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ries of cultural order are, to put it benignly, in need of revision.
Also worthy of reconsideration are the premodern “empires” so-called,
which, the world around, are not extraterritorial governments of colonized so-
cieties so much as predatory overlordships, ruled typically by hubristic kings
of divine potency exacting tributes from subordinated proxy regimes—in oth-
er words, galactic polities as described here for Southeast Asian civilizations.
The lineaments of the same also appear in earlier pages on Africa and Middle
America. And the argument can be extended to famous empires of Mediter-
ranean and Western Asian antiquity: Median, Achaemenid, Seleucid, Sasanian,
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Parthian, Egyptian, Akkadian, Aassyrian, and their like—even the Roman, par-
ticularly during the republic. Of course they vary considerably in structure, but
all take the form of a core region under the direct administration of the domi-
nant ethnic group, whose powers and cultural influences diminish in propor-
tion to distance from the center and inversely to the self-determination of the
outlying peoples. As has been noted of the Roman imperium—and is true of
these galactic orders more generally—the relations of the center to subordinate
peoples are effected in severalty, as so many bilateral arrangements; hence, un-
like the uniform government of national states, these empires are characterized
by heterogeneous forms of submission of peripheral collectivities to the galactic
core (Ando 2015: 13). Generally, however, the effect is a system of three concen-
tric zones, the circle beyond the ruling core consisting of vassal polities obedi-
ent to it, and a further region where submission to the center is nominal and
tributary obligations are minimal. All the same, the pretensions of the galactic
rulers are typically world encompassing, figured as extending indefinitely along
the cardinal directions, the whole taking the form of three circles and four quar-
ters. Characteristically also, the cultural achievements and cosmic powers of the
dominant people and their famous kings are respected beyond any actual po-
litical presence or authority, thus generating an orientation of marginal peoples
toward the center that may presage their ultimate usurpation of their erstwhile
superiors. Indeed, the dynamic phenomena of upward nobility and galactic mi-
mesis, involving progression culturally and politically from below, as motivated
by competition within subordinate groups or resistance to dominant groups, are
likewise endemic in imperial regimes. The outward reach of the dominant cent-
er is thus complemented by a centripetal impulse of peripheral peoples, produc-
ing chronic instabilities in a system that is otherwise envisioned, insofar as it is
impelled by the search for the security of divine, life-giving benefits—elsewhere.
chapter 7
Notes on the politics of divine kingship
Or, elements for an archaeology of sovereignty
David Graeber
This essay is meant to draw some threads together from the other pieces as-
sembled in this collection; but also to propose some new ideas and possible
directions for research. It’s an essay about the politics of divine kingship—as
well as about the origins of the principle of sovereignty, since one of the main
arguments is that the two are intimately linked.
“Sovereignty” is a complicated word and nowadays it is often used to simply
mean “national autonomy,” but as the etymology suggests, it originally referred
to the power of kings. Sovereignty in the sense of royal power has always been
fraught with paradoxes. One the one hand, it is in principle absolute. Kings will,
if they have any possibility of doing so, insist that they stand outside the legal
or moral order and that no rules apply to them. Sovereign power is the power
to refuse all limits and do whatever one likes. On the other, they often tend to
lead lives so circumscribed, so ringed about by custom and ceremony, that they
can barely do anything at all. What’s more, this paradox has never gone away.
It still lingers in the peculiar way we imagine the modern nation-state, where
sovereignty has in principle passed from the king to an entity we refer to as
“the people,” who are simultaneously viewed (in their capacity as “the people”)
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as the source of all legitimacy, as capable of rising up in revolution and creating
an entirely new constitutional and legal order, and also (in their capacity as just
“people”) as those bound and constrained by those very laws.
What I want to do in this essay is to try to trace this paradox back to its
origins. If we define sovereignty in its broadest sense as the ability to “lay down
the law,” either literally or figuratively—that is, to both break all accepted rules
of law, morality, or propriety at will, and to thus step outside the social order
and impose new rules, or simply give arbitrary orders backed up with threat of
punishment—then its historical origins are long since lost. They must surely
to go back long beyond the advent of written records. But it’s possible, I think,
to turn to the ethnographic record to create a conceptual model of the logical
possibilities, as they have worked themselves out in cases that we actually know.
The essays collected in this volume all share at least three common premises.
The first is that A. M. Hocart was largely correct in arguing that what we have
come to call “government” originally derives from ritual. The second is that rec-
ognition of this fact forces us to radically reconsider what we mean by both. And
the third is that what Marshall Sahlins has termed “stranger-kingship” provides
an ideal point of entry from which to do so. For the moment, let me focus on the
second point. Despite occasional protests to the contrary, anthropologists still
largely accept the premise that there is some kind of inevitable division between
the cynical world of Realpolitik and the airy domains of ritual, which—even
if they take the form of rituals of state—are assumed to consist of statements
about the ultimate meaning of human life. Or perhaps the ultimate forms of
authority. Or visions of an ideal social order. Or some kind of alternative, “as-
if ” reality. But anyway, always at a fundamental remove from the pragmatics of
political action. This division between ritual and politics is maintained whether
one insists that royal ritual exists largely for the sake of reinforcing pragmatic
authority (e.g., Bloch 1989), or whether one instead insists that pragmatic au-
thority exists largely for the sake of enabling those in charge to perform rituals
(e.g., Geertz 1980). To some degree, this division is just an effect of the dogged
persistence, in both the British and American traditions, of the theoretical as-
sumption that society and culture, action and expression, must be treated as dif-
ferent levels of human reality, and one must therefore develop different sorts of
theoretical tools to understand each. But to be fair, it’s not just that. Often those
who organize and carry out rituals will themselves insist on a similar division.
This may be because they see ritual as providing access to another dimension
of reality, as famously with the Australian Dreamtime, or it may be because
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
379
intellectuals in charge of conducting such rituals—Confucian, Brahmanical, or
Rabbinical—have developed their own theory of ritual as representing a kind
of ideal, as-if, “subjunctive” universe standing apart from a chaotic and tawdry
everyday existence (A. Seligman et al. 2008); but whatever the theory, rituals are
always to some degree set apart, framed as different from mundane life, and in
pragmatic terms, it is the creation and maintenance of those frames that is key
to rituals’ power.
In this, at least, the Durkheimians were not entirely wrong.
Nonetheless, it is precisely in royal ritual and the politics surrounding it that
such frames seem most in danger of collapse, where sometimes they do indeed
collapse—where it is possible, even, to say that ritual really is politics by other
means, but only to the measure that it is also possible to say that politics be-
comes ritual by other means. I think this is why Sir James Frazer’s stories about
the killing of the divine kings continue to resonate among poets, mystics, and
Hollywood script-writers down to the present day. Killing is one symbolic act
of which it is simply impossible to write off as “just” symbolic—because, what-
ever you may or may not be communicating through the ritual, when the rite of
sacrifice is over, the victim continues to stay dead.
This is why anthropologists found ritual regicide so compelling back in the
days when it was common to imagine people in earlier stages of history as
themselves still living in a kind of poetic Dreamtime, and also why those most
insistent on maintaining the division between symbolic expression and politi-
cal reality were so assiduous about insisting that such things never really hap-
pened, that kings were never really killed (e.g., Evans-Pritchard 1948, 1951).
Or alternately, that if they were, such acts were really political acts dressed up as
ritual, rather than moments when the frames collapse and it’s simply no longer
possible to say there is a difference between the two. But in fact, as practitioners
of cold-blooded Realpolitik from Pizarro to the Bolsheviks discovered to their
irritation, king-killing is always, necessarily, a mythic and ritual act, whether or
not those who perform the act feel it ought to be.
At the same time, no one can possibly claim it’s not political.
This essay, then, is not just an exploration of the politics of kingship, or even
sovereignty; it’s also an exploration of what happens when such frames implode.
One might even say that’s what sovereignty itself is: the ability to toss frames
about. In the first part of the essay, therefore, I want to offer some suggestions
about how sovereignty might first have burst out of the ritual frames in which it
was originally encompassed, thus allowing divine kings to come into the world
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in the first place. In the second two, I will again take up a notion I first proposed
in my essay on the Shilluk (chapter 2 above): to consider what happens when
kings either definitively win, or definitively lose, that war.
SOVEREIGNTY CONTAINED IN TIME AND SPACE
Claire: How do you know you’re God?
The Earl: Simple. When I pray to Him, I find I’m talking to myself.
Peter Barnes, The ruling class
It’s a premise of this volume, as I’ve noted, that A. M. Hocart was correct to argue
that forms of governance first appeared in the ritual sphere, as a part of a larger
politics of the creation, channeling, and maintenance of life, and only later came
to be applied to what we consider the political domain. As Marshal Sahlins has
pointed out earlier in this volume, forager societies do have kings, even if they
are not mortal ones. Mortal kings were modeled on gods and not the other way
around. But the fact that this is true in the broadest historical sense does not mean
that, for instance, Frazer was also correct in assuming that human government
itself begins in divine kingship: the absolute rule of humans taken to be gods.
It might seem like a logical step, but the archaeological and historical evi-
dence in no way supports it. What we know—and our knowledge is decidedly
uneven—suggests a longer and more twisted path. The first bits of evidence
we do have for marked social inequality appear surprisingly early, in the Pleis-
tocene, where, despite the fact most people do not seem to have been buried
at all, a few clearly extraordinary individuals were not only placed in tomb-
like graves but their bodies were festooned with enormous quantities of bead-
work and other precious materials. Yet these “princely” burials (as archaeologists
sometimes call them) appear in isolation, often thousands of years apart, and,
despite the enormous amounts of human labor that must have been mobilized
to create their costumes, never seem to lead to anything that otherwise resem-
bles a kingdom or a state. What’s more, the majority of these bodies appear to
have been physically anomalous in some way: some were extremely tall, others
were marked by dwarfism, yet others had markedly deformed skeletons (Formi-
cola 2007), and there is reason to suspect the burials might have been as much
about containing and neutralizing their power as in honoring them (many, for
instance, are topped by very heavy slabs of stone). Norse myth notwithstanding,
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
381
it seems unlikely the Paleolithic had really produced a hereditary aristocracy
that largely consisted of giants, dwarfs, and hunchbacks. We can only guess,
but the appearance of such striking characters in sumptuous and elaborately
fashioned costumes, some thirty thousand years ago, in such magnificent isola-
tion, does rather suggest that insofar as we are speaking of Ice Age “princes”—as
some of these individuals have been called—any powers they may have held was
strictly limited in time and space: perhaps even to very specific ritual contexts
(Wengrow and Graeber 2015: 604–5).
Al this does not necessarily mean that the first princely figures in human
history were, as a Hocartian reading would suggest, impersonators of divinities in
dramatic rituals whose authority began to extend further during the ritual season.
Other interpretations are possible. But that one would certainly fit the evidence,
which, it must be admitted, most contemporary interpretations, caught up as they
are in evolutionist categories, really don’t. What’s more, there are precedents for
societies in which powers we normally associate with government—and particu-
larly sovereignty, even only in the minimal sense of the power to issue commands
and back them up with the threat of punishment—exist only in ritual contexts,
even, specifical y, when participants are impersonating metahuman beings. It’s
just that neither they, nor the gods they impersonate, are ever anything remotely
like Zeus, Jehovah, Vishnu, or other familiar “King of the Gods”-type figures.
/> * * *
What I am suggesting is that, while the emergence of sovereign powers most
likely did follow a path from kingly divinities to divine kings, this path is in no
way straightforward. It passed through a veritable circus-world of oddities. The
region from the western littoral of North America to the Great Plains provides,
I think, the closest we can get to a glimpse of what must have happened. Here
one can see a clear progression from societies (central California, Northwest
Coast, etc.) where direct orders between adults (or, in the latter case, free adults)
are given only during ritual dramas in which mortals impersonate gods, even
to the point where certain characters in those dramas are regularly referred to
as “police” who enforce the rules of the ceremony; to those in which, as Robert
Lowie was first to point out (1948b; cf. Wengrow and Graeber 2015),1 specific
1. Kroeber (1922: 307–8) note that Californian cult associations never took on the
broader police functions they did elsewhere in North America.
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police powers are assigned (usually on a rotating basis) to clans or warrior socie-
ties during the three-month hunt and ritual season as a whole, even if, during
the rest of the year, society reverts to its usual egalitarian decentralized political
state, chiefs have to rely on powers of persuasion, not compulsion, and the for-
mer police have no more say in public affairs than anybody else.
The real y striking thing about the powers of command that could be exercised
only during rituals, though, is that, most often, they were exercised by clowns.
Some examples from north central California might prove illustrative. In
indigenous Californian societies, with very few exceptions, chiefs and other ex-
plicitly political authorities—where they existed—held no powers of command
or punishment; neither were explicit orders given or taken by adults in the do-
mestic sphere. Even children were no longer punished after a fairly young age.
The great exception was during the great Kuksu, or God-Impersonating rituals
(Barrett 1919; Kroeber 1922: 307; 1925: 364–90; Gifford 1927; Loeb 1932,
1933; Halpern 1988), held in the winter months. During the Kuksu ceremonies,
cosmic powers became manifest to mortal humans in the form of costumed