by Faun Rice
creatures, as gods and spirits and not actual flesh-and-blood rulers, we do not
recognize them as “real.” But they’re real enough for those who live under them.
We need to look for the origins of liberty, then, in a primal revolt against such
authorities. I do not mean to argue that ontogeny exactly reproduces phylogeny
in this case; but it’s easy to see how the argument being developed here might
be seen as complementary in a sense. Every human being has a primordial ex-
perience of autocracy, far earlier than any experience of equal relations could
possibly be—and here I refer not, as usually supposed, to the apparent absolute
power of mothers or other adults (since, at first, infants cannot even recognize
others as autonomous beings with power or intentions), but in their own behav-
ior. Children are would-be autocrats. They are at first incapable of anything else,
since they lack the capacity to even comprehend another’s point of view.
Perhaps these truths are unusually apparent in a place like Madagascar with
an explicit ethos of consensus-based communal decision making. In local as-
semblies, fokon’olona—really this word just refers to any meeting that brings
together everyone affected by some common problem—the only criterion for
participation is if one is mature enough to formulate a reasonable argument. But
they also explicitly reject any principle of representation or leadership. Children,
and kings, are thus the only people who are in a sense incapable of the mutual
understanding and compromise that defines mature deliberation.
It’s helpful to bear this in mind when we think about what raising children
actually consists of. The text in the Tantara says that taking care of the royal
family is “just like taking care of children,” but really it isn’t, since the point of
THE PEOPLE AS NURSEMAIDS OF THE KING
343
raising children is that they eventually grow up. The people’s nurture, in con-
trast, traps rulers in permanent immaturity. Time after time, in my own circles,
I’ve heard parents with antiauthoritarian politics agonize over to what degree
it is appropriate to discipline children, or even, sometimes, to control or guide
their behavior in any way. It obviously can’t be avoided to some degree. Does
that mean that on a certain level authoritarian behavior is not just legitimate
but inevitable? I myself puzzled over the problem for many years until one day it
occurred to me: Is it necessarily “authoritarian” to intervene to stop a child from
behaving in an egocentric and harmful fashion? Surely it all depends on how
you do it. There’s nothing intrinsically authoritarian about doing so because it’s
normally only really required when children themselves behave like would-be
autocrats. If it is done in such a way as to gently guide a child toward the even-
tual capacity to engage in mutually considerate, mature, egalitarian behavior, it’s
not authoritarian at all: it’s actually antiauthoritarian. This would suggest that
not only do we all share a primordial experience of (our own) autocracy, but
we’ve all experienced a form of love designed to allow us to transcend it, and
move us on to at least the capacity for something else.
chapter 6
The cultural politics of core–periphery relations
Marshall Sahlins
My intent is to put the issue of “soft power” in a world-historical frame. I
speak here of the anthropological experience of core–periphery systems, which
are much more extensive, ethnographically and historically, than the modern
“world-system” of capitalism described by Wallerstein and colleagues. Similar
configurations of domination are in fact planetary in scope—they are common
even in tribal zones—and are doubtless even older than the history that began
at Sumer. The effect is a multicultural order of intercultural relations in which
no participating society is sui generis. So, for example, the relations between
valley civilizations and the upland “tribals” of Southeast Asia—a major focus of
this essay—as described by James C. Scott:
Both hill and valley peoples were planets in a larger galactic system (Indic or
Sinic) of mutual influence. Hill peoples may not have been subjects of valley
states, but they were active participants in the economic system of exchange and
in the even wider cosmopolitan circulation of ideas, symbols, cosmology, titles,
political formulas, medical recipes, and legends. (2009: 305–6)
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ON KINGS
And conversely:
Histories of the classical lowland court-states, taken in isolation, risk being unin-
telligible or vastly misleading. Lowland states (mandala or modern) have always
existed in symbiosis with hill society. (2009: 26)
I hasten to add that although they are often recognized, these multicultural
orders are rarely theorized. They are largely ignored by a normal anthropologi-
cal science of autonomous and self-fashioning cultures, each a world unto itself.
There is a radical disjunction between functionalist, structuralist, evolutionist,
and other such paradigms of cultural self-determination, and the often observed
fact that the cultural differences which distinguish interacting peoples—not to
mention the similarities that unite them—are largely dependent on the rela-
tions between them. Consider this notice of Randall Collins (1992: 373), from
the introduction to an article on “The geopolitical and economic world-systems
of kinship-based and agrarian-coercive societies”:
I want to suggest that there is no type of society in any period of human exist-
ence in which world-system relationships do not affect its structure and dynam-
ics. That is to say, economic and political/military connections among organized
social units affect these units as an overall pattern; all societies are in important
respects structure from the outside in.
Not to mention “spiritual” connections. Human societies the world over are not
only interdependent with societies of other kinds, they are also dependent for
their own existence on relations with humans of other kinds. I mean the gods,
ancestors, ghosts, demons, species-masters, and other such metapersons, includ-
ing those inhabiting plants, animals, and natural features: in sum, the host of
“spirits”—wrongly so-cal ed; they are this-worldly and indeed have the attrib-
utes of persons—the host of whom are endowed with life-and-death powers
over the human population. “Each society,” writes Georges Balandier, “links its
own order to an order beyond itself, and, in the case of traditional societies, to
the cosmos” (1972: 101). Lest you think I am going astray, everything I now
say on this score is in support of the observation that the cultural-cum-political
authority of dominant societies in many traditional core–periphery formations,
notably as this authority extends as “soft power” into regions beyond the coer-
cive reach of the center, is based rather on an indigenous anthropology of the
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF CORE–PERIPHERY RELATIONS 347
metahuman sources of human welfare. No battle is won, no child is born, no gar-
dens
flourish or pots come whole from the kiln without the intervention of the
metapersonal powers-that-be—to whom the human powers-that-be have privi-
leged relations. The kingly gifts of fertility and victory, wealth and health, beauty
and monumentality manifested in the center resound in the peripheries as so
many demonstration-effects of divine life-giving powers. Unlike their material
manifestations, such powers are discursively communicable, socially transmissi-
ble, and ritual y accessible. In the event, hinterland peoples may be attracted and
subordinated to the center culturally while they are still independent politically.1
As noted previously (chapters 3 and 4), this soft power of acculturation ap-
pears by definition in Aidan Southall’s discussion of the “segmentary state,” a
multicultural order of the core–periphery kind found in many parts of Africa—
in which, however, “the spheres of ritual suzerainty and political sovereignty do
not coincide. The former [the ritual authority] extends widely towards a flexible,
changing periphery. The latter [political authority] is confined to a central core
domain” (1988: 53). Described in fine detail by Southall, the Alur chiefdoms in
Uganda west of the Nile, where immigrant rulers of Nilotic Luo origin domi-
nate a variety of Sudanic, Bantu, and Nilotic communities, are classic exam-
ples of the segmentary state. Southall’s succinct characterization of the spatial
structure of Alur rule could indeed serve as a model of core–periphery systems
in general—even the imperial systems of cosmocratic ambitions, including the
East Asian “world-systems” that will occupy much of this essay:
In Alurland, the greater chiefs are focal points of rudimentary political speciali-
zation, from which an almost spatial zoning of authority spheres radiates, from
that of chiefship in the center, through that of chieflets with non-Alur subjects,
to that of peripheral non-Alur groups vaguely recognizing some aspects of the
charisma of [Alur] chiefship but continuing with their own autonomous kinship
authorities. ([1956] 2004: 124)
Also exemplary, and more pertinent for the moment, are the spiritual sources of
the Alur chiefs’ domination of peripheral groups. Alur rule was not established
by conquest or sustained by force. “Had his [the chief ’s] position depended on
the command of force or on personal prowess in war it appears that many units
1. The cosmic polity of metaperson powers encompassing human societies is discussed
at length in chapter 1.
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ON KINGS
of Alur domination of other peoples would never have come into existence, for
no irresistible force was brought to bear in their establishment” (ibid.: 246).
Rather the reverse: it is the Alur chief who is effectively conquered by the sub-
ordinate people, as happens often enough in practice and prescriptively in ritual,
when chiefly Alur men are “kidnapped” and carried off by other ethnic commu-
nities—who have their own reasons for wanting a chief to rule them. Prominent
among these reasons is “rain”:
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, stood for
his general and ultimate responsibility in the minds of his subjects for both their
material and moral well-being. (Southall [1956] 2004: 239)
As Frazer, Hocart, and numerous ethnographers have taught: the world around,
the king is the condition of the possibility of the people’s welfare by virtue of
his privileged access to the divine sources of prosperity and life itself. Note, in
particular, Southal ’s observation that the Alur chief gains authority over “the
minds of his subjects”—not their bodies. This is a political economy of social
subjugation rather than material coercion. Here, as in many such chiefdoms and
kingdoms (see chapters 3 and 4, the means of production in the primary, sub-
sistence sectors are “owned” by the underlying producing population, and more
particularly by the ancestors or local spirits indwelling in their lands. According-
ly, kingly power does not work on a proprietary control of the people’s means of
existence so much as on direct command of the people themselves—and thereby
on some portion of their product in goods and manpower. The powers-that-be
have an extractive rather than a productive relation to the economic process. By
contrast to capitalist enterprise, which aims at the increase in productive wealth
as such, the objective of the palace economy is to increase the number and loy-
alty of subjects, as by beneficial or awe-inspiring effects of royal largess, display,
and consumption. Wealth here is a strategic means of power, although not the
only means, and not the ultimate end. And beyond any material advantage to
the people-at-large, what the king’s disposition of riches demonstrates is his ac-
cess to its divine origins—from which follow the benefits he promises to others.2
2. This politics of manpower rather than capital power as such is discussed in some
detail in chapters 3 and 4.
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF CORE–PERIPHERY RELATIONS 349
“Soft power” may thus become real-political power even in tribal zones As
Mary Helms observes: for all that the best examples of superordinate centers are
known from “centralized societies,” similar formations are commonly found in
so-called “non-centralized societies.” Indeed, they are present “at least to some
degree in any setting in which a polity extends its skillfully crafted symbols
and encapsulations (‘regalia’) of political-ideological identity to at least select
outside groups and/or acquires resources from some portion of the geographical
outside realm.” (1993: 157).
Just so, the dominance respectively achieved by the Iatmul and Abelam peo-
ples over other groups in the Middle Sepik region of New Guinea peoples was
essentially similar to the reign-cum-rain of the great Alur chief over Bantu
and Sudanic villagers, or for that matter the superiority of the Celestial Em-
peror over the “raw” barbarians of the Chinese borderlands. Indeed, speaking of
the Sepik “regional systems,” Deborah Gewertz (1991: 236) specifically likened
them to “a world system . . . predicated on power asymmetries.” But, of course,
the asymmetries of power did not entail the Iatmul’s governance of the peo-
ples who respected it and desired to share its benefits. Working from second-
ary centers subordinate to Iatmul, Gewertz from among the nearby Chambri
and Simon Harrison from the Manambu people, the ethnographers describe a
regional system quite like Southall recorded for the Alur: a series of concentric
zones of decreasing cultural influence emanating from the dominant Iatmul
core, as conveyed by intermediate groups to the less powerful hinterlands.
The Manambu . . . seem to have imported throughout their history very many
elements of Iatmul culture, particularly ritual, magic, totemism, and myth. To
the Manambu, the cultural forms of the Iatmul are surrounded by an aura of
&
nbsp; especially dangerous power, and are therefore valuable to acquire. The Iatmul
seem to have a similar domineering influence on all the groups they traded with.
They exported many elements of their culture to the Sawos and Chambri, for
instance, as well as to the Manambu, while the Chambri and the Manambu were
in turn exporters of their culture to their respective sago-suppliers to the south.
(Harrison 1990: 20)
The intermediately situated peoples, notably the Chambri, also appropriated
powers and even ancestors from the marginal “bush” groups; but throughout
the region it was particularly Iatmul metapersonal potency that was highly cov-
eted. In many ways, Harrison (ibid.: 78–79) explains, the Iatmul were deemed
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ON KINGS
by Manambu to be associated with “the ‘invisible’ world of spirits.” Such spir-
its spoke through their Manambu shaman mediums in a language laced with
extraordinary Iatmul features: a language that conveyed the beings and forces
of a widespread totemic cosmology. More than any other of their neighbors,
Harrison says, the Iatmul “embody” this hidden realm “which is the perceived
source of all power.” It perhaps goes without saying that the power thus im-
ported, as it gave access to the life-giving totemic ancestors, included the indis-
pensable means of human fertility and material livelihood.
So run the reports of the Abelam hegemony as well. The extraordinary
cultural achievements of the Abelam represented “spiritual” powers that were
themselves dangerous, attractive, and useful to others. These were all-purpose
achievements, not just material or military but also aesthetic and demographic
distinctions that by invidious contrasts to surrounding societies could engender
an indigenous anthropology of cultural evolution. In Anthony Forge’s summary:
Effectiveness in warfare and skill in growing yams, particularly the phallic long
yams, were in local terms merely the material manifestations of a more funda-
mental Abelam domination, that of power conceived fundamentally in magical
and ritual terms. The Abelam were admired and feared for what was believed to
be superior access to supernatural power in all forms and the concrete expression
of this command in rituals, buildings, and an immense array of objects, decora-
