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  domination. Hobbes spoke of the state of nature as all that time in which “men

  lived without a common power to keep them all in awe.” Yet in Rasmussen’s ac-

  counts of the Inuit, a people who might otherwise be said to approximate that

  natural state, “mankind is held in awe”—given the fear of hunger and sickness

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  inflicted by the powers governing them (1931: 124).5 If this accounts for the

  people’s anxieties, it also helps explain the reports of their stoic, composed, often

  congenial disposition. This happier subjectivity is not simply seasonal, not sim-

  ply due to the fact that times are good in terms of hunting and food supply, for

  that in itself would be because the people have been observant of Sedna’s rules,

  and accordingly she makes the animals available. There is a certain comfort and

  assurance that comes from the people’s compliance with the higher authorities

  that govern their fortunes—or if you will, their compliance with the “dominant

  ideology” (cf. Robbins 2004: 212). In the upshot, it’s almost as if these polar

  inhabitants were bipolar—except that, beside the fear and composure that came

  from their respect of the god, on occasion they also knew how to oppose and

  defy her.

  More precisely, if great shamans could on occasion force the god to desist

  from harming the people, it was by means of countervailing metapersons in

  their service: familiar spirits they possessed or who possessed them. Thus em-

  powered, the shaman could fight or even kill Sedna, to make her liberate the

  game (upon her revival) in a time of famine (Weyer 1932: 359; Merkur 1991:

  112). More often, the dangerous journeys shamans undertake to Sedna’s un-

  dersea home culminate in some manhandling of her with a view to soothing

  her anger by combing the sins of humans out of her tangled hair. Alternatively,

  Sedna was hunted like a seal from a hole in the ice in winter: she was hauled up

  from below by a noose and while in the shaman’s power told to release the ani-

  mals; or she was conjured to rise by song and then harpooned to the same effect.

  The last, the attack on the god, was the dramatic moment of an important

  autumnal festival of the Netsilik, designed to put an end to this tempestuous

  season and ensure good weather for the coming winter. Again it was not just the

  stormy weather with its accompaniment of shifting and cracking ice that was

  the issue, but the “countless evil spirits” that were so manifesting themselves,

  including the dead knocking wildly at the huts “and woe to the unhappy per-

  son they can lay hold of ” (Boas [1888] 1961: 603). Ruling all and the worst of

  them was Sedna, or so one may judge from the fact that when she was ritually

  5. Like the Chukchee shaman who told Bogoras:

  We are surrounded by enemies. Spirits always walk about with gaping mouths.

  We are always cringing, and distributing gifts on all sides, asking protection

  of one, giving ransom to another, and unable to obtain anything whatever

  gratuitously. (1904–9: 298)

  THE ORIGINAL POLITICAL SOCIETY

  35

  hunted and harpooned, the evil metahuman host were all driven away. Sedna

  dives below and in a desperate struggle manages to free herself, leaving her

  badly wounded, greatly angry, and in a mood to seize and carry off her human

  tormenters. That could result in another attack on her, however, for if a rescuing

  shaman is unable to otherwise induce her to release the victim, he may have to

  thrash her into doing so (Rasmussen 1930: 100). Although the shamans’ pow-

  ers to thus oppose the god are not exactly their own, may one not surmise—as

  David Graeber develops at length in chapter 7 in this volume—there is here

  a germ of a human political society: that is, ruling humans qua metapersons

  themselves?

  A word on terminology. Hereafter, I use “inua” as a general technical term

  for all animistic forms of indwelling persons, whether of creatures or things—

  and whether the reference is singular or plural. I use “metaperson” preferably and

  “metahuman” alternately for all those beings usually called “spirits”: including

  gods, ghosts, ancestors, demons, inua, and so on. Aside from direct quotations,

  “spirit” will appear only as a last resort of style or legibility, and usually then in

  quotation marks—for reasons to which I now turn, by way of the life story of

  Takunaqu, an Iglulik woman:

  One day I remember a party of children out at play, and wanted to run out at

  once and play with them. But my father, who understood hidden things, per-

  ceived that I was playing with the souls of my dead brothers and sisters. He was

  afraid this might be dangerous, and therefore called upon his helping spirits and

  asked them about it. Through his helping spirits, my father learned . . . there

  was . . . something in my soul of that which had brought about the death of my

  brothers and sisters. For this reason, the dead were often about me, and I did

  not distinguish between the spirits of the dead and real live people. (Rasmussen

  1930: 24)

  WHY CALL THEM SPIRITS?

  Sometime before Hocart was asking, “Why not call them gods?” Andrew Lang

  in effect asked of gods, “Why call them spirits?” Just because we have been

  taught our god is a spirit, he argued, that is no reason to believe “the earliest

  men” thought of their gods that way ([1898] 1968: 202). Of course, I cannot

  speak here of “the earliest men”—all those suggestive allusions to the state of

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  ON KINGS

  nature notwithstanding—but only of some modern peoples off the beaten track

  of state systems and their religions. For the Inuit, the Chewong, and similar

  others, Lang would have a point: our native distinction between spirits and

  human beings, together with the corollary oppositions between natural and su-

  pernatural and spiritual and material, for these peoples do not apply. Neither,

  then, do they radically differentiate an “other world” from this one. Interacting

  with other souls in “a spiritual world consisting of a number of personal forces,”

  as J. G. Oosten observed, “the Inuit themselves are spiritual beings” (1976: 29).

  Fair enough, although given the personal character of those forces, it is more

  logical to call spirits “people” than to call people “spirits.” But in either case, and

  notwithstanding our own received distinctions, at ethnographic issue here is the

  straightforward equivalence, spirits = people.

  The recent theoretical interest in the animist concepts of indigenous peoples

  of lowland South America, northern North America, Siberia, and Southeast

  Asia has provided broad documentation of this monist ontology of a personal-

  ized universe. Kaj Århem offers a succinct summary:

  As opposed to naturalism, which assumes a foundational dichotomy between

  objective nature and subjective culture, animism posits an intersubjective and

  personalized universe in which the Cartesian split between person and thing

  is dissolved and rendered spurious. In the animist cosmos, animals and plants,

  beings and things may all appear as intentional subjects and persons, capable


  of will, intention, and agency. The primacy of physical causation is replaced by

  intentional causation and social agency. (2016: 3)

  It only needs be added that given the constraints of this “animist cosmos” on the

  human population, the effect is a certain “cosmo-politics” in Eduardo Viveiros

  de Castro’s sense of the term (2015). Indeed, the politics at issue here involves

  much more than animist inua, for it equally characterizes people’s relations to

  gods, disembodied souls of the dead, lineage ancestors, species-masters, demons,

  and other such intentional subjects: a large array of metapersons setting the

  terms and conditions of human existence. Taken in its unity, hierarchy, and to-

  tality, this is a cosmic polity. As Déborah Danowski and Viveiros de Castro (2017:

  68–69) very recently put the matter (just as this article was going to press):

  What we would cal “natural world,” or “world” for short, is for Amazonian

  peoples a multiplicity of intricately connected multiplicities. Animals and other

  THE ORIGINAL POLITICAL SOCIETY

  37

  spirits are conceived as so many kinds of “‘people” or “societies,” that is, as po-

  litical entities. . . . Amerindians think that there are many more societies (and

  therefore, also humans) between heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our

  philosophy and anthropology. What we cal “environment” is for them a society

  of societies, an international arena, a cosmopoliteia. There is, therefore, no abso-

  lute difference in status between society and environment, as if the first were

  the “subject” and the second the “object.” Every object is another subject and is

  more than one.

  In what follows I offer some selected ethnographic reports of the coexistence of

  humans with such metapersonal powers in the same “intersubjective and per-

  sonalized universe”—just by way of illustration. But let me say here, and try to

  demonstrate in the rest of the essay, the implications are world-historical: for if

  these metaperson-others have the same nature as, and are in the same experien-

  tial reality with, humans, while exerting life-and-death powers over them, then

  they are the dominant figures in what we habitually call “politics” and “econom-

  ics” in all the societies so constituted. In the event, we will require a different

  anthropological science than the familiar one that separates the human world

  into ontologically distinct ideas, social relations, and things, and then seeks to

  discount the former as a dependent function of one of the latter two—as if our

  differentiated notions of things and social relations were not symbolically con-

  stituted in the first place.

  Not to separate, then, what peoples of the New Guinea Highlands join:

  surrounded and outnumbered above, below, and on earth by ghosts, clan ances-

  tors, demons, earthquake people, sky people, and the many inua of the wild, the

  Mbowamb spend their lives “completely under the spell and in the company of

  spirits. . . . The spirits rule the life of men. . . . There is simply no profane field

  of life where they don’t find themselves surrounded by a supernatural force”

  (Vicedom and Tischner (1943–48, 2: 680–81). Yet if the “other world” is thus

  omnipresent around Mt. Hagen, it is not then an “other world.” These people,

  we are told, “do not distinguish between the purely material and purely spiritual

  aspects of life” (ibid . : 592). Nor would they have occasion to do so if, as is re-

  ported of Mae Enga, they conducted lives in constant intersubjective relations

  with the so-called “spirits.” “Much of [Enga] behavior remains inexplicable to

  anyone ignorant of the pervasive belief in ghosts,” reports Mervyn Meggitt.

  “Not a day passes but someone refers publicly to the actions of ghosts” (1965:

  109–10). Or as a missionary-ethnographer recounts:

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  ON KINGS

  For the Central Enga the natural world is alive and endowed with invisible pow-

  er. To be seen otherwise would leave unexplained numerous events. The falling

  tree, the lingering illness, the killing frost, the haunting dream—all confirm the

  belief in a relationship between the physical world and the powers of earth, sky,

  and underworld. (Brennan1977: 11–12; cf. Feachem 1973)

  Such metapersonal powers are palpably present in what is actually happening

  to people, their fortunes good and bad. Hence Fredrik Barth’s own experience

  among Baktaman in the Western Highlands: “The striking feature is . . . how

  empirical the spirits are, how they appear as very concrete observable objects in

  the world rather than ways of talking about the world” (1975: 129, emphasis

  in original). Supporting Barth’s observation from his own work among nearby

  Mianmin people, Don Gardner adds that “spirits of one kind or another are a

  basic feature of daily life. Events construed as involving ‘supernatural’ beings are

  commonly reported and discussed” (1987: 161).6

  Mutatis mutandis, in the Amazonian forest, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

  comes to a similar appreciation of the gods and dead as immanently present

  for Araweté. Listening to the nocturnal songs of shamans summoning these

  metaperson-others to the village, the ethnographer

  came to perceive the presence of the gods, as the reality or source of examples, in

  every minute routine action. Most important, it was through these that I could

  discover the participation of the dead in the world of the living. (1992: 13–14)

  The presence of maï [‘gods’] in daily life is astonishing: for each and every pur-

  pose, they are cited as models of action, paradigms of body ornamentation,

  standards for interpreting events, and sources of news . . . . (1992: 74–75)7

  The general condition of the cohabitation of humans and their metaperson-

  al-alters in one “real world” is their psychic unity: their mutual and reciprocal

  6. Peter Lawrence and Meggitt speak of a general Melanesian “view of the cosmos

  (both its empirical and non-empirical parts) as a unitary physical realm with few, if

  any, transcendental attributes” (1965: 8).

  7. Yet the Araweté are no more mystical in such regards than is the ethnographer.

  The affective tone of their life, Viveiros de Castro notes, does not involve what we

  consider religiosity: demonstrations of reverence, devaluation of human existence,

  and so forth. They are familiar with their gods.

  THE ORIGINAL POLITICAL SOCIETY

  39

  status as anthropopsychic subjects. The venerable anthropological premise of

  “the psychic unity of mankind”has to be more generously understood. For as

  Viveiros de Castro says, “There is no way to distinguish between humans and

  what we call spirits” (ibid.: 64). In effect, the so-called “spirits” are so many

  heterogeneous species of the genus Homo: “Human beings proper ( bide) are a

  species within a multiplicity of other species of human beings who form their

  own societies” (ibid . : 55).8 As is well known, the statement would hold for many

  peoples throughout lowland South America. Of the Achuar, Philippe Descola

  writes that they do not know the “supernatural as a level of reality separate from

  nature,”
inasmuch as the human condition is common to “all nature’s beings. . . .

  Humans, and most plants, animals, and meteors are persons ( aents) with a soul

  ( wakan) and individual life” (1996: 93).

  In speaking of the “own societies” of the metaperson-others as known to

  Araweté, Viveiros de Castro al udes to the “perspectivism” that his writings

  have done much to make normal anthropological science. Wel documented

  from Siberia as wel as Amazonia, the phenomenon offers a privileged instance

  of the coparticipation of humans with gods, ghosts, animal-persons, and others

  in the same complex society. In consequence of differences in their perceptual

  apparatus, both people and animals live unseen to each other in their own

  communities as fully human beings, bodily and culturally; even as each ap-

  pears to the other as animal prey or predators. In this connection, the com-

  mon ethnographic observation that because the nonhuman persons are as such

  general y invisible, they must inhabit a different, “spiritual” reality, is a cultural

  non sequitur for Araweté and other perspectivists. In Lockean terms the differ-

  ences are only secondary qualities: due to perception—because of the different

  bodily means thereof—rather than to the thing thus perceived. In practice,

  moreover, the socius includes a variety of metapersonal communities: not only

  those of the animal inua, but also the vil ages of the gods, the dead, and perhaps

  others, all of them likewise cultural replicas of human communities. Accord-

  ingly, the human groups are engaged in a sociological complexity that defies

  the normal anthropological characterizations of their simplicity. A lot of social

  intercourse goes on between humans and the metahuman persons with whom

  they share the earth, as wel as with those who people the heavens and the

  8. Or else, like the various animals known to Naskapi of the Canadian Northeast, these

  other persons “constitute races and tribes among which the human is included”

  (Speck 1977: 30).

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  ON KINGS

  underworld. Apart from shamans, even ordinary humans may travel to lands

  of the metaperson-others, as conversely the latter may appear among people in

  human form. Human and nonhuman persons are often known to intermarry