onkings Read online

  The ethnographic examples of “The original political society” were delib-

  erately taken from so-called “egalitarian societies” situated far from any state

  system to avoid the possibility that the cosmic polities at issue had been diffused

  or otherwise transplanted from an already existing regime of ruling kings and

  high gods. However, comparing Jacobsen’s account with peoples such as the

  Inuit and New Guinea highlanders, something of the reverse seems more likely:

  that the ancient civilizations inherited cosmological regimes of the kind long

  established in human societies. If so, the human state was the realization of a

  political order already prefigured in the cosmos: the state came from heaven to

  earth—rather than the gods from earth to heaven.

  chapter 2

  The divine kingship of the Shilluk

  On violence, utopia, and the human condition

  David Graeber

  God kills us.

  Malagasy proverb

  “States,” I once suggested, have a peculiar dual quality: they are always at the

  same time “forms of institutionalized raiding or extortion, and utopian projects”

  (Graeber 2004: 65). In this essay I’d like to put some flesh on this assertion by

  reexamining one of the most famous cases in the history of anthropology: the

  divine kingship of the Shilluk of the Nilotic Sudan.1

  The Shilluk have been, since at least Sir James Frazer’s time, the locus clas-

  sicus for debates over the nature of divine kingship; however, the kingdom might

  seem an odd choice for an exploration of the nature of the state. The Shilluk

  kingdom was clearly not a state. The Shilluk reth, or king, lacked any sort of ad-

  ministration and had little way to enforce his will. Nonetheless, I think that one

  reason anthropologists, and others, have found the Shilluk case so compelling is

  1. These words were written six years ago, and reflection on cases like this has since

  inspired me to question whether the nature of the “state” is even the most useful

  thing to ask. But I thought it best to leave the argument largely as it stood in the

  original. I should note that “Shilluk” is an Arabization of the native term, Collo or

  Chollo. Most of the king’s current subjects now use Chollo when writing in English.

  I have kept to the historical usage largely to avoid confusion.

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  ON KINGS

  not just because they seem to come so close to actually enacting Frazer’s appar-

  ently whimsical fantasy about primordial god-kings who are ritually sacrificed

  when their term expired, but because they share an intuition that these appar-

  ently minimal, stripped-down versions of sovereign power can tell us some-

  thing profound about the nature of power more generally, and hence, ultimately,

  states. It strikes me this is especially true of the aforementioned predatory and

  utopian elements, both of which can be seen here in embryonic form.

  A proviso is in order. I am not saying this because I believe the Shilluk

  political system to be in any sense “primitive,” or think that forms of sover-

  eignty that were later to blossom into the modern state were only beginning to

  emerge here like some half-formed idea. That would be absurd. Anyone living,

  like the Shilluk, within a few days’ journey of ancient centers of civilization like

  Egypt, Meroe, or Ethiopia was likely to be perfectly aware of what a centralized

  government was. It is even possible (we don’t know) that Shilluk kings were

  distinctly more powerful in the past than they were when our records kick in

  in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But one thing is clear from exist-

  ing records: if the Shilluk were organized the way they were at that time, it is

  because those elements in Shilluk society that clearly would have liked to, and

  occasionally tried to, create something similar to surrounding states and empires

  had largely failed to convince the rest of the Shilluk population to go along with

  them. As a result, the Shilluk kingdom was a system of institutionalized raiding,

  and a utopian project, and very little else.

  I am also aware that the word “utopian” might seem odd here; one might

  just as easily substitute “cosmological project.” Royal palaces, royal cities, or roy-

  al courts almost invariably become microcosms, images of totality. The central

  place is imagined as a model of perfection, but at the same time, as a model of

  the universe; the kingdom, ideally, should be another reproduction of the same

  pattern on a larger level. I emphasize the word “ideally.” Royal palaces and royal

  cities always fall slightly short of heaven; kingdoms as a whole never live up

  to the ideals of the royal court. This is one reason the term “utopia” seems ap-

  propriate. These are ideals that by definition can never be realized; after all, if

  the cosmos, and the kingdom, really could be brought into conformity with the

  ideal, there would be no excuse for the predatory violence.

  Perhaps the most fascinating thing about the Shilluk material is that these

  two elements are so clearly seen as linked. Sovereignty—that which makes one

  a sovereign—is defined as the ability to carry out arbitrary violence with im-

  punity. Royal subjects are equal in that they are all, equally, potential victims;

  THE DIVINE KINGSHIP OF THE SHILLUK

  67

  but the king too is a victim in suspense, and in myth as well as ritual, it is at

  the moments when the people gather together to destroy the king—or at least

  to express their hatred for him—that he is mysteriously transformed into an

  eternal, transcendental being. In a cosmological system where separation is seen

  as balanced antagonism, opposition literally as at least potential hostility, the

  king inhabits a kind of tiny paradise, set apart from birth, death, and sickness;

  set apart equally from ordinary human sociality; representing exactly this sort

  of imperfect ideal. Yet his ability to do so rests on a delicate balance of relations

  of opposition and barely contained aggression—between humans and gods, be-

  tween king and people, between fractions of the royal family itself—that will,

  inevitably, destroy him.

  All this will become more clear as I go on. Let me begin, though, with a very

  brief survey of theories of divine kingship and the place of the Shilluk in them.

  Then I will demonstrate how I think these pieces can be reassembled to create

  the elements for a genealogy of sovereignty.

  THEORIES OF DIVINE KINSGHIP

  The Shil uk first became famous, in Europe and America, through James

  Frazer’s book The golden bough. They are so firmly identified with Frazer that

  most are unaware the Shilluk did not even appear in the book’s first two edi-

  tions (1890 and 1900). Original y, in fact, Frazer drew largely on classical litera-

  ture in making an argument that al religion was to some degree derived from

  fertility cults centered on the figure of a dying god, and that the first kings,

  who embodied that god, were ritual y sacrificed. This idea made an enormous

  impression on anthropology students of the time (and even more, perhaps, on

  artists and intellectuals), many of whom were to fan out across the world look-

  ing for traces o
f such institutions in the present day. The most successful was

  Charles Seligman, who discovered in the Shil uk kingdom an almost perfect

  example, in 1911 sending Frazer a description that he incorporated, almost ver-

  batim, in the book’s third edition (C. G. Seligman 1911; Frazer 1911a; Fraser

  1990: 200–201).

  One reason the Shilluk seemed to fit the bill so nicely was that Frazer had

  argued that divine kingship was originally a form of spirit possession. To find

  a king whose physical health was said to be tied to the fertility and prosper-

  ity of the kingdom, or even who was therefore said to be ritually killed when

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  ON KINGS

  his powers begin to wane, was not difficult. There were endless examples in

  Africa and elsewhere. But for Frazer, divine kings were literally possessed by a

  god. Frazer also felt the notion that kings were possessed by the spirits of gods

  would necessarily lead to a practical problem: How does one pass this divine

  spirit from one mortal vessel to another? Clearly, he felt, this would demand

  some sort of ceremony. But death tends to be a random and unpredictable affair.

  How could one be sure the ceremony would be conducted at the moment of the

  king’s death? Frazer concluded the only way was to arrange for the king’s death

  to occur at an appropriate moment: either after a fixed term, or, at the very least,

  when his weakened condition meant death seemed to be approaching anyway.

  And the only way to do that was of course by killing him.

  All this was precisely what the Shilluk did appear to do. The Shilluk king, or

  reth, was indeed said to embody a divine being—a god, or at least a demigod—

  in the person of Nyikang, the legendary founder of the Shilluk nation. Every

  king was Nyikang. The reth was not supposed to die a natural death. He might

  fall in battle with the nation’s enemies. He might be killed in single combat after

  a rival prince demanded a duel, as they had a right to do, or be suffocated by

  his own wives or retainers if he was seen to be physically failing (a state which

  was indeed seen to lead to poor harvests or natural catastrophes). On his death,

  though, Seligman emphasized, Nyikang’s spirit left him and entered a wooden

  effigy. Once a new reth was elected, the candidate had to raise an army and fight

  a mock battle against the effigy’s army in which he was first defeated and cap-

  tured, then, having been possessed by the spirit of Nyikang, which passed from

  the effigy back into his body, emerged victorious again.

  Frazer made the Shilluk famous, and their installation ritual has become

  one of the classic cases in anthropology—which in a way is rather odd, since

  the Shilluk are one of the few Nilotic peoples never to have been the subject of

  sustained anthropological fieldwork. Their notoreity is partly due to the fact that

  E. E. Evans-Pritchard chose the Shilluk as the case study with which to carry

  out his own ceremony of ritual regicide, directed at Frazer himself. In 1948, tak-

  ing advantage of new ethnographic material provided by local colonial officials

  who had received some anthropological training, Evans-Pritchard delivered the

  first Frazer lecture on the subject (1948)—a lecture essentially designed to deal

  the death-blow to Frazer’s whole problematic. In it, he argued that there was no

  such thing as a divine king, that Shilluk kings were probably never ritually exe-

  cuted, and that the installation ritual was not really about transferring a soul, but

  about resolving the tension between the office of kingship (figured as Nyikang),

  THE DIVINE KINGSHIP OF THE SHILLUK

  69

  which was set above everyone equally, and the particular individual who held it,

  with his very particular background, loyalties, and local support base:

  In my view kingship everywhere and at all times has been in some degree a sa-

  cred office. Rex est mixta persona cum sacerdote. This is because a king symbolizes

  a whole society and must not be identified with any part of it. He must be in the

  society and yet stand outside it and this is only possible if his office is raised to

  a mystical plane. It is the kingship, and not the king who is divine. (1948: 36)

  The intricacies of Shilluk royal ceremonial, according to Evans-Pritchard, arose

  from “a contradiction between dogma and social facts” (ibid.: 38): these were a

  people sufficiently well organized to wish for a symbol of national unity, but not

  well organized enough to turn that symbol into an actual government.

  Evans-Pritchard was always a bit coy about his theoretical influences, but it’s

  hard not to detect here a distant echo the Renaissance doctrine of the “King’s

  Two Bodies,” that is, the “body politic,” or eternal office of kingship (ultimate-

  ly including the community of his subjects), and “body natural,” which is the

  physical person of the individual king. This intellectual tradition was later to be

  the subject of comprehensive study by the German historian Ernst Kantorow-

  icz (1957), whose student Ralph Giesey (1967), in turn, explored the way that

  during Renaissance English and French inauguration rituals, the relationship

  between the two bodies was acted out through royal effigies. Later anthropolo-

  gists (Arens 1979, 1984; Schnepel 1988, 1995) recognized the similarity with

  Shilluk ritual and went on to explore the parallels (and differences) much more

  explicitly.

  Evans-Pritchard’s lecture opened the way to a whole series of debates, most

  famously over his claim that ritual king-killing was simply a matter of ideology,

  not something that ever really happened. The “Did Africans really kill their

  kings?” debate raged for years, ending, finally, with an accumulation of empiri-

  cal evidence that forced a general recognition that at least in some cases—the

  Shilluk being included among them—yes, they did.

  At the same time, some of Frazer’s ideas were discovered to have been not

  been nearly so fanciful and irrelevant as Evans-Pritchard suggested. Since the

  1980s, at least, there has, indeed, been something of a Frazerian revival.

  No one has been more responsible for this revival than the Belgian anthro-

  pologist Luc de Heusch—who, ironically, began his intellectual journey (1962)

  by setting out from Evans-Pritchard’s point that in order to rule, a king must

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  ON KINGS

  “stand outside” society. Essentially he asked: What are the mechanisms through

  which a king is made into an outsider? In any number of African kingdoms, at

  least, this meant that at their installations, kings were expected to make some

  kind of dramatic gesture that marked a fundamental break with “the domestic

  order” and domestic morality. Usually this consisted of performing acts—mur-

  der, cannibalism, incest, the desecration of corpses—that would, had anyone else

  performed them, have been considered the most outrageous of crimes. Some-

  times such “exploits” were acted out symbolically: pretending to lie next to one’s

  sister or stepping over one’s father’s body when taking the throne. At others they

  were quite literal: kings actually would marry their sisters or massacre their close

  kin. Always, such acts marked
the king as a kind of “sacred monster,” a figure,

  effectively, outside of morality (de Heusch 1982a, 1982b, 2000).

  Marshall Sahlins (1981b, 1983b, 2007, this volume) has taken all this much

  further, pointing out, for one thing, that the vast majority of kings, in all times

  and places, not only try to mark themselves as exterior to society, but actually

  claim to come from someplace other than the lands they govern—or at the

  very least to derive from ancestors who do. There is a sense almost everywhere

  that “society,” however conceived, is not self-sufficient; that power, creative en-

  ergy—life, even—ultimately comes from outside. On the other hand, raw power

  needs to be domesticated. In myth, this often leads to stories of wild, destruc-

  tive young conquerors who arrive from far away, only to be eventually tamed on

  marriage to “daughters of the land.” In rituals, it often leads to ceremonies in

  which the king is himself conquered by the people.

  De Heusch’s concern was different. He was mainly interested in how, in

  African installation rituals, kings are effectively “torn from the everyday kinship

  order to take on the heavy responsibility of guaranteeing the equilibrium of the

  universe” (1997: 321). Kings do not begin as outsiders; they are made to “stand

  outside society.” But in contrast to Evans-Pritchard, de Heusch insisted this

  exteriority was not just a political imperative. Kings stand outside society not

  just so they can represent it to itself, but so that they can represent it before the

  powers of nature. This is why, as he repeatedly emphasized, it is possible to have

  exactly the same rituals and beliefs surrounding actual rulers, largely powerless

  kings like the Shilluk reth, and “kings” who do not even pretend to rule over

  anything at all, but are simply individuals with an “enhanced moral status,” like

  the Dinka masters of the fishing spear.

  In such matters, Frazer’s observations did indeed prove useful, especially

  because he began to map out a typology. In “The dying god” (1911a), Frazer

  THE DIVINE KINGSHIP OF THE SHILLUK

  71

  described how kings act as what de Heusch calls “fetish bodies”: that is, as magi-

  cal charms manufactured by the people, “a living person whose mystical capacity