onkings Page 22
1920a). The reth here plays the part of the Dinka prophet. After he emphasizes
that the ox’s flesh and blood are real y his own, the animal is speared, and the
chyme, the half-digested grass in question, is used to anoint the former feuding
parties. “That was done to show their united condition” (ibid.: 299).58 Nuer insist
that chyme, like the blood and more generally the “life,” is the part of the sacri-
ficed animal that belongs to God (Evans-Pritchard 1956: 212; Evens 1989: 338).
Generally speaking, in Nilotic ritual, chyme59 is treated as the stuff of pure poten-
tial: it is grass in the process of becoming flesh; undifferentiated substance in the
way of creative transformation. As such it is itself the pure embodiment of life.
It seems to me that this is the utopian moment in which the reth is suspend-
ed. Not only is he, as reth, the ground for “order and peace in human relations,”
58. “The thought was that the animal eats a bit here and there, but in the stomach it all
becomes one mass. Even so the individuals of the two factions were to become one”
(Oyler 1920a: 299).
59. And also chyle, which is the further digested grass in the animal’s second stomach.
This is the stuff even more closely identified with life, but I thought I would spare
the reader all the niceties of bovine digestive anatomy.
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of unity and hence of justice, he is the person actually responsible for mediating
and resolving disputes. Peace and justice, then, is the social equivalent of rain,
and chyme, like falling water, is the very physical substance of the divine in its
most benevolent aspect. All this is stated almost explicitly in the peace sacrifice:
the king is the ox, he is God, he is peace, he is the unity of all his subjects. This,
too, is how the reth can be both sacrificial victim in suspense, and living in a kind
of small version of paradise.
The installation ritual begins with a nightmare vision of a world infused with
divine power, in which no separations exist, and all human relations are therefore
tinged with potential violence. It is the worst kind of unity of God and world. It
ends with the restoration of the best kind. In this sense, it is the transformation
of divine king into sacred king. Dak, in his untrammeled form, embodies the
former. The proceedings seem to be based on the assumption that the primor-
dial truth of power—that it is arbitrary violence—has to be acknowledged so it
can then be contained. One might argue the two main forms of sacred kingship
identified by Luc de Heusch are the two principal strategies for doing this. Each
plays itself out in a different division of the country. In the north, divine power
is reduced to a fetish—literally, an effigy—which is constructed by, and hence
to some degree therefore manageable by, ordinary humans. In the south, we
see the making of a classic scapegoat king. Ultimately the two become one: the
king not only becomes Nyikang, he also, at least momentarily, becomes an effigy.
Ordered, hierarchical relations (God–Nyikang–king–people) are restored. The
new king is (as Dak was originally) in a sense all of them at once, even as he is
also the means to keep them apart, suspended in a kind of balanced antagonism.
As such he is a victim himself suspended, temporarily, in a miniature version of
the original unity of heaven and earth, in a strange village with sex but without
childbirth, a place of ease and pleasure, devoid of hunger, sickness, and death.
The paradise, however, is temporary, and the solution always provisional, in-
complete. Arbitrary violence can never be entirely eliminated. Heaven and earth
cannot really be brought together, except during momentary thundershowers.
And even the simulation of paradise is bought at a terrible price.
SOME WORDS IN WAY OF A CONCLUSION
I have framed my argument in cosmological terms because I believe one can-
not understand political institutions without understanding the people who
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create them, what they believe the world to be like, how they imagine the hu-
man situation within it, and what they believe it is possible or legitimate to want
from it. This is true everywhere, even though cosmological formulations them-
selves can vary enormously. Still, anyone coming at the Shilluk material from
a background in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam is unlikely to feel on entirely
here. There is a reason early anthropologists often saw Nilotic peoples as the
closest living cousins of the biblical patriarchs: not only are Semitic and Nilotic
languages distantly connected; in each case we are dealing with seminomadic
pastoralists with a lineage-based form of organization, monotheists whose ritual
life was dominated by sacrifice to a distant and arbitrary God. Actually, I suspect
this affinity is true, in a more attenuated sense, for Africa more generally. It is
easy to get the sense, reading African myths, that the basic dilemmas of human
existence they explore—the reasons for suffering, the justice of God—are much
the same as those grappled with in the Abrahamic tradition; if nothing else,
certainly far more familiar to someone raised on the tradition of the Bible and
Greek myths than equivalent stories from, say, Amazonia or Polynesia—or even
ancient Ireland.
Though to some degree, too, they deal with issues that are universal.
It would have to be so, or it would not be possible to make cross-cultural
generalizations about “divine kingship,” “sacred kingship,” or “scapegoats” to be-
gin with. This essay is really founded on two such generalizations. The first is
that it is one of the misfortunes of humanity that we share a tendency to see the
successful prosecution of arbitrary violence as in some sense divine—or, anyway,
to identify it with some kind of transcendental power. It is not entirely clear why
this should be. Perhaps it has something to do with the utterly disproportion-
ate quality of violence, the enormous gap between action and effect. It takes
decades to bring forth and shape a human being; a few seconds to bring all that
to nothing by driving a spear into his chest. It takes very little effort to drop a
bomb; unimaginable effort to have to learn to get about without legs for the rest
of one’s life because they’ve been blown off by one. Even more, acts of arbitrary
violence are acts which for the victims and their families must necessarily have
enormous significance, but have no intrinsic meaning. Meaning, after all, im-
plies intentionality. But the definition of “arbitrary” is that there is no particular
reason why one person was shot or blown up and another wasn’t; such acts are
therefore by definition meaningless, in that they do not embody a conscious or
even unconscious intention. This is just what allows arbitrary acts of weather to
be referred to as “acts of God.” Meaning abhors a vacuum. Particularly when we
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are dealing with actions or events of enormous significance, it is hard to resist
the tendency to ascribe some kind of transcendental meaning, or at least to as-
&n
bsp; sume that one exists even though we can’t know what it is. It is in this absolute
absence of meaning that we encounter the Divine.
Of course, this is only a tendency. As I remarked earlier, it’s not as if any
bandit who finds himself in a position to wreak random violence with impunity
is therefore going to be treated as a god (except perhaps in his immediate pres-
ence). But some are. It is also clear that the apparatus of sacred kingship is a very
effective way of managing those who are treated in this way.
Here I introduce my second cross-cultural generalization. The sacred, every-
where, is seen as something that is or should be set apart. As much as an object
becomes the embodiment of a transcendental principle or abstraction, so much
is it to be kept apart from the muck and mire of ordinary human life, and sur-
rounded, therefore, with restrictions. These are the kind of principles of separa-
tion that Nuer and Dinka, at least, refer to with the word thek, usually translated
“respect.” Violent men almost invariably insist on tokens of respect, but tokens
of respect taken to the cosmological level—“not to touch the earth,”, “not to
see the sun”—tend to become severe limits on one’s freedom to act violently. If
nothing else, the violence can, as in the Shilluk case, be bottled up, limited to
a specific royal sphere which is under ordinary circumstances scrupulously set
apart from ordinary daily affairs.
We will never know the exact circumstances under which Shilluk royal in-
stitutions came into being, but the broad outlines can be reconstructed. The an-
cestors of the Shilluk were likely in most essentials barely distinguishable from
their Nuer or Dinka neighbors—fiercely egalitarian pastoralists who settled
along an unusually fertile stretch of the Nile. There they became more seden-
tary, more populous, but also began regularly raiding their neighbors for cattle,
wealth, and food. To some degree this appears to have been born of necessity;
to some degree, it no doubt became a matter of glory and adventure. An incipi-
ent class of war chieftains emerged who assembled wealth in the form of cattle,
women, and retainers. These became the ancestors of Shilluk royalty. However,
the royal clan itself only appears to have developed, at least in the form in which
anthropologists came to know it, after a prolonged struggle over the nature of
the emerging political order, the role of women, and the power and jurisdiction
of commoner chiefs. A compromise eventually emerged, which has come to be
known as “the divine kingship of the Shilluuk.” This compromised formula-
tion appears to have been brilliantly successful in creating and maintaining a
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sense of a unified nation, capable of defending itself and usually dominating
the surrounding territories, without ever giving the royals with their fractious
politics much chance to play havoc with local affairs. It was sustained by popular
vigilance. Ordinary Shilluk appear to have resisted the emergence of anything
resembling an administrative system. Communications between Fashoda and
other settlements were maintained not by officials, but principally by relations
with and between royal sisters, wives, and daughters. Any attempt at creating
systematic tribute relations, at home or abroad, appears to have been met with
such immediate and widespread protest that the very legitimacy of the king-
ship was soon called into question. As a result, the royal treasury, such as it
was, consisted almost entirely of wealth that had been stolen—seized in raids
either against foreigners, or against Shilluk communities that resisted attempts
to mediate disputes. The playful raiding during installation rituals was simply
a reminder of what everyone already knew: that predatory violence was and
would always remain the essence of sovereignty. Above all, there seemed to be
an at least implicit understanding that such matters ought not be in any way
obfuscated—that the euphemization of power was essential to any project of its
permanent institutionalization, and this was precisely what most people did not
wish to see.
My use of the term “utopia” is somewhat unconventional in this context. I
am defining “utopia,” in the fairly colloquial sense, as any place that represents
an unattainable ideal, particularly if that ideal involves an impossible resolution
of what are otherwise taken to be the fundamental dilemmas of human exist-
ence—however those might be conceived. Utopia is the place where contradic-
tions are resolved.60 Part of my inspiration here is Pierre Clastres’ argument
(1962, 1977) that among the Amazonian societies he knew, states could never
have developed out of existing political institutions. Those political institutions,
he insisted, appeared to be designed to prevent arbitrary coercive authority
from ever developing. If states ever could emerge in this environment (and it
seems apparent now that, in certain periods of history, they did), it could only
be through figures like the Tupí-Guraní prophets, who called on their followers
to abandon their existing customs and communities to embark on a quest for a
“land without evil,” an imaginary utopia where all would become as gods free
of birth and death, the earth would yield its bounty without labor, and all social
60. Or, better put, the place where existential dilemmas are reduced to mere
contradictions, so that they can be resolved.
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131
restrictions could therefore be set aside (H. Clastres 1995). The state can only
arise from such absolutist claims, and, above all, from an explicit break with the
world of kinship. Luc de Heusch’s original insight on African kingship, which
came out in the same year as Clastres’ original essay (1962), makes a similar
argument: kingship must always mark an explicit break with the domestic order.
Perhaps this is not surprising as both emerge from the mutual confluence of
revolutionary politics and structuralist theory.61 Obviously, de Heusch was later
to take it in what might seem a very different direction. But how different is it
really?
Certainly, Shilluk kings do share certain qualities with Nuer and Dinka
prophets, even if, unlike them, they don’t predict the coming of a new world
where all human dilemmas will be resolved.62 Certainly, the organization of
the royal capital did represent a kind of partial unraveling of the dilemmas of
the human condition. But we can also consider de Heusch’s idea of the “body-
fetish.” The reader will recall that the basic idea here is that rituals of installa-
tion turn the king’s own physical person into the equivalent of a magical charm;
he is the kingdom, its milk and its grain, and any danger to the king’s bodily
integrity is thus a threat to the safety and prosperity of the kingdom as a whole.
If he grows old and sickly, defeats, crop failures, and natural disasters are likely
to result. Hence the principle, so common in Africa, that kings ought not to die
a natural death.
For this reason, the king “must keep himself in a state of ritual purity,” as
sources agree on this latter point, and it is a common feature of sacred king-
ship. A legitimate candidate to the throne must not only be strong and healthy,
61. Before becoming an anthropologist and conducting fieldwork in the then-
Belgian Congo, Luc de Heusch was known as a radical film-maker and part of
the revolutionary art collective the CoBrA group, now remembered largely as the
ancestor of the Situationist International. Clastres was famously an anarchist who
became the main source for almost all of Deleuze and Guattari’s anthropological
interventions (the evolutionary stages in anti-Oedipus, the “war machine,” etc).
De Heusch’s later work shows no obvious traces of revolutionary theory but this
context must have influenced his initial framing of his problem.
62. Specifically, kings were like prophets seen as being possessed by divine spirits
(Shilluk prophets, when they appeared, were often possessed by Nyikang), mediated
disputes on a national level that local authorities could not deal with, and relied on
a following of young men who were themselves cut off from the ordinary domestic
order because, having no access to cattle, they could not ordinarily expect to marry.
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he must have no scars, blemishes, missing teeth, asymmetrical features, unde-
scended testicles, deformities, and so forth. What’s more, his bodily integrity
must be fastidiously maintained, particularly at ritual moments: we are told that
if during the installation ceremonies the reth is injured in any way, “even if the
king is only punched and blood appears” (Singer in Schnepel 1988: 444), he is
immediately disqualified for office. For this reason, some sources insist kings
could not even fight in war, but were rather borne along as a kind of standard
while others were fighting; historical narratives suggest this was not always the
case, but certainly, if the king were seriously injured, this could not be allowed
to stand, and he would be discreetly dispatched.
The very idea of physical perfection is strangely paradoxical if you real y
think about it. What does it mean to say someone is physically perfect? Presum-
ably that they correspond to some idealized model of what a human being is