by Faun Rice
is closely tied to the integrity of his physical being” (2005a: 26).2 And while
Frazer might not have understood that such kings were, indeed, seen as having
been created by the people, de Heusch insisted he was quite correct in hold-
ing that, having been so consecrated, their physical strength was tied to the
prosperity of nature, and that’s why they could not be allowed to grow sickly,
frail, and old. But in a later volume, The scapegoat (1911c), Frazer discovered
another aspect: the king who absorbs the nation’s sin and pollution, and is thus
destroyed as a way of disposing of collective evil. The two are obviously difficult
to reconcile. Yet in a surprising number of cases (e.g., Quigley 2005) they seem
to coexist.
It’s the scapegoat aspect that has generated the most voluminous litera-
ture—largely because students of divine kingship soon connected it with René
Girard’s quasi-psychoanalytic “scapegoat theory” (Makarius 1970; Scubla 2002),
one which was gaining increasing popularity in French intellectual circles from
the 1970s on. Girard, famously, argued that the scapegoat mechanism is really
the secret lying behind all myth, ritual, and religion and is, indeed, what allows
the very possibility of human sociality itself. Girard’s is one of those arguments
that, even if so overstated it might seem self-evidently absurd, nonetheless never
fails to find an audience because it managed to find a way of framing some-
thing we are taught to already suspect is true—that is, that society is always,
everywhere founded on some kind of fundamental violence—in a way no one
had ever thought to propose before. Girard does not seek to find the sources of
that violence in some presocial nature, but quite the opposite. The story goes
like this: We learn to desire by observing what others desire. Therefore we all
want the same things. Therefore we are necessarily in competition. The only way
humans can avoid thus plunging into a Hobbesian war of all against all is to
2. I am summarizing, not assessing, theories at this point, so I will not enlarge on the
fact that de Heusch seems to me to be working with a fundamentally mistaken
idea of the nature of African fetishes, which are rarely embodiments of fertility but
ordinarily embodiments of destructive forces (Graeber 2005). I think he is quite
right and profoundly insightful when he argues that kings are often created by
the same mechanisms as fetishes, as I have myself argued for Merina sovereigns
(Graeber 1996a), mistaken when he goes on to claim that the key innovation here
is that, unlike fetishes, the power of kings does not have to be constantly ritually
maintained, as there are any number of counterexamples (e.g., Richards 1968)
where it definitely does.
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ON KINGS
direct their mutual hostility outward onto a single object. This generally means
selecting some arbitrary victim, who is first reviled as the cause of all their trou-
bles and expelled from the community, most often by killing him. Once this
happens, though, everything suddenly turns around: the former scapegoat is
suddenly treated as an exalted being, even a god, because he is now the em-
bodiment of society’s ability to create itself by the very act of killing him. This
mechanism, Girard argues, is the origin of all society and culture. The logic is, in
classic Freudian style, circular: since we cannot face the reality, we are always de-
nying it; therefore, it cannot possibly be disproved. Still, applying this model to
the problem of divine kingship has interesting effects. Kings become, effectively,
scapegoats in waiting (Muller 1980; Scubla 2003). Hence de Heusch’s “exploits”
are, for Girardians, actual crimes. They ensure that the king is, by definition, a
criminal; hence it is always legitimate to execute him, should it come to that.
His sacred pneuma, then, is anticipatory: the reflected glow of the role the king
might ultimately play in embodying the unity the people will achieve in finally
destroying him.
Over the course of the ensuing debate the idea that such kings embody gods
was gradually abandoned. De Heusch rejected the expression “divine kingship”
entirely. And kings actually taken to be living gods are in fact surprisingly rare:
the Egyptian Pharaoh may well have been the only entirely unambiguous ex-
ample (Frankfort 1948; cf. Brisch 2008).3 Better, he argued, to speak of “sacred
kingship.” Sacred kings are legion. But de Heusch also emphasizes that sacred
kings are not necessarily temporal rulers. They might be. But they might equally
be utterly powerless. Different functions—the king as fetish, the king as scape-
goat, the king as military commander or secular leader—can either be combined
in the same figure or be distributed across many; in any one community, any
given one of them may or may not exist (de Heusch 1997).
De Heusch’s ultimate conclusion is that A. M. Hocart ([1927] 1969, 1933,
[1936] 1970) was right: kingship was originally a ritual institution. Only later
did it become something we would think of as political—that is, concerned with
making decisions and enforcing them through the threat of force. As with any
such statement, though, the obvious question is: What does “originally” mean
here? Five thousand years ago when states first emerged in Egypt and Mesopo-
tamia? And if so, why is that important? Or is the idea, instead, that whenever
3. Though part of the problem in saying that a king is a god is that the definition of
“god”—or even, for that matter “is”—is entirely ambiguous here.
THE DIVINE KINGSHIP OF THE SHILLUK
73
states emerge, it is invariably from within ritual institutions? This seems highly
unlikely to be true in every case. Or is de Heusch simply saying that it is pos-
sible to have kings with ritual responsibilities and no political power, but not the
other way around? If so, it would appear to be a circular argument, since then it
would only be those political figures who have ritual responsibilities whom the
analyst is willing to dignify with the name of “king.”
It seems to me that de Heusch’s real accomplishment is to demonstrate that
what we are used to thinking of as “government” (or, maybe better, “govern-
ance”) is not a unitary phenomenon. Simon Simonse (2005: 72), for instance,
observes that, really, all most Africans ask of their sacred kings is what most
Europeans demand of their welfare states: health, prosperity, a certain level of
life security, and protection from natural disasters.4 He might have added: how-
ever, most do not feel it necessary or desirable to also grant them police powers
in order to achieve this.
The question of governance, then, is not the same as the question of sov-
ereignty. But what is sovereignty? Probably the most elegant definition is that
recently proposed by Thomas Hansen and Finn Stepputat (2005, 2006): in its
minimal sense, sovereignty is simply the recognition of the right to exercise vio-
lence with impunity. This is probably the reason why, as these same authors note,
those arguing about the nature of sovereignty in the contemporary world—the
breakdown of s
tates, the multiplications of new forms of semicriminal sover-
eignty in the margins between them—rarely find the existing anthropological
literature on sacred kingship particularly useful.5
4. Simonse’s comment has a particularly piquant irony when one considers the current
popularity of the notion of “biopower”: the idea that modern states claim unique
powers over life itself because they see themselves not just ruling over subjects, or
citizens, but as administering the health and well-being of a biological population.
Probably the question we should be asking is how it happened that there were
governments that did not have such concerns. This must have had something to do
with the peculiar role of the church in the European Middle Ages.
5. I am simplifying their argument. Sovereign power for Hansen and Stepputat is
marked not only by impunity but also by a resultant transcendence—the “crucial
marks of sovereign power” are “indivisibility, self-reference, and transcendence”
(2005: 8), as well as a certain “excessive” quality. In many ways their argument,
especially when it draws on that of Georges Bataille with his reflections on
autonomy and violence, comes close to the one that I will be developing. But it is
also exactly in this area that it deviates the most sharply, since Bataille’s position is
ultimately profoundly reactionary, reading authoritarian political institutions back
into the very nature of human desire. I like to think my position is more hopeful.
74
ON KINGS
It seems to me this need not be the case. The existing literature does contain
elements from which a relevant analysis can be constructed. Any such analysis
would have to begin with the notion of transcendence: that in order to become
the constitutive principle of society, a sovereign has to stand outside it. I mean
this is not quite in either Evans-Pritchard’s or de Heusch’s sense; what I am
suggesting is that the various “exploits” or acts of transgression by which a king
marks his break with ordinary morality are normally seen to make him not
immoral, but a creature beyond morality. As such, he can be treated as the con-
stituent principle of a system of justice or morality—since, logically, no creature
capable of creating a system of justice can itself be already bound by the system
it creates. Let me take a famous example here. When European visitors to the
court of King Mutesa of the Ganda kingdom tried to impress him by present-
ing him with some new state-of-the-art rifle, he would often respond by trying
to impress them with the absolute quality of his power: testing the rifle out by
randomly picking off one or two of his subjects on the street. Ganda kings were
notorious for arbitrary, even random, violence against their own subjects. This,
however, did not prevent Mutesa from also being accepted as supreme judge and
guardian of the state’s system of justice. Instead, such random acts of violence
confirmed in him in a status similar to that often (in much of Africa) attributed
to God, who is seen simultaneously as an utterly random force throwing light-
ning and striking down mortals for no apparent reason, and as the very embodi-
ment of justice and protector of the weak.
This, I would argue, is the aspect of African kingship which can legitimately
be labeled “divine.” Creatures like Mutesa transcend all ordinary limitations.
Whether they were said to embody a god is not the issue .6 The point is that they
act like gods—or even God—and get away with it.
For all that European and American observers ordinarily professed horror
at behavior like Mutesa’s, this divine aspect of kingship is echoed in the mod-
ern nation-state. Walter Benjamin (1978) posed the dilemma quite nicely in
his famous distinction between “law-making” and “law-maintaining” violence.
Really it is exactly the same paradox, cast in the new language that became
necessary once the power of kings (“sovereignty”) had been transferred, at least
6. The Ganda kingship, for example, was almost entirely secular. Not only are we not
dealing with a “divine king,” in the sense of one identified with supernatural beings,
we are not even dealing with a particularly sacred one—except insofar as any king
is, simply by virtue of hierarchical position, by definition sacred.
THE DIVINE KINGSHIP OF THE SHILLUK
75
in principle, to an entity referred to as “the people”—even though the exact way
in which “the people” were to exercise sovereignty was never clear. No constitu-
tional order can constitute itself. We like to say that “no one is above the law,”
but if this were really true, laws would not exist to begin with: even the writers
of the United States Constitution or founders of the French Republic were,
after all, guilty of treason according to the legal regimes under which they had
been born. The legitimacy of any legal order therefore ultimately rests on ille-
gal acts—usually, acts of illegal violence. Whether one embraces the left solu-
tion (that “the people” periodically rise up to exercise their sovereignty through
revolutions) or the right solution (that heads of state can exercise sovereignty
in their ability to set the legal order aside by declaring exceptions or states of
emergency), the paradox itself remains. In practical terms, it translates into a
constant political dilemma: How does one distinguish “the people” from a mere
unruly mob? How does one know if the hand suspending habeas corpus is that
of a contemporary Lincoln or a contemporary Mussolini?
What I am proposing here is that this paradox has always been with us.
Obviously, any thug or bandit who finds he can regularly get away with rap-
ing, killing, and plundering at random will not, simply by that fact, come to
be seen as a power capable of constituting a moral order or national identity.7
The overwhelming majority of those who find themselves with the power to do
so, and willing to act on it, never think to make such claims—except perhaps
among their immediate henchmen. The overwhelming majority of those who
do try fail. Yet the potential is always there. Successful thugs do become sover-
eigns, even creators of new legal and moral systems. And genuine “sovereignty”
does always carry with it the potential for arbitrary violence. This is true even
in contemporary welfare states: apparently this is the one aspect that, despite
liberal hopes, can never be completely reformed away. It is precisely in this that
sovereigns resemble gods and that kingship can properly be called “divine.”
This is not to say that Evans-Pritchard was wrong to say that kings are
also always sacred. Rather, I think this perspective al ows us to see that the
mechanics of sacred kingship—turning the king into a fetish or a scapegoat—
often operate (whatever their immediate intentions) as a means of control ing
the obvious dangers of rulers who feel they can act like arbitrary, petulant
gods. Sahlins’ emphasis on the way stranger-kings must be domesticated,
7. Benjamin himself suggested that the popular fascination with the “great criminal”
who “makes his own law” derives from precisely
this recognition.
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ON KINGS
encompassed, and thus tamed by the people is a classic case in point. It is by
such means that divine kings are rendered merely sacred. In the absence of
a strong state apparatus, situations of power are often fluid and tenuous: the
same act that at one point marks a monarch as a transcendent force beyond
morality can, if the balance of forces shift, be reinterpreted as simple criminal-
ity. Thus can divine kings indeed be made into scapegoats. In this, at least, the
Girardians are right.
There is every reason to believe this logic applies to the Shilluk king (or reth)
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well. Consider the following two
stories, preserved by the German missionary Dietrich Westermann (and bear-
ing in mind that while there is no way to know if these incidents ever actually
happened, it doesn’t really matter, since the repetition of such stories constitutes
the very stuff of politics):
Story 1: One day a man named Ogam was fishing with a member of the
royal family named Nyadwai. He caught a choice fish and the prince de-
manded he turn it over, but he refused. Later, when his fellow villagers sug-
gested this was unwise, he pointed out there were dozens of princes, and
belittled Nyadwai: “who would ever elect him king?”
Some years later, he learned Nyadwai had indeed been elected king.
Sure enough he was summoned to court but the king’s behavior ap-
peared entirely forgiving. “The king gave him cattle; built him a village; he
married a woman, and his village became large; he had many children.”
Then one day, many years later, the King destroyed the village and
killed them all. (Westermann 1912: 141)
Here, we have an example of a king trying to play god in every sense of the
term. Such a king appears arbitrary, vindictive, all-powerful in an almost bibli-
cal sense. If one examines it in the context of Shilluk institutions, however, it
begins to look rather different. Ordinarily, Shilluk kings did not even have the
power to appoint or remove village chiefs. In the complete absence of any sort
of administrative apparatus, their power was almost entirely personal: Nyadwai
created and destroyed Ogam’s village using his own personal resources, his own
