onkings Page 37
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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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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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