by Faun Rice
and in certain respects identify with Vazimba.
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ON KINGS
CONCLUSIONS
This is an essay on the archaeology of sovereignty (sometimes in the literal
sense, mostly though metaphoric); it is very much not an essay on the origins
of the state. The reader will probably have noticed I barely touch on the subject.
This is intentional. Some of the kingdoms discussed in this essay (Inka,
China, et al.) are universally considered to be states; with others (Benin, Natchez,
et al.), it depends on one’s definition; still others (Shilluk, Jukun, et al.), almost
no one would consider to be states. Yet for the specific questions I am inves-
tigating here, whether or not a kingdom is a state makes very little difference.
It seems to me that “the state” is itself becoming something of a shopworn
concept. Since the mid-twentieth century there have been endless debates, for
instance, about “the origins of the state”—in fact, when treating with the sort
of material I’ve been treating with here, it often seems to be considered about
the only question really worth asking. Such debates almost always assume that
“the state” is just one thing, and that in speaking of the origins of the state one
is necessarily also speaking of the origins of urbanization, written literature,
law, exploitation, bureaucracy, science, and almost anything else of enduring im-
portance that happened between the dawn of agriculture and the Renaissance,
aside, perhaps, from the rise of world religions. From our current vantage, it has
become increasingly clear this is simply wrong. “The state” would better be seen
as an amalgam of heterogeneous elements often of entirely separate origins that
happened to have come together in certain times and places, and now appear to
be in the process of drifting apart.
One aim of this collection has been to begin to develop a new set of frame-
works, and in this essay, I have been examining the notion of sovereignty—
which I think to be embedded in what we call “divine kingship”—in that light.
Asking about the origins of sovereignty is very different than asking about the
origins of the state. But it is, perhaps, of even greater long-term significance.
* * *
It might be well to clarify what I mean by “sovereignty” before turning to my con-
clusions. At its simplest, the term refers to the power of command. But the power
of command is not itself a simple concept. Al human languages we know of have
imperative forms, and in any society there will be situations where it is consid-
ered appropriate for some individuals to tel others what to do. This need have
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
457
very little to do with larger power structures. It might even to some degree fly in
the face of them. In highland Madagascar, women use imperative forms freely,
especially in managing household affairs (Graeber 1996b). It’s far more com-
mon to see women issuing direct orders to men than the other way around; but
such societies can in no sense be considered matriarchies. One of the ways male
patriarchs express their authority, in fact, is by their refusal to give direct orders.
Malagasy women, when they send children off on errands, or tell their hus-
band to stop drinking and come and help set the table, have little or no means
of compulsion at their disposal. In that sense, they are not really issuing “com-
mands.” What I mean by the “power of command” is, instead, the ability to issue
orders backed up by the threat of punishment.75
Now, those who live in liberal societies are also used to making a sharp
distinction between situations where such commands can be issued “arbitrarily,”
by individuals—say, a dictator, or gangster—and situations where the individual
issuing the orders is seen as enforcing a system of rules or laws. This, however, is
ultimately a somewhat artificial distinction. First of all, the distinction is blurry
at best in practice. Even in the most legalistic order, officials are allowed a degree
of “discretion” over when, how, and whether to issue orders or sanctions (when
they claim their hands are tied, they’re usually being dishonest), and they are al-
most always protected from any serious consequences if they do break the rules.
A judge or employee of the tax office knows he will never be charged with theft
or extortion even if it’s found he knowingly dunned money on false pretenses,
and a policeman or prison guard knows he will never be charged with murder or
assault—or even, for that matter, rape—pretty much no matter what he does. As
a result, orders given by a dictator, and a traffic cop in a constitutional republic,
have far more in common with each other than either do with orders given by
someone with no coercive power at all.
75. Said punishment may not be immediately physical, but is ultimately physical in
nature: firing an employee is not itself violent, but can have effects equivalent to
violence in a context where someone without money can expect to be, for instance,
physically forced out of from their home for nonpayment of rent. The formulation
also assumes a preponderance of means of punishment on one side. A Malagasy
woman might have a number of ways to sanction a husband who refuses orders
to carry out a task, but the husband has even more. I might note the patriarchal
stereotype of housewives as “nags” could be considered the direct result of delegating
managerial responsibilities to women without also granting them adequate means
of enforcement.
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ON KINGS
In theory, of course, the traffic cop is different than the dictator because he
has been duly appointed within a constitutional order, following correct proce-
dures—even if he may not be following correct procedures when he shoots or
arrests someone; but all one is really saying here is that insofar as he can exercise
discretion—that is, arbitrary power—it is as an extension of the sovereignty
(arbitrary power) of the government itself. That sovereignty, as Carl Schmitt
periodically appears, like some embarrassing uncle, to remind us, consists above
all in the ability to set the law aside. It is the ghost of divine kingship still hang-
ing over us. The police who regularly get away with murder are simply exercising
that small—but lethal—bit of royal power that has been delegated to them by
its current holder, an entity we refer to as “the people.”
I will return to this point later on. All I want to draw attention to here is that
there is a reason the word “order” has the semantic range that it does. Sover-
eignty, in the sense of the power to stand outside a moral or legal order and as a
consequence to be able to create new rules, to embody (at least potential) chaos
so as to impose order, and the power of command, the ability to give “orders” in
the military sense, invariably draw on and partake of one another. This is what
I’m referring to when I speak of the “principle of sovereignty.”
Divine kingship simply represents this principle in its purest form. The “mo-
nopoly of coercive force” which Weber so famously attribut
ed to the modern
state is its secularization.
What I have tried to do in this essay is to develop at least an initial outline,
first, of how the principle of sovereignty originally came into being, and, second, of
what tends to happen when sovereignty becomes the central organizing principle
of political life—as it remains almost everywhere today. I want to emphasize that
I don’t think there was anything particularly inevitable about this development.
One could probably make a case that in any complex human society there are likely
to be some circumstances in which some people can issue arbitrary commands—
that is, unless there is a social consensus that powers of command are wrong and
inappropriate. Still, there is an enormous difference between a social order in
which sovereign powers appear in some limited circumstances, and one where
sovereignty is the dominant organizing principle of social life. Historically, the
latter is much less common. In most of the earliest civilizations we know about, for
instance, sovereignty does not appear to have played this role. Egypt had its divine
king, and so it seems did China; but in the Indus Valley, the Tripolye civilization,
even early Mesopotamia for the most part, we see no sign of such a figure, or any
other human entity claiming to be either the ultimate source or ultimate arbiter
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
459
of the legitimate use of force—let alone one that stood outside the legal or moral
order and thus claimed to constitute it.76 Even in classical Greece, at least before
Alexander, such powers remained firmly in the hands of the gods.77
Once the principle of sovereign power takes root, however, it appears to be
almost impossible to get rid of. Kings can be killed; kingship abolished; but even
then, the principle of sovereignty tends to remain. Therefore, understanding the
history of this principle could hardly be more important.
* * *
The first conclusion this exploration reached is that while Hocart’s hypothesis
of the ritual origins of royal power seems confirmed by—or, at the very least, is
perfectly consistent with—the evidence, the devolution of divine powers onto
mortal humans, or, perhaps better said, its breaking out of ritual frames, did not
follow a single or a simple trajectory. Most hunter-gatherers we know of have
plenty of kings, but they studiously avoid allowing sovereign powers to fall into
the hands of mortal humans, at least on any sort of ongoing basis, and usually in
any form at all. There seems no reason to believe this was not true in the distant
past as well. Societies in which powers of command can only be exercised in
ritual contexts have certainly been documented. In many, at least—the societies
of central California are one example, but there are other very similar examples
in Chile and Tierra del Fuego (Loeb 1931)—these powers do take on aspects
of what I’m calling sovereignty, in that those giving the orders make a point of
breaking ordinary rules and conventions so as to demonstrate that they stand
outside the moral order, can act arbitrarily and with impunity, even make up
76. In other words, a state according to either Weber’s definition, or that of his teacher
Jhering—the latter defined the state not, like Weber, as the only entity whose
agents had the legitimate right to use coercive force within a territory, but, rather,
as the institution which has the exclusive right to judge the legitimacy of any use of
coercive force. I might note here that even Egypt tended to swing back and forth
between dynastic periods and extremely long interdynastic periods where there was
no pharaoh, so even here sovereignty was at the very least episodic.
77. It is even possible that in world-historical terms, kingship only became the
predominant mode of political organization relatively recently. The Bronze Age
seems to have been dominated by decentralized confederations, either aristocratic
or relatively egalitarian. Kingdoms, while they did exist, appear to have often been
small. It’s only much later that monarchy becomes, as it were, the default mode of
political organization.
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ON KINGS
rules as they go along. But for this reason they are also seen as ridiculous. And
the clowns that exercise such powers tend to be the last people who would ex-
ercise power of any sort in everyday life.
This opens up a specific trajectory, where sovereign powers, while gradu-
ally losing their clownish aspects, are nonetheless contained within a specific
ritual season or time or year. The alternate trajectory—the one which can lead
to full-fledged divine kings and hence ultimately to (among other things) the
modern nation-state, allows sovereign powers to emerge on an ongoing basis.
But instead they are confined in space. The actual historical origins of such ar-
rangements remain obscure. Perhaps they always will. The Natchez, the best
example of a classic divine kingship we know of in North America, appear at
the tail end of a long political history beginning with the peaceful and decen-
tralized Hopewell civilization, based on some kind of ritual amphictyonies, the
rise of the vast imperial center of Cahokia, its abandonment and replacement by
a number of smaller warring kingdoms, and their collapse and replacement by
tribal republics that explicitly rejected the principle of hereditary authority (the
Natchez being by the eighteenth century about the only old-fashioned Missis-
sippian divine kingship still extant).
Whatever the background, the Natchez case illustrates structural features
which, I think, can be found in any divine kingship. It might be helpful to list
them:
1. The sovereign’s origins are external to society (stranger-king).
2. The sovereign remains in a fundamental sense external to society, insofar as
he is not bound by ordinary morality or law.
3. All insist on the sovereign’s absolute power over the life, death, and property
of subjects when physically present.
4. The physical presence of the sovereign is carefully circumscribed.
5. Sovereign and people exist in a fundamental constitutive antagonism (war),
which is paradoxically seen as key to the sovereign’s immortality, and trans-
cendent, metahuman quality.
a. In life, this manifests itself adverse sacralization: the imposition of elabo-
rate taboos that deny the mortal qualities of the king, cut him off from
regular contact with his subjects, and often, imprison him in a carefully
bounded physical space (village, compound, palace).
b. Such acts of adverse sacralization at the same time often make that vil-
lage, compound, or palace into a kind of miniature paradise where basic
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
461
dilemmas of mortal existence can be seen to be at least temporarily or
provisionally overcome.
c. Ritual regicide (documented mainly in Africa) is simply the most ex-
treme form of such adverse sacralization.
Consider again the Jewish version of the story of Alexander the Great, where
the conqueror almost finds himself trapped forever in the Garden of
Eden. It
is, in its own way, a perfect expression of the tensions within the concept of
sovereignty. In his quest to become a god, the all-conquering king finally attains
Eden, and has before him the prospect of finally undoing all the dilemmas of
human existence that were a consequence of the Fall—but only on condition
he be denied all contact with his subjects. In which case, in what sense is he a
sovereign?
This dilemma was perhaps formulated most explicitly in the Greco-Roman
world, since the classical gods were so obviously figures of desire: they were not
merely metahumans (Platonic representations of the perfect forms of power,
wisdom, beauty, or proficiency)—at least in literature, they were always rep-
resented as just human enough that worshipers could imagine what it might
be like to themselves embody such a principle forever, even if such a dream
could only inspire permanent frustration. Hence their notorious envy of hu-
man happiness, whose ful achievement would mean they would no longer
exist. It is significant, I think, that such pantheons were, in both Greece and
Rome, largely created in the wake of the col apse of systems of divine kingship.
In that sense, the Euhemerists were right: they are gods inspired by humans
aspiring to be gods.
Since one cannot actually become a Greek god (as that is the entire point
of Greek gods: they are that which it is impossible to become, however much
you might like to), and since return to a prelapsarian state is neither possible
nor desirable, the absolute victory of kings only creates (or exacerbates) another
set of problems: how to deal with the burden of one’s own ancestors insofar as
those ancestors have succeeded in finding a way to attain at least partial im-
mortality. The second half of this essay—the bulk of it, actually—is an outline of
some of the difficulties (e.g., the contradiction of vertical and horizontal sink-
ing status) dynastic monarchs can create, and some of the strategies latter-day
monarchs have adopted to deal with such difficulties. (Not all of them: conquest
and marriage, for instance, were largely unaddressed.) None of these strategies
are completely effective. But they help explain some of the apparently irrational
