onkings

by Faun Rice

to his palace, his person identified with the crops and agricultural fertility, every

  aspect of his life regulated by elaborate taboos (Meek 1931: 126–33, 153–63). It

  seems Jukun kings were always in principle scheduled to die at the end of a seven-

  year term, but in early times, unless they failed as warriors, this fate was always

  postponed, and any disabling impurities they may have taken on were transferred

  to a scapegoat slave killed in their stead (ibid.: 139–44; Muller 1990: 58–59). By

  the time our evidence kicks in, in the 1930s, this scapegoat ritual had long since

  fal en into abeyance. Instead it was the king himself who had become a potential

  scapegoat; he could be executed for any number of reasons, whether for crop

  failure or violation of taboos (see also Abraham 1933: 20; Lagercrantz 1950: 348).

  Though the Jukun king was never referred to as a god but merely as a “son

  of a god” (it is never said precisely which), and though all things surrounding

  the divinity of the king are, as often, left vague, or kept secret, some notion of

  godlike status seems consonant with the general tenor of the taboos that sur-

  rounded him. These kept him from any regular contact with his people. The king

  rarely left his compound, and then under carefully choreographed situations:

  none might gaze at him directly, or touch anything he’d touched; most subjects

  could never come into his presence at all, but only hope to communicate with

  him through layers of officials. Not only contact between king and people, but

  intimate contact between the king and surrounding world of any kind had to be

  negated, hidden, or denied:

  Jukun chiefs and kings . . . are not supposed to suffer from the limitations of

  ordinary human beings. They do not “eat,” they do not “sleep,” and they never

  “die.” It is not merely bad manners, but actual sacrilege to use such expressions

  when speaking of a king. When the king eats he does so in private, the food be-

  ing proffered to him with the same ritual as is used by priests in offering sacrifice

  to the gods. . . .

  30. I should emphasize this is my own reconstruction; earlier colonial historians saw

  the Jukun as a fallen empire, and most contemporary Nigerian historians believe

  that they were always more of a spiritual federation—as Afigo (2005) adds, with

  a core group claiming autochthonous status as earliest settlers of the land. Isichei

  (1997; see also Afolayan 2005: 144) suggested a gradual transformation from a

  warlike power to a ritual one, on the model of Benin, which, she notes, took a

  similar course. I have simply synthesized these views.

  408

  ON KINGS

  The Jukun king must not put his foot on the ground or sit on the ground

  without a mat, possibly because he is a god of the Upper Air or because his dy-

  namism might escape into the ground and blast the crops . . . .31 It is taboo for

  the king to pick up anything from the ground. If a Jukun king were to fall off his

  horse, he would, in former times, have been promptly put to death. Being a god

  it may never be said of him that he is ill, and if serious illness overtook him he is

  quietly strangled. (Meek 1931: 126–27)

  Any way that the royal body was continuous with or in contact with the physi-

  cal world—eating, excretion, sex—was not only performed in secret, but had to

  be treated as if it did not occur at all (excrement, hair or nail clippings, spittle,

  even sandal-prints, had to be hidden away). The king could not directly touch

  the earth, and was often referred to as an airy spirit: when he slept or died, he

  was said to “return to the skies.”

  While there was the usual ideology of the king’s absolute power,32 there’s

  little indication of arbitrary executions or other high-handed behavior. Instead,

  royal anger was seen as dangerous in itself:

  It is a disastrous thing, also, for the Jukun king to fly into a rage, point his finger

  at a man or strike the ground in wrath, for by doing so, he would let loose on the

  community the anger of the gods immanent in his person, and the whole land

  would be infected by blight. If the king were so far to forget himself the offenders

  would immediately render their apologies and take steps to induce him to recall

  or cancel his hasty word or act. They would request one of his sisters’ sons, the

  king’s acolyte, to approach him and calm him, and persuade him to dip his fin-

  gers in water in order to purge or rather quench the “fire of his hand,” and when

  this rite had been performed the acolyte would withdraw backwards, sweeping

  the ground in front of the king, in the same way as a priest withdraws when he

  has offered sacrifice to the offended gods. (Meek 1931: 128)

  31. It is often difficult in Meek’s text to know what is report and what is speculation,

  but this does seem rooted in Jukun ideas, as we’ll see.

  32. Meek notes that “the Jukun system of government is, in theory at least, of a highly

  despotic nature” (ibid.: 332), but emphasizes this was in no sense true in practice. “If

  the harvests were good people were prepared to put up with a moderate amount of

  tyranny. But excessive tyranny would lead to a demand for his death even if harvests

  were good” (ibid.).

  NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP

  409

  This passage gives a particularly vivid glimpse of the intimate, indeed, mutu-

  ally constitutive, relation between violence and sacralization. Jukun kings may

  not be gods. but they bear within them a divine element, identical with their

  power of command, or sovereignty, and which resides in the heart and right arm

  (Young 1966: 147–49). Each new king acquires this power by consuming the

  powdered heart of his predecessor, mixed in beer, during his coronation; the old

  king’s right hand is also preserved as an amulet (Meek 1931: 168; Muller 1981:

  241). This is presumably why pointing is considered so particularly dangerous.

  It blights the crops. But in a broader sense the king—at least, his human, non-

  divine element— is the crops: at public appearances he is regularly hailed as

  “Our Corn, Our Beans, Our Groundnuts” (Meek 1931: 129, 172; Young 1966:

  149–50). And if the crops fail for too long, rather than being mollified and pro-

  pitiated, the king himself can be killed; whereon it is said—as it is always said

  when any monarch dies—that he ascended to heaven and became a god owing

  to the malice of his people (Meek 1931: 131; Young 1966: 148).33

  All this clearly recalls the curious dialectic of hostility and sacralization we’ve

  already seen in the myths and rituals surrounding the Shilluk reth. Nyikang

  and his immediate successors, we are told, did not die; they ascended into the

  heavens and became disembodied gods in the face of the rancor of their people.

  Among the Jukun, all monarchs do this.

  However, the ceremonial surrounding the king also suggests that such cos-

  mological statements are themselves expressions of a deeper truth, inscribed

  in the very nature of formal etiquette, hierarchical deference, and gestures of

  respect. Recall that the formalities surrounding the Jukun king are simply more

  elaborate versions of those surrounding chiefs and elders, on the one ha
nd, or

  of gods, on the other. In fact, in their most basic elements, such formalities

  can be said to have certain common structural features that can be observed in

  forms of formal deference anywhere— indeed, the very nature of what we call

  “formality.” I’ve offered an analysis of these structural features in an earlier work

  (Graeber 1997); here I can only offer the barest summary.

  33. “When the king became sick, or infirm, or broke any of the royal taboos, or proved

  himself unfortunate, he was secretly put to death. Whether any king was, in the

  olden days, permitted to die a natural death cannot be known” (Meek 1931: 165),

  but “when a Jukun king dies (even if he has been secretly murdered as a result of a

  famine) it is commonly said he has forsaken the world and gone back to the heavens

  in consequence of the wickedness of men” (ibid.: 131).

  410

  ON KINGS

  Essentially, the argument is that what anthropologists have traditionally

  called “joking relations” and “relations of avoidance” are simply exaggerated

  forms of a kind of playful familiarity, and formal respect, that might be consid-

  ered among the universal building-blocks of human sociality. Deference tends

  to expressed not only by the inferior party averting eyes, or otherwise avoid-

  ing contact with the superior (gestures generally accompanied by feelings of

  shame), or by the fact the superior party remains relatively free to engage in or

  initiate such contact if desired, but also by a suppression of any acknowledg-

  ment of ways that bodies, and particularly the superior’s body, are continuous

  with the world around them, where, as Bakhtin (1984; cf. Stallybrass and White

  1986; Mbembe 1992) so aptly put it, the borders between bodies in the world

  become permeable or are cast into doubt entirely. These usually include eating

  and drinking to a degree, but almost always they include sexual intercourse,

  pregnancy and labor, excretion, mucus, mutilation, menstruation, death and de-

  composition, flatulence, suppurating wounds, and so on. There is an enormous

  degree of cultural variation in which of these are considered most shocking in

  polite company, which relatively trivial; and, as Norbert Elias ([1939] 1978) so

  carefully demonstrated, the borders of shame and embarrassment can advance

  and retreat over time. Still everywhere, the basic list remains the same. And

  topics considered shameful and suppressed in one context are exactly those to

  which people will also appeal when making rude jokes, and celebrated in “jok-

  ing relations,”34 which are less humorous than enactments of playful egalitarian

  competition, insult, or hostility, in a kind of systematic inversion of the princi-

  ples of avoidance. In such relations, that hierarchical superiority instead turns

  into a constant game of back-and-forth—a sometimes literal wrestling in the

  mud—where the very materiality of the interaction, the lack of clear borders

  between bodies, also emphasizes the temporary, even momentary, nature of any

  victory.35

  To be sacred, as Émile Durkheim reminds us, means “to be set apart,” which

  is also the literal meaning of the Tongan word “tabu. ” “Not to be touched.” By

  constituting the object of hierarchical deference as a thing apart, and therefore

  34. I should emphasize that “joking relations” of the classic anthropological variety are

  often not all that funny; they tend to involve play fighting or simple insults (“my,

  you’re ugly”) more than witty banter, though one could argue that witty banter is

  the same thing in an attenuated form.

  35. I should also hasten to add that I am not suggesting that all human behavior can be

  placed on a continuum between joking and avoidance; it’s one axis among many.

  NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP

  411

  at least tacitly as a perfectly self-contained and disembodied entity, floating

  above the muck and mire of the world, such taboos effectively render that object

  an abstraction. Hence it makes sense that kings, and gods, are so often rendered

  homage in similar ways. But the logic of deference also helps explain an appar-

  ent paradox: that the more exalted, hence more set apart, a superior is from his

  surroundings, including his inferiors, the more he is also seen as hierarchically

  encompassing those very same inferiors. Because “abstraction” in such situa-

  tions always has a dual meaning. It does not just refer to disembodiment; it also

  means being, as it were, moved upward on the taxonomic ladder.

  Lévi-Strauss referred to this as “universalization” versus “particularization”

  (1966: 161). An easy example will suffice: consider the difference in our own

  society between the use of first and last names. A first name (Barack) is yours

  alone, and is hence used to express familiarity; a family name encompasses a

  plethora of first names, and is hence more generic, hence more formal and def-

  erential (Mr. Obama)—and of course a title (Mr. President, et al.) is even higher

  up the taxonomic ladder, hence more deferential yet.36 In this sense, Marshall

  Sahlins’ language of “metabeings” is decidedly apt. Gods are often seen as almost

  literally Platonic Forms: the Master of the Seals is also the generic form of all

  seals, which are but tokens of their type. The same tacit logic is at play here as

  well. Consider the common insistence that a sacred king be “without blemish”

  or “physically perfect.” As noted in chapter 2, the very idea of physical perfec-

  tion is itself a kind of paradox: Can one so perfectly embody the generic human

  form that one is set apart from other humans as unique?

  How does all this relate to sovereignty?

  Wel , if nothing else, I think it now makes the opposition between clowns

  and kings worked out in the last section begins to make a great deal more sense.

  In my original essay (Graeber 1997), I emphasized how the great “reformation

  of manners” in early modern Europe might best be considered a generalization

  of avoidance relations, attendant on the rise of possessive individualism, which

  posited everyone as self-contained within the circle and compass of his or her

  property: hence, everyone was now to address everyone else as inferiors had once

  addressed feudal lords. This was the exact opposite of the festive generalization

  36. This is not to say that we are always talking about the relation of (profane) individual

  and (sacred) office in the ritual surrounding sacred kings, as structural-functionalist

  anthropology tended to assume, but rather that that relation is one specific form

  this more general relation of particularization and universalization might take.

  412

  ON KINGS

  of joking relations that Bakhtin referred to as “the carnivalesque.” (Obviously,

  this equalization is never perfect. There is always a residual—women, the poor,

  some racialized underclass—which the possessive individual also avoids talking

  about in formal situations, in the same way as one pretends not to notice when

  one’s superior blows his nose or farts.) But the opposition between clowns and

  kings is different. Normally, joking and avoidance relations are between indi-

  vidu
als, or sometimes between groups. One might say the sovereign clown is an

  individual with a joking relation with absolutely everyone; the sacred king, in an

  analogous way, is in a relation of avoidance with everybody else. Hence in the

  first case, the violence essential to the nature of sovereignty is wildly exaggerated,

  in a kind of mock chaos that actual y disguises a maintenance of a certain form

  of order (the clowns double as police); in the second, it is largely euphemized,

  along with all the bodily functions that clowns are so notoriously fond of cel-

  ebrating—though, in fact, the form of the euphemization can itself become an

  insidious form of violence: since the only way to render a human being a com-

  plete abstraction, a self-enclosing Idea divorced from material entanglements,

  is to destroy their body entirely (adverse sacralization taken to its last degree).

  * * *

  A case could be made that all etiquette has an element of potential violence

  in it. When the rich and powerful feel utterly humiliated (it does sometimes

  happen), it usually has to do with being discovered in some scandalous breach

  of protocol or decorum. But clearly, not all sacralization is adverse. Systems of

  deference overall tend to operate very much to the benefit of those who are

  deferred to. To turn such a system so against itself is unusual. It almost only

  happens to monarchs of one sort or another, or others at the very apex of some

  sort of hierarchy. Why, then, does it happen to them?

  In the Jukun case, the king seems to have been demoted from war leader to a

  kind of fetish object, whose secular powers, while they did exist, appear to have

  been entirely outbalanced by those of various palace women (particularly the

  king’s mother and sister, who had their own court and observed similar taboos

  but were never killed), a governing council, and a whole panoply of priests and

  officials (Meek 1931: 333–45; Tamuno 1965: 203; Abubakar 1986). Any at-

  tempt by the king to exercise his “absolute” power too aggressively would, Meek

  noted, lead to those surrounding him claiming he had violated some taboo and

  ordering him to be strangled in his sleep (ibid.: 333).

  NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP

  413

  In this case, Frazerian sacred kingship was a consequence of political decline.