by Faun Rice
to become lower and lower in rank as time goes on. It’s commonplace in such
a system to have a cut-off point: thus, among both the Natchez and Merina, it
was said that after seven generations royal descendants lose any noble privileges
and become commoners again.
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
431
In reality, of course, things are never this simple, since human beings nor-
mally have two parents, not one, and marriage allows one to avoid the inevita-
bility of decline—either by marrying back up, or by marrying outside the system
entirely (the stranger-king principle again). But the more a unilinear genealogy,
matrilineal or patrilineal or cognatic, is determinant of status, the more will the
principle of sinking status, inevitably, apply.
In the Inka case, for instance, in 1532, the Valley of Cuzco surrounding the
capital came to be entirely occupied by members of the ten panaqa descended
from former kings, and these were indeed ranked by genealogical distance from
the core lines (Zuidema 1964, 1989; Gose 1996b: 405; Jenkins 2011: 179–81).
All claimed descent from Manco Capac, founder of the empire, but the panaqa
specifically identified with Manco Capac, Chima Panaqa, and which kept the
founder’s image and conducted rituals on his behalf, in fact ranked lowest (Bau-
er 1998: 125–26).
What I am proposing here is that, in the case of royal genealogies at least (and
these are, by definition, ranked), there are in fact two different kinds of sinking
status at play, and that they work at cross-purposes. On the one hand, col ateral
branches will inevitably spin off the royal line, just like the panaqa, and each new
one that spins off pushes al the older ones even further downward in rank. We
can refer to this “col ateral” or “horizontal” descending status: the further a lineage
gets from the center, the less exalted it becomes. On the other hand, we can also
distinguish a principle of vertical descending status, that applies within the core
dynastic line itself.48 Al things being equal, the founder of a dynasty wil neces-
sarily rank higher than his descendants, for the same reason that fathers outrank
sons, and because the longer a dynasty endures, the more distant the current ruler
will be seen to fall from the original (often alien) sources of his or her power.
I think this is a structural feature, or, at the very least, a constant tendency
within any dynastic system; but the problem becomes all the more acute in
traditional societies where history itself is seen as a process of rupture or decline
from mythic or heroic times. Michael Puett has argued that in Bronze Age
China, during the Shang (c .1600–1046 BC) and Zhou (1046–256 BC) dynas-
ties, this problem became systemic. Each ruler’s ritual role was to sacrifice to his
father, who would then intervene with his own father, and so on, up the chain to
48. The terminology was first suggested to me by Marshall Sahlins; it somewhat echoes
Clifford Geertz, who speaks of genealogical status “dimming” both vertically and
horizontally in Bali (1980: 16), but the usage is not identical.
432
ON KINGS
the original founder of the dynasty, who would intervene with God (or heaven)
for the well-being of his people:
In such a sacrificial system, however, there was a built-in inevitability of de-
cline. . . . Since it was defined genealogically each subsequent generation would
grow ever more distant from the ancestors serving Heaven. . . . As reigning kings
grew ritually weaker, rival claimants from powerful lineages inevitably began
seeking allegiances that would allow them to overthrow the king and begin a
new dynasty. (Puett 2012: 214)
Puett makes the intriguing argument that the First Emperor (259–210 BC)
attempted to break the cycle by declaring himself a god, who could therefore
remain available for direct contact for his descendants, no matter what the ge-
nealogical distance; but the project failed, leading, ultimately, to the distinctly
human Chinese conception of kingship we find in the Han and thereafter
(ibid.: 216–18; cf. 2002: 237–45). Still, Chinese sages simply found other rea-
sons to insist that dynasties tended toward inevitable decline.
The term “sinking status” was originally coined by the Geertzes (1975) to
describe the ranked lineage system of Bali, where lineages that spin off core de-
scent lines are always in danger of losing status over time, but here too one can
speak of both vertical and horizontal sinking status. All Balinese kings claim
descent from the princes who fled from the downfall of the Javanese kingdom
of Majapahit, but the Babad Dalem chronicle recounts how even the highest-
ranking branch of the royal line, the kings of Gelgel and Klungkung, steadily
decline from their divine origins when one misstep or another leads to a fall
from grace: hence even the rank of kings, as indicated by their titles, descends
from godlike Mpu, to priestly Sri, to the relatively modest warrior titles Dalem
and Dewa (see C. Geertz 1980: 15–18; Weiner 1995: 105–35; Acciaioli 2009:
62–65). Here, the contradiction between vertical and horizontal principles plays
itself out explicitly, since each lineage that splits off from the royal line should
rank properly higher than those who split earlier, but, in fact, the effect is coun-
tered by the fact that the ruling line itself was losing rank—no doubt creating all
sorts of opportunities for neighbors to develop deeply felt disagreements about
who is ultimately superior to who (see fig. 2).49
49. For some reason, all the spin-off lines in figure 2 are represented as descended from
Satria lineages that are formally of the same rank, but there were dadia or lineages
descended from later monarchs as well.
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
433
BATARA (god)
semi-divine MPU
Collateral royal lines from
ahmana)
dispersing nobels of entourage
Danglang (Br
ajahs)
ahla r
ISAN (S
EPAK
A K
RESNK
AW
DE AGUNG
UNG
Founder of
LUNGKK
Figure 2. Sinking status (Acciaioli 2009: 63).
434
ON KINGS
* * *
Rather than multiply examples (the idea that royal dynasties are often seen as
prone to decadence is hardly controversial), let me sum up the argument so far.
I have proposed that when kings definitively win what I’ve called the con-
stitutive war between sovereign and people, succeeding in extending sovereign
power to their kingdom as a whole, they will tend to take the assumption of
their godlike status (the very weapon used against them when popular forces
win) as inspiration to actually try to transcend mortality. They will make them-
selves legends, transform the landscape, create dynasties. However, insofar as
they succeed, this will always create problems for their successors, especially if
those successors wish to do the same. Generations fall in rivalry with one an-
other. Livi
ng kings find themselves choked and surrounded by the dead.
Now, I do not think this problem is peculiar to royal dynasties. Actually,
something like this is likely to happen wherever the status of the living is de-
pendent on ancestors who are similar to themselves.
I first came to this conclusion when thinking about mortuary ritual in high-
land Madagascar (Graeber 1995), where famadihana ceremonies, which people
of all social backgrounds now perform, have a peculiar double-edged quality.
Such rituals simultaneously celebrate the memories of the dead, and allow de-
scendants to efface those memories by literally pulverizing the ancestors’ bodies.
This ambivalence can be observed wherever ancestors take human form. On
the one hand, if one has no ancestors at all, one is not really a social person (in
Madagascar one becomes a “lost person,” which is a polite way of saying “slave”);
on the other, if an ancestor is simply someone who succeeded in keeping his
children around him and being remembered as the founder or great ancestor of
a village or clan or tomb, then that ancestor will inevitably be in a position of
rivalry in relation to any descendant whose ultimate ambition is to do the same.
I suspect we are in the presence of a general sociological principle here.
When ancestors are seen as being fundamentally different from their descend-
ants, or as existing in a fundamentally different kind of time (the Australian
Dreamtime, for example), they tend to be seen as sources of power for their
present-day descendants; when they are fundamentally similar and living in
the same sort of time, like Malagasy ancestors, they tend to be seen as rivals
and sources of constraint. The former is particularly true of those societies of
Australia and North and South America that are marked by totemism, where
ancestral figures are not even human, or exist in a kind of mythological time
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
435
where present-day differences between gods, humans, and animals did not yet
exist; the latter tends to be the case in societies in Africa, East Asia, and the
Austronesian world, where one instead finds widespread worship or propitia-
tion of named human ancestors.
Highland Malagasy mortuary ritual, I also suggested, is to a certain degree
a popularization of royal ritual. This raises the intriguing question of how often
and to what extent ancestor cults on the popular level are always appropria-
tions of, or at least influenced by, royal or aristocratic practice. The matter can
only be resolved through further research, and no doubt the relation is one of
mutual appropriation; but for present purposes, I will merely point out that it is
in precisely in those parts of the world marked by ancestor worship where one
also encounters kingdoms, whereas in the totemic zone, monarchy effectively
does not exist.50 There are, as in all things, a few exceptions (largely in East
Africa, including curiously both Ganda and Shilluk), but the Americas would
seem to provide strong confirmation, since it is precisely in those places where
we do find kingdoms—in the Andes, and among Maya and Zapotec—where
totemism is weak or nonexistent, and one finds ancestor cults instead.51
Be this as it may, throughout the totemic zone, ancestors, while often seen as
dangerous, give various forms of power to their descendants; throughout the zone
50. Obviously it is hardly the case that all societies that practice ancestor worship
are kingdoms; I am merely pointing out that in those parts of the world where
ancestors are propitiated, monarchy is a common form of government, whereas in
those parts of the world marked by totemic clan systems, it is not. The argument is
much more complicated than I can develop here. On the one hand, as I noted in the
case of the Merina monarchy in chapter 5, monarchic and aristocratic systems tend
to deny commoners genealogies, which helps explain why it is often in the more
egalitarian polities around kingdoms (Nuer, Tiv, Tallensi, et al.) that one finds the
most generalized systems of ancestor worship; on the other hand, in appropriating
royal practices, commoners also end up with the same problems in that the ancestors
tend to be demanding, vindictive, and so on.
51. This seems to hold true even in North America—the Natchez had totemic clans
by 1900, but the consensus seems to be they borrowed them from neighbors after
the kingdom was destroyed (Swanton 1905: 667; Knight 1990: 14). The fact that
cults of aristocratic ancestors appear to have flourished under the Mississippian
kingdoms, and largely vanished with the monarchy itself (Knight 1986: 683-84;
Ethridge 2010: 224) suggests that at least in the Americas, it is not so much that
societies with ancestor worship are more likely to develop kingdoms, but that the
presence of kingdoms are likely to lead, eventually at least, to the dissemination
of ancestor cults. The one possible exception is among the Mexica, where neither
ancestor worship nor totemism is present.
436
ON KINGS
marked by propitiation of named human ancestors, royal, aristocratic, or other-
wise, ancestral spirits tend to impose themselves in unwanted ways: at best, they
need to be constantly propitiated, at worst, they make themselves known through
the vindictive or arbitrary (i.e., sovereign) infliction of disaster and death.52
Kings invariably have ancestors of the human type, and those ancestors reg-
ularly tend to become a problem. Typically, the original stranger-king founder
of a dynasty is seen as a source of legitimacy and power rather than a constraint
(unless, that is, the current monarch is particularly ambitious), but the closer
one comes to the present, the more of a burden ancestral memories tend to
become. The Egyptian and Peruvian mummies are just extreme examples of a
more general tendency. Just as much of the panoply of Frazerian sacred kingship
can be seen as a series of techniques for reining in and controlling monarchs, so
too can many of the ritual institutions one sees in kingdoms where sovereignty
has, indeed, broken out of its initial frame, where kings have won, as I’ve put it,
be seen as consisting of so many strategies for coping with this problem—itself
mere one manifestation of the more general problem of vertical sinking status.
Space does not permit a detailed exposition, but a rough list of such strate-
gies would at the very least include:
1. killing or exiling the dead, in the sense of erasing or marginalizing their
memories;
2. becoming the dead, in the sense of creating a positional succession system;
3. outdoing one’s ancestors in some dramatic way, the most historically impor-
tant of which appear to have been:
a. the creation of monuments;
b. the conquest of new territories;
c. mass human sacrifice; and
4. turning history on its head and inventing a myth of progress.
52. This is clearly true in most African and Austronesian cases; Japan, China, and
other East Asian societies might seem exceptions, since ancestors there are
always represented at least superficially in a benevolent light. But in fact ancestors
/>
everywhere are represented in a superficially benevolent light; the veneer just seems
much thicker in these cases, largely I suspect owing to the existence of intellectual
traditions such as Confucianism that have turned the idealization into a moral
exercise. In neither the elite nor popular tradition, though, do ancestors benefit
their descendants, and on the popular level, if unpropitiated, they are apt to turn
into dangerous ghosts (Kwon 2008: 20–25; Puett 2013).
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
437
Let me end by considering these briefly, one at a time:
1. Killing or exiling the dead
“Genealogical amnesia” (or “structural amnesia”) is an inevitable feature of any
system of descent. Not all dead can be remembered. Clans, for instance, are
descent groups that claim descent from a single ancestor but cannot trace the
intermediary links to their own grandparents (or however far back they remem-
ber), everyone in between is simply forgotten. But even in a segmentary lineage
system like the Nuer, where ostensibly everyone can trace back to the founders
of their descent groups through an unbroken chain of ancestors, there is an
“amnesiac space” (M. Douglas 1980: 84) five generations back, a memory hole
into which ancestors must disappear to ensure that there are always only ten
to twelve generations between the founding ancestors, who always remain the
same, and the present.
When the bodies of ancestors are physically there (as in highland Mala-
gasy tombs, or Inka mummies), or ancestors otherwise memorialized in physical
shrines, relics, or other material tokens, this obviously becomes much harder to
do. The objects themselves must be dealt with in some way. The same is true
when genealogies are preserved in writing, as with Chinese ancestral tablets, or
when there are institutional structures (such as the Egyptian funerary priests,
or Shilluk royal lineages) whose existence is based on keeping those memories
alive. In the case of royal ancestors, any or all these things are likely to be the
case. There is always a social and material apparatus of memory. For this rea-
son, kings often find it very difficult to efface the memories of particular royal
ancestors even if they wish to. I’ve already mentioned the story of the Shilluk
king who tried, and failed, to sneak into the shrine of a royal ancestor in or-
