onkings Read online

is closely tied to the integrity of his physical being” (2005a: 26).2 And while

  Frazer might not have understood that such kings were, indeed, seen as having

  been created by the people, de Heusch insisted he was quite correct in hold-

  ing that, having been so consecrated, their physical strength was tied to the

  prosperity of nature, and that’s why they could not be allowed to grow sickly,

  frail, and old. But in a later volume, The scapegoat (1911c), Frazer discovered

  another aspect: the king who absorbs the nation’s sin and pollution, and is thus

  destroyed as a way of disposing of collective evil. The two are obviously difficult

  to reconcile. Yet in a surprising number of cases (e.g., Quigley 2005) they seem

  to coexist.

  It’s the scapegoat aspect that has generated the most voluminous litera-

  ture—largely because students of divine kingship soon connected it with René

  Girard’s quasi-psychoanalytic “scapegoat theory” (Makarius 1970; Scubla 2002),

  one which was gaining increasing popularity in French intellectual circles from

  the 1970s on. Girard, famously, argued that the scapegoat mechanism is really

  the secret lying behind all myth, ritual, and religion and is, indeed, what allows

  the very possibility of human sociality itself. Girard’s is one of those arguments

  that, even if so overstated it might seem self-evidently absurd, nonetheless never

  fails to find an audience because it managed to find a way of framing some-

  thing we are taught to already suspect is true—that is, that society is always,

  everywhere founded on some kind of fundamental violence—in a way no one

  had ever thought to propose before. Girard does not seek to find the sources of

  that violence in some presocial nature, but quite the opposite. The story goes

  like this: We learn to desire by observing what others desire. Therefore we all

  want the same things. Therefore we are necessarily in competition. The only way

  humans can avoid thus plunging into a Hobbesian war of all against all is to

  2. I am summarizing, not assessing, theories at this point, so I will not enlarge on the

  fact that de Heusch seems to me to be working with a fundamentally mistaken

  idea of the nature of African fetishes, which are rarely embodiments of fertility but

  ordinarily embodiments of destructive forces (Graeber 2005). I think he is quite

  right and profoundly insightful when he argues that kings are often created by

  the same mechanisms as fetishes, as I have myself argued for Merina sovereigns

  (Graeber 1996a), mistaken when he goes on to claim that the key innovation here

  is that, unlike fetishes, the power of kings does not have to be constantly ritually

  maintained, as there are any number of counterexamples (e.g., Richards 1968)

  where it definitely does.

  72

  ON KINGS

  direct their mutual hostility outward onto a single object. This generally means

  selecting some arbitrary victim, who is first reviled as the cause of all their trou-

  bles and expelled from the community, most often by killing him. Once this

  happens, though, everything suddenly turns around: the former scapegoat is

  suddenly treated as an exalted being, even a god, because he is now the em-

  bodiment of society’s ability to create itself by the very act of killing him. This

  mechanism, Girard argues, is the origin of all society and culture. The logic is, in

  classic Freudian style, circular: since we cannot face the reality, we are always de-

  nying it; therefore, it cannot possibly be disproved. Still, applying this model to

  the problem of divine kingship has interesting effects. Kings become, effectively,

  scapegoats in waiting (Muller 1980; Scubla 2003). Hence de Heusch’s “exploits”

  are, for Girardians, actual crimes. They ensure that the king is, by definition, a

  criminal; hence it is always legitimate to execute him, should it come to that.

  His sacred pneuma, then, is anticipatory: the reflected glow of the role the king

  might ultimately play in embodying the unity the people will achieve in finally

  destroying him.

  Over the course of the ensuing debate the idea that such kings embody gods

  was gradually abandoned. De Heusch rejected the expression “divine kingship”

  entirely. And kings actually taken to be living gods are in fact surprisingly rare:

  the Egyptian Pharaoh may well have been the only entirely unambiguous ex-

  ample (Frankfort 1948; cf. Brisch 2008).3 Better, he argued, to speak of “sacred

  kingship.” Sacred kings are legion. But de Heusch also emphasizes that sacred

  kings are not necessarily temporal rulers. They might be. But they might equally

  be utterly powerless. Different functions—the king as fetish, the king as scape-

  goat, the king as military commander or secular leader—can either be combined

  in the same figure or be distributed across many; in any one community, any

  given one of them may or may not exist (de Heusch 1997).

  De Heusch’s ultimate conclusion is that A. M. Hocart ([1927] 1969, 1933,

  [1936] 1970) was right: kingship was originally a ritual institution. Only later

  did it become something we would think of as political—that is, concerned with

  making decisions and enforcing them through the threat of force. As with any

  such statement, though, the obvious question is: What does “originally” mean

  here? Five thousand years ago when states first emerged in Egypt and Mesopo-

  tamia? And if so, why is that important? Or is the idea, instead, that whenever

  3. Though part of the problem in saying that a king is a god is that the definition of

  “god”—or even, for that matter “is”—is entirely ambiguous here.

  THE DIVINE KINGSHIP OF THE SHILLUK

  73

  states emerge, it is invariably from within ritual institutions? This seems highly

  unlikely to be true in every case. Or is de Heusch simply saying that it is pos-

  sible to have kings with ritual responsibilities and no political power, but not the

  other way around? If so, it would appear to be a circular argument, since then it

  would only be those political figures who have ritual responsibilities whom the

  analyst is willing to dignify with the name of “king.”

  It seems to me that de Heusch’s real accomplishment is to demonstrate that

  what we are used to thinking of as “government” (or, maybe better, “govern-

  ance”) is not a unitary phenomenon. Simon Simonse (2005: 72), for instance,

  observes that, really, all most Africans ask of their sacred kings is what most

  Europeans demand of their welfare states: health, prosperity, a certain level of

  life security, and protection from natural disasters.4 He might have added: how-

  ever, most do not feel it necessary or desirable to also grant them police powers

  in order to achieve this.

  The question of governance, then, is not the same as the question of sov-

  ereignty. But what is sovereignty? Probably the most elegant definition is that

  recently proposed by Thomas Hansen and Finn Stepputat (2005, 2006): in its

  minimal sense, sovereignty is simply the recognition of the right to exercise vio-

  lence with impunity. This is probably the reason why, as these same authors note,

  those arguing about the nature of sovereignty in the contemporary world—the

  breakdown of s
tates, the multiplications of new forms of semicriminal sover-

  eignty in the margins between them—rarely find the existing anthropological

  literature on sacred kingship particularly useful.5

  4. Simonse’s comment has a particularly piquant irony when one considers the current

  popularity of the notion of “biopower”: the idea that modern states claim unique

  powers over life itself because they see themselves not just ruling over subjects, or

  citizens, but as administering the health and well-being of a biological population.

  Probably the question we should be asking is how it happened that there were

  governments that did not have such concerns. This must have had something to do

  with the peculiar role of the church in the European Middle Ages.

  5. I am simplifying their argument. Sovereign power for Hansen and Stepputat is

  marked not only by impunity but also by a resultant transcendence—the “crucial

  marks of sovereign power” are “indivisibility, self-reference, and transcendence”

  (2005: 8), as well as a certain “excessive” quality. In many ways their argument,

  especially when it draws on that of Georges Bataille with his reflections on

  autonomy and violence, comes close to the one that I will be developing. But it is

  also exactly in this area that it deviates the most sharply, since Bataille’s position is

  ultimately profoundly reactionary, reading authoritarian political institutions back

  into the very nature of human desire. I like to think my position is more hopeful.

  74

  ON KINGS

  It seems to me this need not be the case. The existing literature does contain

  elements from which a relevant analysis can be constructed. Any such analysis

  would have to begin with the notion of transcendence: that in order to become

  the constitutive principle of society, a sovereign has to stand outside it. I mean

  this is not quite in either Evans-Pritchard’s or de Heusch’s sense; what I am

  suggesting is that the various “exploits” or acts of transgression by which a king

  marks his break with ordinary morality are normally seen to make him not

  immoral, but a creature beyond morality. As such, he can be treated as the con-

  stituent principle of a system of justice or morality—since, logically, no creature

  capable of creating a system of justice can itself be already bound by the system

  it creates. Let me take a famous example here. When European visitors to the

  court of King Mutesa of the Ganda kingdom tried to impress him by present-

  ing him with some new state-of-the-art rifle, he would often respond by trying

  to impress them with the absolute quality of his power: testing the rifle out by

  randomly picking off one or two of his subjects on the street. Ganda kings were

  notorious for arbitrary, even random, violence against their own subjects. This,

  however, did not prevent Mutesa from also being accepted as supreme judge and

  guardian of the state’s system of justice. Instead, such random acts of violence

  confirmed in him in a status similar to that often (in much of Africa) attributed

  to God, who is seen simultaneously as an utterly random force throwing light-

  ning and striking down mortals for no apparent reason, and as the very embodi-

  ment of justice and protector of the weak.

  This, I would argue, is the aspect of African kingship which can legitimately

  be labeled “divine.” Creatures like Mutesa transcend all ordinary limitations.

  Whether they were said to embody a god is not the issue .6 The point is that they

  act like gods—or even God—and get away with it.

  For all that European and American observers ordinarily professed horror

  at behavior like Mutesa’s, this divine aspect of kingship is echoed in the mod-

  ern nation-state. Walter Benjamin (1978) posed the dilemma quite nicely in

  his famous distinction between “law-making” and “law-maintaining” violence.

  Really it is exactly the same paradox, cast in the new language that became

  necessary once the power of kings (“sovereignty”) had been transferred, at least

  6. The Ganda kingship, for example, was almost entirely secular. Not only are we not

  dealing with a “divine king,” in the sense of one identified with supernatural beings,

  we are not even dealing with a particularly sacred one—except insofar as any king

  is, simply by virtue of hierarchical position, by definition sacred.

  THE DIVINE KINGSHIP OF THE SHILLUK

  75

  in principle, to an entity referred to as “the people”—even though the exact way

  in which “the people” were to exercise sovereignty was never clear. No constitu-

  tional order can constitute itself. We like to say that “no one is above the law,”

  but if this were really true, laws would not exist to begin with: even the writers

  of the United States Constitution or founders of the French Republic were,

  after all, guilty of treason according to the legal regimes under which they had

  been born. The legitimacy of any legal order therefore ultimately rests on ille-

  gal acts—usually, acts of illegal violence. Whether one embraces the left solu-

  tion (that “the people” periodically rise up to exercise their sovereignty through

  revolutions) or the right solution (that heads of state can exercise sovereignty

  in their ability to set the legal order aside by declaring exceptions or states of

  emergency), the paradox itself remains. In practical terms, it translates into a

  constant political dilemma: How does one distinguish “the people” from a mere

  unruly mob? How does one know if the hand suspending habeas corpus is that

  of a contemporary Lincoln or a contemporary Mussolini?

  What I am proposing here is that this paradox has always been with us.

  Obviously, any thug or bandit who finds he can regularly get away with rap-

  ing, killing, and plundering at random will not, simply by that fact, come to

  be seen as a power capable of constituting a moral order or national identity.7

  The overwhelming majority of those who find themselves with the power to do

  so, and willing to act on it, never think to make such claims—except perhaps

  among their immediate henchmen. The overwhelming majority of those who

  do try fail. Yet the potential is always there. Successful thugs do become sover-

  eigns, even creators of new legal and moral systems. And genuine “sovereignty”

  does always carry with it the potential for arbitrary violence. This is true even

  in contemporary welfare states: apparently this is the one aspect that, despite

  liberal hopes, can never be completely reformed away. It is precisely in this that

  sovereigns resemble gods and that kingship can properly be called “divine.”

  This is not to say that Evans-Pritchard was wrong to say that kings are

  also always sacred. Rather, I think this perspective al ows us to see that the

  mechanics of sacred kingship—turning the king into a fetish or a scapegoat—

  often operate (whatever their immediate intentions) as a means of control ing

  the obvious dangers of rulers who feel they can act like arbitrary, petulant

  gods. Sahlins’ emphasis on the way stranger-kings must be domesticated,

  7. Benjamin himself suggested that the popular fascination with the “great criminal”

  who “makes his own law” derives from precisely
this recognition.

  76

  ON KINGS

  encompassed, and thus tamed by the people is a classic case in point. It is by

  such means that divine kings are rendered merely sacred. In the absence of

  a strong state apparatus, situations of power are often fluid and tenuous: the

  same act that at one point marks a monarch as a transcendent force beyond

  morality can, if the balance of forces shift, be reinterpreted as simple criminal-

  ity. Thus can divine kings indeed be made into scapegoats. In this, at least, the

  Girardians are right.

  There is every reason to believe this logic applies to the Shilluk king (or reth)

  of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well. Consider the following two

  stories, preserved by the German missionary Dietrich Westermann (and bear-

  ing in mind that while there is no way to know if these incidents ever actually

  happened, it doesn’t really matter, since the repetition of such stories constitutes

  the very stuff of politics):

  Story 1: One day a man named Ogam was fishing with a member of the

  royal family named Nyadwai. He caught a choice fish and the prince de-

  manded he turn it over, but he refused. Later, when his fellow villagers sug-

  gested this was unwise, he pointed out there were dozens of princes, and

  belittled Nyadwai: “who would ever elect him king?”

  Some years later, he learned Nyadwai had indeed been elected king.

  Sure enough he was summoned to court but the king’s behavior ap-

  peared entirely forgiving. “The king gave him cattle; built him a village; he

  married a woman, and his village became large; he had many children.”

  Then one day, many years later, the King destroyed the village and

  killed them all. (Westermann 1912: 141)

  Here, we have an example of a king trying to play god in every sense of the

  term. Such a king appears arbitrary, vindictive, all-powerful in an almost bibli-

  cal sense. If one examines it in the context of Shilluk institutions, however, it

  begins to look rather different. Ordinarily, Shilluk kings did not even have the

  power to appoint or remove village chiefs. In the complete absence of any sort

  of administrative apparatus, their power was almost entirely personal: Nyadwai

  created and destroyed Ogam’s village using his own personal resources, his own