onkings Read online

  by a constant and particulars by universals-–to which MacGaffey, by invoking

  history to bridge the epistemological abyss, thereupon adds an explanation of

  the recurrent by the contingent.

  Although MacGaffey and Thornton have their more principled reasons

  for dismissing the historical value of Kongo origin traditions, whether of the

  kingship or the clans, they also on occasion pooh-pooh them for the trivial or

  unlikely causes these stories may assign for large events. So Thornton (2001:

  109) follows MacGaffey in writing off the so-called “Cabbage Patch Wars,” a

  recurrent motif in clan traditions which alleges that an original ancestral group

  was definitively divided as a result of a quarrel between women over the owner-

  ship of a cabbage patch. (I have seen the like in traditions of Fijian clans and

  the origin of the Hawaiian ruling chiefs, not to forget the Luo kingships that

  were sequitur to a brother’s child swallowing a certain bead.) Without claiming

  to assess the possible symbolic weight of the incident, one could easily suggest

  THE ATEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY

  219

  from our own Judeo-Christian traditions that though such episodes may seem

  unlikely, they can serve as the reasons for major real-historical consequences. Or

  is it not partly because they have accumulated such effects over time that to the

  rational-positivist eye, they seem disproportionately trivial? In any case, for two

  thousand years Christians have known that they are inherently marked by sin

  and condemned to labor, suffer, and die, all because Adam ate an apple. There is,

  however, no historical record of the event. Or of Adam, for that matter. Perhaps

  Augustine’s influential notions of the inheritance of acquired characteristics in

  regard to original sin were instrumentally designed to combat the alternative

  interpretations of the rival doctrines abroad in North Africa, even as they would

  be of functional value to the exercise of Roman imperial power (Pagels 1988).

  Still, the stigma of the original sin together with its many doctrinal comple-

  ments has survived all manner of regimes, including the medieval, feudal, and

  the modern democratic, notwithstanding the mythical and irrational—not to

  say ridiculous—tradition of its origin. It also has been successfully perpetrated

  on colonized peoples who needed to be persuaded they were inherently evil.

  All that grand history has been sequitur to a trivial event that never happened.

  Yet because MacGaffey and Thornton are convinced that events described in

  the Kongo traditions of stranger-kingship never happened, or in any case that

  they are of no historical moment, they dismiss these traditions as precedents

  and thereby ignore their specific structural entailments—as in the relations of

  agricultural production—as well as their historical reiterations—as in the politi-

  cal functions of the Nasku ne Vunda (Mani Vunda) in the Christian kingdom.

  Otherwise said, they confound a syntagmatic history with a paradigmatic one,

  and having denied the facticity of the former, that also precludes the possibility

  of the latter. This is not to say that for MacGaffey this is standard ethnographic

  or historiographic procedure. In regard to other aspects of Kongo history, he

  is prepared to recognize the historicity of Kongo traditions that, like stranger-

  kingship, suppose that power comes from a spiritually charged other world:

  The conversion of the king and the leading nobles to Christianity in the fifteenth

  century meant from their point of view, as Randles effectively indicates, their ini-

  tiation into a new and more powerful cult which, like all the other cults known to

  them, offered privileged access to the powers of the other world through contacts

  with the dead. The subsequent religious history of the BaKongo down to the

  present day is the history of this misunderstanding. The misunderstanding is as

  fundamental as the definition of death (lufua) which to BaKongo is a condition

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  ON KINGS

  of life in another place, or as the definition of race, which to BaKongo is a matter

  of changing one’s skin. Any foreigner attempting to understand must be pre-

  pared to recognize a logic totally unlike his own. (1974: 426)

  The numerous working misunderstandings that have attended Western colo-

  nial enterprises afford perhaps the best demonstration of the historical signifi-

  cance of the difference between “what actually happened” and “what it is that

  happened.” The Whitemen thought they were buying Maori land; by the same

  transaction, the Maori understood they were acquiring Whitemen. One can un-

  derstand why Luapulu people translate their traditions as “meaning”: the same

  happening can have different meanings, hence different historical effects, for

  peoples of different cultural heritage. In 1779, Hawaiian women of ordinary

  rank ate with their sailor paramours aboard Captain Cook’s ship during his

  fateful sojourn at Kealakekua Bay (Sahlins 1981a). That is what actually hap-

  pened; but what it is that happened, among other meaningful things, is that the

  women broke the Hawaiian taboos on codining with men and eating sacrificial

  foods, pork and bananas, strictly forbidden them. For the sailors what happened

  was something like a date for lunch, an expression of intimacy. For the Hawai-

  ians, it was a significant historic event, which—along with other exchanges of

  mundane significance to Europeans that amounted to violations of the human

  and divine order for Hawaiians—contributed to the climactic abolition of the

  indigenous religion in 1819. At that time, in a symmetrical and inverse act of

  codining, King Liholiho launched a cultural revolution by eating in public with

  women of the highest nobility. Consider, then, that the syntagmatic event is as

  much dependent on cultural conditions that are not coterminous with it as are

  events that are paradigmatically inspired by ancient memories. One might say

  that the happening becomes an event insofar as it is recuperated by values origi-

  nating outside of it, that is, by the meaningful or symbolic values of a particular

  cultural scheme. Indeed, the event as such is doubly beholden to phenomena

  external to it: both to cultural values preposed to it and to subsequent events

  that retrospectively make it more-or-less consequential. Not that these values

  determine what actually happens, as this also depends on contingent circum-

  stances not specifiable as such in the relevant cultural scheme. The British ex-

  plorer Captain Cook was not foreseen in the Hawaiian order of things, however

  much the annual visitation of the god Lono, with whom Cook was identified,

  became the cultural template of his fatal end.

  THE ATEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY

  221

  However circumstantial, history is necessarily atemporal and cultural

  through and through. Whether the pertinent causation is sequential or analogi-

  cal, syntagmatic or paradigmatic, the transhistorical cultural context is the con-

  dition of its possibility—of what it actually is that happens. Otherwise, without

  the culture concerned, what actually happens would be as significant as a tree

  falling in an uninhabited
African forest.

  chapter 4

  The stranger-kingship of the Mexica

  Marshall Sahlins

  According to Cortés, upon first meeting Moctezuma, the Mexica ruler famous-

  ly told him:

  It is now a long time since, by means of written records, we learned from our

  ancestors that neither myself nor any of those who inhabit this region were de-

  scended from its original inhabitants, but from strangers who immigrated hither

  from a very distant land; and we have also learned that a prince, whose vassals

  they all were, conducted our people into these parts, and then returned to his

  native land. He afterwards came again to this country . . . and found that his

  people had intermarried with the native inhabitants, by whom they had many

  children and had built towns . . . . And when he desired them to return with

  him, they were unwilling to go, nor were they disposed to acknowledge him as

  their sovereign; so he departed from this country, and we have always heard that

  his descendants would come to conquer this land and return us to subjection.

  (1843: 87–88)

  For all the scholarly controversy that has ensued about the veracity of Cor-

  tés’ account, when one considers the worldwide distribution of stranger-king

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  ON KINGS

  dynasties with quite similar structural features and historical traditions as are

  entailed in Moctezuma’s discourse, what he is reported to have said is quite

  unremarkable. Stranger-kingdoms of this description constitute the dominant

  form of premodern state (Sahlins 2010, 2014). The rulers of a remarkable num-

  ber of societies the world around have been foreign by origin to the peoples they

  rule. As rehearsed in ongoing traditions and enacted in royal rituals—notably

  the rituals of their installation and of the New Year—the kings come from else-

  where. Moreover, as their cosmic-cum-celestial powers derive from their exter-

  nal origins, the foreign identity of the kingship is perpetual, a condition of their

  sovereignty, in contrast to the earthly powers and identity of their indigenous

  subjects. A common counterpart of the fabled origins of the stranger-kings is

  their cultural superiority: just as in the Moctezuma text, they are (literally) the

  civilizers—they built cities. Yet most indicative of stranger-kingship is the mar-

  riage of these powerful foreigners with native women—in the paradigmatic

  case, the union of the original stranger-king with the daughter or daughters of

  the autochthonous ruler—an alliance that is in effect the fundamental contract

  of the new society. Sovereignty here is embodied in and transmitted by women

  of rank. In the sequel, the union of the native woman with an immigrant prince

  engenders a succession of kings who combine in their own persons the essential

  components of the new regime: foreign and indigenous, celestial and terrestrial,

  masculine and feminine—each component incomplete in itself, but taken to-

  gether they make a reproductive totality. Have you ever wondered why vassal

  lords address Moctezuma as “my child”? I have heard the like in the Fiji Islands,

  where the indigenous chieftains similarly assume the status of the paramount’s

  elders, for he is the offspring of their clan, their ancestress. First in the land, giv-

  ing birth to the king, the subject people are senior kinsmen of their ruler.

  The return of the original king, ruler of the native people—the Quetzal-

  coatl figure in the Moctezuma text—is another common narrative of stranger-

  kingdoms, as well as an annual ritual drama. The king of ancient memory and

  godly status comes back to reclaim his sovereignty, only to be deposed again

  by the usurper now in power, although usually not before he renews the fertil-

  ity of the land during his temporary ascendency. Also not uncommon is the

  tragic irony involved in the identification of the colonizing European with the

  returning popular god-king: the way Captain Cook was considered an avatar of

  Lono in Hawai‘i, or Sir James Brooke, the “White Raja of Sarawak,” was taken

  by some Iban people as the son of their primordial progenitors, Keling and

  Kumang—then again, in another version, Sir James was Kumang’s lover, thus

  THE STRANGER-KINGSHIP OF THE MEXICA

  225

  replicating the contractual union of the stranger prince with the ranking woman

  of the native people (cf. Sahlins 2010: 113). Similar marvelous tales of White-

  men are told in Amazonia and Melanesia. For the Micronesians of Ponape and

  Truk, things that drift ashore, including the founders of chiefly lineages, have

  come from the spirit world; which is why, as Ward Goodenough explained,

  Europeans, on their first arrival, were greeted as denizens of that divine realm

  (1986: 559). The parallels with Moctezuma’s alleged greeting of Cortés would

  not be worth further discussion were it not for the disputable speculation of

  some scholars that the identification of Cortés with the lost god-king of Tollan

  greatly facilitated the Spanish Conquest. That this does not necessarily follow

  is demonstrated in the case of Captain Cook, whose identification with the

  ancient deity Lono merely got him killed. What will happen in the showdown

  between the returning god and the king whose ancestors came to power by

  usurping him depends on contingent circumstances of the historical conjunc-

  ture. Moctezuma hardly had to give in as a result of the tradition; he could have

  as well concluded from it that Cortés was a threat and got rid of him. What is

  structural is that either outcome, the death of the god or the king, is a logical but

  not inevitable sequitur to opposition between them in the indigenous cultural

  order: one might say it is structurally sufficient but not historically necessary.

  That is one possible conclusion from Mexica history on the relation between

  structure and event.

  Another is the remarkable similarity between the Mexica history and that of

  the Bunyoro kingdom of the East African Rift Valley—itself a lacustrine basin

  geographically similar to the Valley of Mexico. The resemblances include the

  Banyoro people’s notions of early European visitors, who were sometimes iden-

  tified with the Bachwezi rulers of the fabled Kitara “empire” that once dominat-

  ed the Valley and peoples beyond. “Europeans,” reports the ethnographer John

  Beattie (1971: 50), “were sometimes taken for Bachwezi returning to their old

  kingdom, and . . . were said to have possessed marvelous skills and marvelous

  powers”—should we not say, like the Toltecs? Indeed the Banyoro relate that

  they inherited the great realm and high culture of the Bachwezi in much the

  same way as the Mexica became the successors of the glorious Toltecs, including

  the parallel saga of their origin as uncultured barbarians who migrated from the

  northern peripheries of the empire to its interlacustrine heartland. So the re-

  semblances continue: the Bachwezi of ancient Kitara are analogously described

  as “a mysterious race of semi-divine rulers,” of whose extraordinary wisdom and

  achievements stories are still told, including their takeover of the country from

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  “an even more sh
adowy dynasty” (ibid.: 25, 45). (Hint: Teotihuacan.) And the

  Bachwezi kings, too, were high priests of their Kitara realm, as wealthy as they

  were wise, reigning over many lesser kingdoms of the Rift Valley and beyond.

  Just as the Bachwezi resemble the Toltecs, so the Banyoro who replaced

  them were like the Mexica in their original Chichimec state. Their own tradi-

  tions stress the Banyoro’s “ignorance and uncouthness when they first arrived

  from their uncivilized homeland” (ibid.: 59). Like the common depictions of

  the Chichimecs, the Banyoro are described as rough hunters, naked and savage,

  without knowledge of riches, courtly manners, or diplomacy—as it were, “sans

  roi, sans loi, sans foi.” Speakers of the uncivilized Nilotic Luo tongue, this, too,

  the Banyoro would give up when they adopted the customs and language of

  the Bantu Bachwezi. It is remarkable, comments the historian Roland Oliver

  (1955: 115), that the successor kingdoms of the Bachwezi in the Rift Valley—

  Buganda, Toro, Nkole, Sogo, and Bunyoro, among others—attribute most of

  the social and cultural practices that mark them off from surrounding regions

  to their glorious Kitara predecessors. Many “are at pains to describe how they

  learnt and copied the kingship customs” of these ancient rulers, from whom

  indeed their own kings claim to be descended—like Moctezuma, who similarly

  transcended Chichamec origins by virtue of an ancestral connection to the fa-

  bled Toltecs (see below).

  In juxtaposing the Mexica and the Banyoro, I join a small cottage industry

  in Mesoamerican studies that has turned out a number of such cross-cultural

  comparisons: likening not only the Mexica’s polity to various African states,

  but also their hegemony to the Roman empire and their kings to sovereigns of

  Polynesian islands. In the latter connection, Susan Gillespie’s (1989) adaptation

  of the Polynesian stranger-king model to Mexica history, including her appro-

  priate emphasis on the passage of sovereignty through high-ranking women, is

  most pertinent to the present discussion. So is David Carrasco’s (2000) analysis

  of core–periphery relations in the Valley of Mexico on the model of the “galactic

  polities” of Southeast Asia, as described in influential works by Stanley Tambiah