&nb
sp; that this is a political economy, or, more exactly, a cosmopolitical economy, in-
asmuch as the human credit for the harvest goes to those who gained access to
the ancestors by means of their secret knowledge—rather than the gardener
who knew the right soils for yams. Of course, one may accurately say that, here
as elsewhere, human technical skills, climatic conditions, and photosynthesis
are responsible for the material outcome, for what actually happened; but also
here as elsewhere, the decisive cultural issue, from which such specific political
effects follow, is, rather, what it is that happened— namely, the clan magicians
summoned the yams from the ancestral villages. Such is the human reality, the
premises on which the people are acting—which are also the beginnings of
anthropological wisdom.
Further ethnographic notices of the spiritual nature of the material basis are
easy to come by. I close with a final one that has the added advantage of ad-
dressing the issue, raised in Harrison’s work, of human power in a cosmic polity.
The site will be Melpa and their neighbors of the Hagen region. Here a variety
of metahuman beings—Sky People deities (including their collective personifi-
cation in “Himself, the Above”); “Great Spirits” of the major cults; the human
dead, both recently deceased kin and clan ancestors; and the numerous “nature
spirits” or inua-owners of the wild—are the agents of human welfare:
In trade and economic affairs . . . in campaigns of war or at great festivals, any
success is seen as the result of the help of benevolent spirits. . . . Benevolent
spirits are said to “plant our fields for us” and to “make our pigs big and fat.” . . .
They are said to “raise the pigs.” (Strauss [1962] 1990: 148)
The functions of these metaperson-kinds are largely redundant; many are com-
petent to promote or endanger the well-being of the people. It will be sufficient
to focus on a few critical modes of life and death from the metapersons—with
a view also to their constitution of human, big-man power.
Whereas the Sky People originally “sent down” humans and their means
of existence, it is the recent dead and clan ancestors who are most intimately
and continuously responsible for the health and wealth of their descendants—
though for punishing people they usually enlist the ill-intentioned inua of the
wild. As recipients of frequent sacrifices, the recent dead protect their kin from
accidents, illness, and ill fortune. “They will ‘make the fields and vegetable gar-
dens for us . . . raise pigs for us, go ahead of us on journeys and trading trips,
56
ON KINGS
grant us large numbers of children . . . stay at our side in every way” (ibid . : 272).
So likewise, on a larger scale, as when a meeting house is built for them, will
the clan spirits “make our fields bring forth . . . our pigs multiply, protect our
wives, children, and pigs from plagues and illness, keep sorcery and evil spirits
at bay” (ibid . : 279). But if the gardens are planted without proper sacrifices, “the
owner-spirit digs up the fruits and eats them” (Vicedom and Tischner 1943–48,
2: 677). By contrast to this constant attention, the Great Spirits of the collective
cults are ceremonially celebrated only at intervals of years. On these occasions,
the large number of pigs sacrificed testifies to the deities’ exceptional ability
to multiply things themselves by promoting the people’s growth, fertility, and
wealth. In such respects both the dead and the cult deities are particularly useful
to big-men and would-be big-men, that is, as the critical sources of their human
power:
We rich people [i.e., big-men] live and sacrifice to the Kor Nganap [Female
Great Spirit]; this enables us to make many moka [pig-exchange festivals].
Through this spirit we become rich, create many children who remain healthy
and alive, and stay ourselves healthy. Our gardens bear much fruit. All this the
Kor Nganap does, and that is why we sacrifice to it. (Vicedom and Tischner
1943–48, 2: 794)
The Stratherns relate that when a big-man goes on a journey to solicit valuables,
he asks his clan-ancestors to come sit on his eyelids and induce his trading
partner to part with his valuables. Big-men are also helped by the ghosts of
close relatives, who may be enlisted by partaking of the pig backbone cooked
especially for them. The same ancestors and ghosts are with the big-man in the
ceremonial ground when he makes the prestations that underwrite his fame and
status (Strathern and Strathern 1968: 192).
In another text, Andrew Strathern notes that traditional Hagen big-men
had “a multitude of sacred and magical appurtenances which played an impor-
tant part, from the people’s own perspective, in giving them the very access to
wealth on which their power depended” (1993: 147). Strathern here addresses
a range of leadership forms in a variety of Highland New Guinea societies—
including Baruya, Duna, Simbari Anga, Kuskusmin, and Maring, as well as
Melpa—to show that the “ritual sources of power” amount to a Melanesian
Realpolitik: the condition of possibility of human authority, as regards both the
practices by which it is achieved and the reason it is believed. All the same, we
THE ORIGINAL POLITICAL SOCIETY
57
need not completely abandon historical materialism and put Hegel right-side
up again, for in these big-man orders one may still speak of economic determin-
ism—provided that the determinism is not economic.
TO CONCLUDE
To conclude: we need something like a Copernican Revolution in the sciences
of society and culture. I mean a shift in perspective from human society as the
center of a universe onto which it projects its own forms—that is to say, from
the received Durkheimian, Marxist, and structural-functionalist conventions—
to the ethnographic realities of people’s dependence on the encompassing meta-
person-others who rule earthly order, welfare, and existence. For Durkheim, God
was an expression of the power of society: people felt they were constrained by
some power, but they knew not whence it came. But if what has been said here
has any cogency, it is better to say that God is an expression of the lack of power
of society. Finitude is the universal human predicament: people do not control
the essential conditions of their existence. I have made this unoriginal and banal
argument too many times, but if I can just say it once more: if people really con-
trolled their own lives, they would not die, or fall sick. Nor do they govern the
weather and other external forces on which their welfare depends. The life-force
that makes plants and animals grow or women bear children is not their doing.
And if they reify it—as mana, semengat, or the like—and attribute it to external
authorities otherwise like themselves, this is not altogether a false conscious-
ness, though it may be an unhappy one. Vitality and mortality do come from
elsewhere, from forces beyond human society, even as they evidently take some
interest in our existence. They must be, as Chewong say, “people like us.”
But so far
as the relation between the cosmic authorities and the human so-
cial order goes, in both morphology and potency there is no equivalence between
them. As I have tried to show, especially by egalitarian and chiefless societies,
neither in structure nor in practice do they match the powers above and around
them. Among these societies there are no human authorities the likes of Sedna,
Sila, Ungud, the Original Snake, Afek, Magalim, Nankui, or the New Guinea
Sky People.16 What Viveiros de Castro says in this regard to the Araweté and
16. Of the Huli equivalent of Hagener Sky People, R. M. Glasse writes: “Dama are
gods—extremely powerful beings who control the course of nature and interfere in
58
ON KINGS
Tupi Guarani peoples generally can be widely duplicated among the classically
“acephalous” societies:
How to account for the coexistence of, on one hand, a “loosely structured” organ-
ization (few social categories, absence of global segmentation, weak institution-
alization of interpersonal relations, lack of differentiation between public and
domestic spheres) with, on the other hand, an extensive taxonomy of the spirit
world . . . an active presence of that world in daily life, and a thoroughly vertical
“gothic” orientation of thought . . . ? Societies such as the Araweté reveal how
utterly trivial any attempts are to establish functional consistencies or forced cor-
respondences between morphology and cosmology or between institution and
representation. (1992: 2–3)
Even apart from the numerous malevolent, shape-shifting beings with superhu-
man powers of afflicting people with all kinds of suffering, Viveiros de Castro
describes a society of immortal gods in heaven without equal on earth, who
make people’s foods and devour their souls, who are capable of elevating the sky
and resurrecting the dead, gods who are “extraordinary, splendid but also dread-
ful, weird—in a word, awesome” (ibid.: 69).17
But they do have shamans, precisely of similar powers (ibid.: 64)—as do
many other such societies. Even where there are no chiefs, there are often some
human authorities: big-men, great-men, guardian magicians, warriors, elders.
Yet, given the basis of their authority, these personages are so many exceptions
