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by Faun Rice


  that prove the rule of domination by metaperson powers-that-be; for, like Inuit

  shamans or Hagen big-men, their own ability to command others is conveyed

  by their service to or enlistment of just such metaperson-others. Indeed, as

  Vicedom and Tischner write of Hageners: “Any manifestation of power in peo-

  ple or things is ascribed to supernatural or hidden power,” whether in the form

  the affairs of men.” Notably, one Datagaliwabe, “a unique spirit whose sole concern is

  punishing breaches of kinship rules” (1965: 27)—including lying, stealing, adultery,

  murder, incest, violations of exogamic rules and of ritual taboos—inflicts sickness,

  accidents, death or wounding in war (ibid.: 37).

  17. For a similar structure of divinity in a non-Tupi setting, see Jon Christopher Crocker

  (1983: 37 et passim) on the bope spirits of the Bororo. In both cases, by conveying to

  the gods their rightful share of certain foods, the people will be blessed with fertility

  and natural plenty.

  THE ORIGINAL POLITICAL SOCIETY

  59

  of good harvests, many children, success in trade, or a respected position in the

  community (1943–48, 1: 43).

  In insightful discussions of the Piaroa of the Orinoco region, Joanna Over-

  ing (1983–84, 1989) notes that human life-giving powers were not their own,

  but were magically transmitted to individuals from the gods by tribal leaders.

  By means of powerful chants, the ruwang, the tribal leader, was uniquely able

  to travel to the lands of the gods, whence he brought the forces for productivity

  enclosed within “beads of life” and placed them in the people of his community.

  Overing points out that this is no political economy in the sense that tribal lead-

  ers control the labor of others. But as they absorbed more divine powers than

  others, they were responsible for building the community: “Without the work

  of the ruwang, the community could not be created, and because of his greater

  creative power, he was also the most productive member of the community”

  (1989: 172).

  In such cultural-ontological regimes, where every variety of human social

  success is thus attributed to metapersonal powers, there are no purely secular

  authorities. Roger Keesing relates of an ambitious young Kwaio man that he

  is well on his way to big-manship, as evidenced by his staggering command of

  genealogies, his encyclopedic knowledge of traditions of the ancestors and their

  feuds, his distinction as a singer of epic chants, and his acquisition of magi-

  cal powers. Accordingly, he is “not only acquiring an intellectual command of

  his culture, but powerful instruments for pursuing secular ambitions as a feast-

  giver” (Keesing 1982: 208). Or for an Australian Aboriginal example: Helmut

  Petri concludes that the reason certain Ungarinyin “medicine men” and elders

  are leading and influential men of their communities is that they “are regarded

  as people in whom primeval times are especially alive, in whom the great he-

  roes and culture-bringers are repeated and who maintain an inner link between

  mythical past and present” ([1954] 2011: 69). Not that those who so possess

  or are favored by divine powers are necessarily placed beyond the control of

  their fellows, for popular pressures may be put on them to use such powers be-

  neficently. Here is where the famous “egalitarianism” of these peoples becomes

  relevant. Tony Swain (1993: 52) notes that the native Australian elders’ shared

  being with the land entails the obligation to make it abound with life—a duty

  the people will hold them to. Swain is careful to insist that the leaders’ access

  to ritual positions amounts to a certain control of “the means of production,”

  hence that this is not the kind of communalistic, nonhierarchical society “im-

  agined by early Marxists.” But then, ordinary people, without direct access to

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  ON KINGS

  metapersonal sources of fertility, “can and do order ritual custodians to ‘work’ to

  make them food: ‘You mak’em father—I want to eat.’” All of which brings us

  back to the issue of mystification.

  Earlier, I warned against too quickly writing off the human dependence on

  gods, ancestors, ghosts, or even seal-persons as so much mistaken fantasy. Well,

  nobody nowadays is going to attribute these notions to a “primitive mental-

  ity.” And from all that has been said here, it cannot be claimed these beliefs

  in “spirits” amount to an ideological chimera perpetrated by the ruling class in

  the interest of maintaining their power—that is, on the Voltairean principle of

  “There is no God, but don’t tell the servants.” Here we do have gods, but no rul-

  ing class. And what we also distinctively find in these societies is the coexistence

  in the same social reality of humans with metahumans who have life-giving and

  death-dealing powers over them. The implications, as I say, look to be world-

  historical. As is true of big-men or shamans, access to the metaperson authori-

  ties on behalf of others is the fundamental political value in all human societies

  so organized. Access on one’s own behalf is usually sorcery, but to bestow the

  life-powers of the god on others is to be a god among men. Human political

  power is the usurpation of divine power. This is also to say that claims to divine

  power, as manifest in ways varying from the successful hunter sharing food

  or the shaman curing illness, to the African king bringing rain, have been the

  raison d’être of political power throughout the greater part of human history.

  Including chiefdoms such as Kwakiutl, where,

  The chiefs are the assemblers, the concentrators, and the managers of super-

  natural powers. . . . The human chiefs go out to alien realms and deal with alien

  beings to accumulate nawalak [generic life-giving power], and to concentrate it

  in the ceremonial house. When they have become centers of nawalak the salmon

  come to them. The power to draw salmon is equated with the power to draw

  people. The power to attract derives from nawalak and demonstrates its posses-

  sion. (Goldman 1975: 198–99)

  It was not military power or economic prowess as such that generated the

  dominance of the Abelam people over the various other Sepik communities of

  New Guinea eager to adopt Abelam cultural forms; rather it was the “super-

  natural power” that their successes signified. “Effectiveness in warfare and skill

  in growing yams, particularly the phallic long yams,” Anthony Forge (1990:

  162) explains, “were in local terms merely the material manifestations of a more

  THE ORIGINAL POLITICAL SOCIETY

  61

  fundamental Abelam domination, that of power conceived essentially in magical

  and ritual terms.” What enabled the Abelam yams to grow larger, their gardens

  to be more productive, and their occupation of land once held by others was

  their “superior access to supernatural power.” Accordingly, the political-cum-

  cultural reach of the Abelam extended beyond their actual grasp. Beyond any

  real-political or material constraints, the Abelam were admired and feared for

  their superior access to cosmic power in all its forms, and notably for its “con-


  crete expression” in rituals, buildings, and a great array of objects, decorations,

  and aesthetic styles. Abelam culture was thus carried abroad by its demonstrable

  command of greater force than its own (ibid: 163ff.).

  Southeast Asian “tribals” and peasants are wel known for sacrificial “feasts

  of merit” in which the display and/or distribution of livestock, foods, and ritual

  valuables such as porcelain jars and imported textiles is the making of local au-

  thorities. But it is not so much the economic benefits to the population at large

  that constitute this authority—as if the people were rendered dependent on the

  sponsor of the sacrificial feast for their own means of existence—as it is the priv-

  ileged dependence of the feast-giver on the metahuman sources of people’s pros-

  perity. As Kaj Århem comments in regard to the “ritual wealth” thus expended:

  Such ritual wealth is regarded as objectivized spirit power—an indication that

  the owner is blessed and protected by personal spirits. Spirit possession manifests

  itself in good health and a large family. The blessings of the spirits are gained by

  proper conduct—keeping the precepts of the cosmologically underpinned social

  and moral order—and, above all, by continuously hosting animal sacrifices, the

  so-called “feasts of merit.” Wealth, sacrifice, and spiritual blessing are thus linked

  in an endless, positive feedback circuit. The implied reification of spiritual poten-

  cy in the form of wealth and worldly power—its acquisition and accumulation as

  well as its loss—is central to Southeast Asian cosmology and politics. (2016: 20)

  Economic prowess is a metaphysical power.18 Then again, there are other well-

  known ways, from the magical to the military, of demonstrating such metahu-

  man potency. Even in the matter of kingship, the royal authority may have little

  or nothing to do with the accumulation and disposition of riches. In certain

  African stranger-kingships described elsewhere (see chapter 5 in this volume),

  18. Geertz (1980) was right to speak of a Balinese “theatre state.” So were those who

  criticized him for underplaying its material dimension.

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  power essentially rested on the ritual functions of ensuring the population’s pros-

  perity: the authority to do so being dependent on descent from exalted foreign

  sources, complemented usually by traditions of the dynastic founder’s exploits as

  a hunter and warrior in the wild. As Shilluk, Lovedu, and Alur demonstrate, in

  more than one African realm such stranger-kings “rained” but did not govern.

  For all the superior foreign origin of an Alur chiefly dynasty, its connection

  to the ancient great kingdom of Nyoro-Kitara, the Alur ruler, reported Aidan

  Southall, was revered by his indigenous subjects more for his power to stop war

  than to make it; “and the sanction to his ritual authority, which is always up-

  permost in people’s minds, is his power to make or withhold rain rather than his

  power to call in overwhelming force to crush an opponent” ([1956] 2004: 246):

  Rain ( koth) stood for material well-being in general, and a chief ’s ability to dem-

  onstrate his control over it was a crucial test of his efficacy. The chief ’s control

  of rain and weather, together with his conduct of sacrifice and worship at the

  chiefdom shrines, stood for his general and ultimate responsibility in the minds

  of his subjects for both their material and moral well-being. ([1956] 2004: 239)

  You will have noticed that I have come back full circle to Hocart’s Kings and

  councillors. Government in general and kingship in particular develop as the or-

  ganization of ritual. As said earlier, we scholars of a more skeptical or positivist

  bent are at liberty to demystify the apparent illusions of the Others. We can split

  up their reality in order to make society autonomous, expose the gods as fantasy,

  and reduce nature to things. To put it in Chicagoese, we may say we know bet-

  ter than them. But if we do, it becomes much harder to know them better. For

  myself, I am a Hocartesian.

  A final note in this personal vein. Written by one of a certain age, this pre-

  tentious article has the air of a swan song. Similarly, for its concern with disap-

  pearing or disappeared cultural forms, it is something of the Owl of Minerva

  taking wing at dusk. Still, it does manage to kill those two birds with one stone.

  CODA

  Already copyedited, this text was on its way to the printer when by happy chance

  I discovered that in 1946 Thorkild Jacobsen had formulated the concept of a “cos-

  mic state” in reference to Mesopotamian polities of the third millennium bce.

  THE ORIGINAL POLITICAL SOCIETY

  63

  Jacobsen’s discussion of a universal metapersonal regime in a city-state setting

  indeed anticipates many of the attributes of “The original political society” as pre-

  sented here—most fundamentally his observation that “the universe as an organ-

  ized whole was a society, a state” ([1946] 1977: 149). Ruled by divine authorities,

  human society was merely a subordinate part of this larger society, together with all

  the other phenomena-cum-subjects inhabiting the cosmos, from beasts and plants

  to stones and stars: all animate beings ( inua) likewise endowed with personality

  and intentionality. Jacobsen depicts this hierarchical y organized world in which

  personkind was the nature of things in a number of parallel passages. For example:

  Human society was to the Mesopotamian merely a part of the larger society of

  the universe. The Mesopotamian universe—because it did not consist of dead

  matter, because every stone, every tree, every conceivable thing in it was a being

  with a will and a character of its own—was likewise founded on authority: its

  members, too, willingly and automatically obeyed orders which made them act

  as they should act. . . . So the whole universe showed the influence of the essence

  peculiar to Anu [Sky, king and father of the gods]. ([1946] 1977: 139)

  By Jacobsen’s descriptions, this universal animism was classificatory—the per-

  sonalities of elements of the same kind were instances of a master personality of

  the species; and the scheme was hierarchical at multiple levels—species forms

  were in turn inhabited by higher, divine forms, such that the world was gov-

  erned through the indwelling being of cosmocratic gods in every existing thing.

  While the whole universe manifested the essence of Anu, the goddess Nidabe

  created and inhabited the useful reeds of the wetlands and by her presence made

  them flourish. “She was one with every reed in the sense that she penetrated

  as an animating and characterizing agent, but she did not lose her identity in

  that of the concrete phenomena and was not limited to any or all the existing

  reeds” (ibid.: 132). Note that this kind of philosophical realism, with the god as

  personification of the class of which individuals are participatory members, is

  a general logic of partibility or dividualism. The god is a partible person mani-

  fest in various other beings—like the “myriad bodies” ( kino lau) of Hawaiian

  gods—and at the same time exists independently of them. By the same token

  (p
un intended), the several members of a divine class are at once manifestations

  of the god and (in)dividuals in their own right and kind.

  Following this classificatory logic, Jacobsen achieves a description of di-

  vine kingship in Mesopotamia of the kind known from classic anthropological

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  ON KINGS

  accounts in which, for all that the king is a certain god, the god is not the king.

  Nyikang is Juok, but Juok is not Nyikang; Captain Cook is Lono, but Lono is

  not Captain Cook. Just so, the Mesopotamian king is Anu, but Anu is not the

  king. Indeed, given the partibilities involved, the Mesopotamian king in various

  capacities is also Enlil, Marduk, or any and all the great gods. (Interesting that

  Hocart [(1936) 1970: 88] recounted the analogous claim of an important Fijian

  chief who, after enumerating the great gods of the chiefdom, said, “These are

  all my names.”) This type of intersubjective animism is by far the most com-

  mon type of divine kingship: the king as human manifestation of the god, as an

  avatar of the god, rather than the human as the deity in his own person, such as

  the self-made Roman god, Augustus. Jacobsen also thus testifies to the principle

  that human authority is the appropriation of divine power. In the cult, the Mes-

  opotamian king enacted the god and thereby controlled and acquired the god’s

  potency. By a kind of usurpation, as it were, a man could “clothe himself with

  these powers, with the identity of the gods, and through his own actions, when

  thus identified, cause the powers to act as he would have them act” (Jacobsen

  [1946] 1977: 199).

  For the rest, Jacobsen’s text delivers on the usual ontological suspects of a

  metapersonal cosmos: no subject–object opposition, and, a fortiori, no differen-

  tiation of humans from nature—or can we not say: no culture–nature opposi-

  tion? (Similar observations are made in the same volume by John A. Wilson

  [(1946) 1977] on ancient Egypt and H. and H. A. Frankfort [(1946) 1977] on

  ancient civilizations in general.) Given this universal subjectivity as a matter of

  common experience, neither did the ancient Mesopotamians know a transcend-

  ent, “supernatural” realm. “The Mesopotamian universe did not have ‘different

  levels of reality’” (Jacobsen [1946] 1977: 149).

 

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