by Faun Rice
supposed to be like. But how do we even know what humans are supposed to be
like? There is only one way: by observing actual human beings. But actual hu-
man beings are never physical y perfect; in fact, when compared with the model
of a generic human we have in our heads, most seem at least slightly misshapen.
This is partly because, when moving from tokens to types, we wipe out change
and process: real humans grow, age, and so on; generic humans are, first of all,
caught forever at some idealized moment of their lives. But it’s also an effect of
the process of generalization itself: in moving from tokens to types, we always
seem to generate something which we find more proper or appealing than the
tokens—or at least the overwhelming majority of them. In this sense, the king
is indeed an abstraction or transcendental principle: the ideal-typical human,
though here I am using the phrase not in Weber’s sense, but rather from the
understanding that, like Leonardo da Vinci, when we try to imagine the typi-
cal, we usual y end up generating the ideal.63 Insofar as the reth is the embodi-
ment of the nation, and of humanity as a whole before the divine powers, he
is a generic human; insofar as he is the generic human, he must be the perfect
human; insofar as he is an image of humanity removed from time and process,
he must be preserved from any harmful transformation until the point where,
when this becomes impossible, he must be simply destroyed and put away. In
the sense, the king’s body is less a fetish than itself a kind of microutopia, an
impossible ideal.
63. This is, of course, what “ideal” actually means: it is the idea lying behind some
category.
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133
There is always, I think, a certain utopian element in the sacred. That which
is sacred is not only set apart from the mundane world, it is set apart particularly
from the world of time and process, of birth, growth, decay, and also simple
bodily functions—ways in which the body is continuous with the world. I have
explored this phenomenon in great detail elsewhere (Graeber 1997). What is
most striking in the case of sacred kingship is that this is reflected above all in
an urge to deny the king’s mortality; and this denial is almost invariably effected
by killing people.
Rulers of early states—Egyptian and Mesoamerican pyramid-builders be-
ing only the most famous examples—had a notorious tendency to develop ob-
sessions with their own mortality. In a way, this is not hard to understand; like
Gilgamesh, having conquered every other enemy they could imagine, they were
left to confront the one that they could never ultimately defeat. Killing others,
in turn, does seem one of the few ways to achieve some sort of immortality.
That is to say, most kings are aware that there are rulers remembered for reigns
of peace, justice, and prosperity, but they are rarely the ones remembered for
all time. If history will accord them permanent significance, it will most likely
be for either one or two things: vast building projects (which often themselves
entail the death of thousands) or wars of conquest. There is an almost literal
vampirism here: ten thousand young Assyrians or Frenchmen must be wiped
from existence, their own future histories aborted, so the name of Assurbanipal
or Napoleon can live on.
Shilluk refused to allow their reths to engage in this sort of behavior, but in
the institutions of Frazerian sacred kingship we encounter the same relation in
a far more subtle way. The connection is so subtle, in fact, that it has gone largely
unnoticed. But it comes especially clearly into focus if one compares the Shilluk
kingdom with its most notoriously brutal cousin: the kingdom of Buganda lo-
cated on the shores of Lake Victoria a few hundred miles to the south. In many
ways, the similarities between the two are quite remarkable. Ganda legends, too,
trace the kingship back to a cosmic dilemma about the origins of death; here,
too, the first king did not die but mysteriously vanished in the face of popular
discontent; here, too, the next three kings vanished as well; here, too, there were
elaborate installation rituals with mock battles, the lighting of ritual fires, and
a chaotic year-long interregnum. Yet in other ways the Ganda kingship is an
exact inversion.
Much of the difference turned on the status of women. In Buganda, women
did almost all subsistence labor, while having no autonomous organizations of
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ON KINGS
their own; men formed a largely parasitical stratum, the young ones organized
into militarized bands, older ones into an endlessly elaborate administrative ap-
paratus that seemed to function largely to keep the younger ones under control,
or distracted in endless wars of conquest. The result was, by any definition, a
bona fide state. It was also one of those rare cases when bureaucratization did
not in any sense lead to any significant euphemization. While the king was not
identified with any divine being, he remained very much a divine king in our
sense of the term: a dispatcher of arbitrary violence, and higher justice, both at
the same time. However, where the Shilluk king was surrounded by execution-
ers whose role was eventually to kill him, the Ganda king was surrounded by
executioners whose role was to kill everybody else. Thousands might be slaugh-
tered during royal funerals, installations, or when the king periodically decided
there were too many young men on the roads surrounding the capital, and it
was time to round a few hundred up and hold a mass execution. Kings might
be killed in rebellions, but none were ritually put to death. As Gillian Feeley-
Harnik (1985: 277) aptly put it, regicide, here, seems to have been replaced by
civicide.64 When David Livingstone asked why the king killed so many people,
he was told that if he didn’t, everyone would assume that he was dead.
Benjamin Ray remarks that the capital was, as so often in such states, “a
microcosm of the kingdom, laid out so that it reflected the administrative order
of Buganda as a whole” (1991: 203); the king was the linchpin of the social
cosmos, distributor of titles and spoils, and, hence, the ultimate arbiter of all
forms of value. His was a secular court, with few of the formal trappings of sa-
cral kingship. Even his close relatives insisted he just a man like any other. Still,
the person of the king is always sacred, and the very fact that this was a regime
based almost solely on force meant that the ritual surrounding the person of the
king took on a unique ferocity. The kabaka, as he was called, did not leave the
palace except when carried by bearers, and the punishment for gazing directly
at him was death.
The rules of courtly etiquette, such as the prohibition against sneezing or cough-
ing in the king’s presence . . . were considered as important as the laws of the state,
64. Probably literally: Christopher Wrigley, the grand old man of Ganda studies, makes
a plausible case that what we are dealing with here is a very old and probably fairly
typical institution of sacred kinship suddenly transfo
rmed, a few generations before,
into a state (1996: 246). A bureaucracy was superimposed with disastrous results.
THE DIVINE KINGSHIP OF THE SHILLUK
135
for behavior towards the king’s person was regarded as an expression of one’s al-
legiance to the throne he represented. Thus Mutesa sometimes condemned his
wives to death because they coughed while he was eating. (Ray 1991: 172)
Foreign observers like Speke and Livingstone wrote in horror of even well-born
princesses being dragged off to execution for the slightest physical infraction.65
This might seem about as far as one can get from the Shilluk court, where
women were sacrosanct and it was the king who was eventually executed. But
in fact it is a precise inversion, a mirror image, and hence, on a deeper level, pre-
cisely the same thing. The constant element is the illusion of physical perfection
at the center, which brings with it the need to suppress whatever are taken to be
the most significant signs of bodily weakness, illness, or lack of physical control,
and, above all, the fact that this illusion was ultimately enforced by threat of
death. The difference is simply that the direction of the violence is reversed. It is,
perhaps, a simple matter of balance of forces. In the war between sovereign and
people, the reth was at a constant disadvantage. The kabaka, in contrast, held all
the cards. One might even say that, for the moment at least, he had definitively
won. His ability to rain arbitrary destruction was unlimited not just in principle,
but largely in practice, and the bodies of royal women were simply the most
dramatic means of its display.
Granted, the situation was not ultimately viable. Such victories can never
be sustained. Even in the nineteenth century, it was assumed that every kabaka,
driven mad by power, would eventually go too far, and be destroyed—if not by
real flesh-and-blood rebels, then at least by the angry ghosts of his victims. By
the end of the century, the entire system was overthrown and mass executions
were abolished. What I really want to draw attention to here, though, is, first of
all, the intimate connection between the otherworldly perfection of royal courts
and their violence—to the fact that such utopias do, always, rest on what we
euphemistically call “force.” The second point is that the violence always cuts
both ways. This is the truth that is being acknowledged in the Shilluk stories
that show how Dak’s effigy—which represents human capacities to become a
god through violence—was created when the people as a whole set out to kill
Dak, or how Nyikang vanished and became a god when everybody hated him.
65. No doubt some of this was simply to impress foreigners with the absoluteness of
royal power; but such customs aren’t improvised whole cloth.
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ON KINGS
What I would suggest is that this has remained the hidden logic of sover-
eignty. What we call “the social peace” is really just a truce in a constitutive war
between sovereign power and “the people” or “nation”—both of whom come
into existence, as political entities, in their struggle against each other. Further-
more, this elemental war is prior to wars between nations.
To call this a “war” is to fly in the face of almost all existing political theory,
which—whether it be a matter of Carl Schmitt’s argument that the first gesture
of sovereignty is declaring the division of friend and enemy, or Max Weber’s
monopoly of legitimate use of force within a territory, or the assertion in African
political systems (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940) that states are entities that
resolve conflict internally through law, and externally, through war—assumes
there is a fundamental distinction between inside and outside, and particularly
between violence inside and violence outside—that, in fact, this is constitutive
of the very nature of politics. As a result, just about everyone (with the pos-
sible exception of anthropologists) who wishes to discuss the nature of “war”
starts with examples of armed conflicts between two clearly defined political
and territorial entities, usually assumed to be nation-states or something almost
exactly like them, involving a clash of armies that ends either with conquest or
some sort of negotiated peace.66 In fact, even the most cursory glance at history
shows that only a tiny percentage of armed conflicts have taken such a form. In
reality, there is almost never a clear line between what we’d now call “war” and
what we’d now call “banditry,” “terrorism,” “raids,” “massacres,” “duels,” “insur-
rections,” or “police actions.” Yet somehow in order to be able to talk about war
in the abstract we have to imagine an idealized situation that only rarely actually
occurs. True, during the heyday of European colonialism, from roughly 1648 to
1950, European states did attempt to set up a clear system of rules to order wars
between nation-states, and in this period one does find a fair number of wars
that do fit this abstract model; but these rules applied only within Europe, a tiny
corner of the globe. Outside it, the same European powers became notorious
for disrespecting solemn agreements and their willingness to engage in every
sort of indiscriminate violence. Since 1950, the rest of the globe has come to
be included in the system of nation-states, but as a result, since that time, no
wars have been formally declared, and despite hundreds of military conflicts,
66. Or sometimes they skip from description of monkeys, other sorts of animal
behavior, or speculations about early hominids to wars between fully constituted
nation-states. But generally there is nothing in between.
THE DIVINE KINGSHIP OF THE SHILLUK
137
there have been only a handful that have involved the clash of armies between
nation-states.
Obviously, the conceptual apparatus—the way we imagine war—is impor-
tant. But it seems to me it is mainly important in occluding that more funda-
mental truth that the Nilotic material brings so clearly into focus. As those
European travelers discovered, when asked by Nilotic kings to conduct raids or
rain random gunfire on “enemy villages” that actually turned out to be inhabited
by the king’s own subjects, there is no fundamental difference in the relation
between a sovereign and his people, and a sovereign and his enemies. Inside and
outside are both constituted through at least the possibility of indiscriminate
violence. What differentiates the two—at least, when the differences are clear
enough to bear noticing—is that the insiders share a commitment to a certain
common notion of utopia. Their war with the sovereign becomes the ground of
their being, and thus, paradoxically, the ground of a certain notion of perfec-
tion—even peace.
Any more realistic exploration of the nature of sovereignty, I believe, should
proceed from examination of the nature of this basic constitutive war. Unlike
wars between states, the war between sovereign and people is a war that the
sovereign can never, truly, win. Yet states seem to have an obsession with creat-
ing such pe
rmanent, unwinnable wars: as the United States has passed over the
last half-century from the War on Poverty to the War on Crime to the War on
Drugs (the first to be internationalized) and, now, to the War on Terror. The
scale changes but the essential logic remains the same. This is the logic of the
assertion of sovereignty. Of course, no war is (as Clausewitz falsely claimed)
simply a contest of untrammeled force. Any sustained conflict, especially one
between state and people, will have elaborately developed rules of engagement.
Still, behind those rules of engagement always lies at least the threat—and usu-
ally, periodically, the practice—of random, arbitrary, indiscriminate destruction.
It is only in this sense that the state is, as Thomas Hobbes so famously put it, a
“mortall god.”
I don’t think there is anything inevitable about all this. The will to sover-
eignty is not, as reactionaries always want us to believe, something inherent in
the nature of human desire—as if the desire for autonomy was always also nec-
essarily the desire to dominate and destroy. Neither, however, does the historical
emergence of forms of sovereignty mark some kind of remarkable intellectual
or organizational breakthrough. Actually, taken simply as an idea, sovereignty,
like monotheism, is an extraordinarily simple concept that almost anyone could
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ON KINGS
have thought of. The problem is it’s not simply an idea: it is better seen, I think,
as proclivity, a tendency of interpretation immanent in certain sorts of social
and material circumstances, but one which nonetheless can be, and often is,
resisted. As Luc de Heusch makes clear, it is not even essential to the nature of
government. Only by putting sovereignty in its place, it seems to me, can we can
begin to look realistically at the full range of human possibilities.
chapter 3
The atemporal dimensions of history
In the old Kongo kingdom, for example
Marshall Sahlins
INTRODUCTION: PARADIGMATIC HISTORIES
“There’s something particular to Muslims. When I read I feel the behavior of people
who lived a glorious past—in our consciousness, not in our experience—so we feel it
keenly,” he said. “And now in a quest to find that honor, there is a voraciousness to find
