onkings Page 8
or negotiate the exchange of wealth—when they are not reciprocal y eating
one another.
SOCIAL RELATIONS OF PEOPLE AND METAPERSON-OTHERS
A woman sits in a corner of the house, whispering to a dead relative; a man ad-
dresses a clump of trees. . . . When an illness or misfortune occurs, a father or
neighbor will break knotted strips of cordyline leaf, talking to the spirits to find
out which one is causing trouble and why. (Keesing 1982: 33)
This passage is one of many that exemplify how Roger Keesing makes good
on the introductory promise of his fine monograph on the Kwaio people of
Malaita (Solomon Islands): namely, “to describe Kwaio religion in a way that
captures the phenomenological reality of a world where one’s group includes
the living and the dead, where conversations with spirits and signs of their pres-
ence and acts are part of everyday life” (ibid . : 2–3; cf. 33, 112–13). Likewise, the
human world of the Lalakai of New Britain is “also a world of spirits. Human
beings are in frequent contact with non-human others, and there is always the
possibility of encountering them at any time” (Valentine 1965: 194). Yet beyond
such conversations or passing encounters with metaperson-others, from many
parts come reports of humans entering into customary social relations with
them.
Inuit know of many people who visited vil ages of animal-persons, even
married and lived long among them, some only later and by accident discover-
ing their hosts were animal inua rather than Inuit humans (Oosten 1976: 27).
A personal favorite is the Caribou Man of the northern Algonkians. In one of
many similar versions, Caribou Man was a human stranger who was seduced
by a caribou doe, went on to live with and have sons by her, and became the
ruler of the herd (Speck 1977). French-Canadian trappers were not off the
mark in dubbing Caribou Man “le roi des caribou,” as the story rehearses the
archetypal stranger-king traditions of dynastic origin, down to the mediating
role played by the native woman and her foundational marriage to the youthful
THE ORIGINAL POLITICAL SOCIETY
41
outsider (see chapter 3 in this volume). Besides the hierogamic experiences of
Chewong women and the marriage of the gods with dead Araweté women,
there are many permutations of such interspecies unions: some patrilocal and
some matrilocal, some enduring and some ended by divorce due to home-
sickness. A Kaluli man of the New Guinea Southern Highlands may marry
a woman of the invisible world, relates Edward Schiefflin (2005: 97); when
the man has a child by her, he can leave his body in his sleep and visit her
world. Reciprocal y, people from that world may enter his body and through
his mouth converse with the people present. Then there was the Mianmin man
of the Western Highlands who, beside his human wife, formed a polygynous
arrangement with a dead woman from a different descent group. The dead wife
lived in a nearby mountain, but she gardened on her husband’s land and bore
him a son (Gardner 1987: 164).
Don Gardner also tells of the time that the Ulap clan of the Mianmin saved
themselves from their Ivik enemies by virtue of a marital alliance with their
own dead. The lvik clan people were bent on revenge for the death of many of
their kinsmen at Ulap hands. Sometime before, the big-man of the Ulap and
his counterpart among their dead, who lived inside the mountain on which the
Ulap were settled, exchanged sisters in marriage. When the big-man of the dead
heard the Ivik were threatening his living brother-in-law, he proposed that the
two Ulap groups exchange the pigs they had been raising for each other and
hold a joint feast. In the course of the festivities, the ancestral people became
visible to the Ulap villagers, who were in turn rendered invisible to the Ivik. So
when the Ivik enemies came, they could not find the Ulap, although three times
they attacked the places where they distinctly heard them singing. Throughout
the Western Mianmin area, this account, Garner assures us, has the status of a
historical narrative.
We need not conclude that relations between humans and their metaperson
counterparts are everywhere and normally so sympathetic. On the contrary, they
are often hostile and to the people’s disadvantage, especially as the predicament
noted earlier of the Inuit is broadly applicable: the animals and plants on which
humans subsist are essentially human themselves. Although some anthropolo-
gists have been known to debate whether cannibalism even existed, it is hardly a
rare condition—even among peoples who profess not to practice it themselves.
As already noticed, in many societies known to anthropology, especially those
where hunting is a mainstay, the people and their prey are involved in a system
42
ON KINGS
of mutual cannibalism. For even as the people kill and consume “people like us,”
these metaperson-alters retaliate more or less in kind, as eating away human
flesh by disease or starvation.
All over the Siberian forest, for instance,
Humans eat the meat of game animals in the same way that animal spirits feed
on human flesh and blood. This is the reason why sickness (experienced as a
loss of vitality) and death in the [human] community as a whole are understood
as a just payment for its successful hunting both in the past and the future.
(Hamayon 1996: 79)
Married to the sister or daughter of the “game-giving spirit,” an elk or reindeer,
his brother-in-law the Siberian shaman thus enters an affinal exchange system
of flesh—the meat of animals compensated by the withering of people—on
behalf of the human community. Thus here again: “Being similar to the hu-
man soul in essence and on a par with hunters in alliance and exchange part-
ners, spirits are not transcendent” (ibid.: 80). It is, to reprise Århem’s expression
above, “an intersubjective and personalized universe.”
METAPERSON POWERS-THAT-BE
The metahuman beings with whom people interact socially are often hierar-
chically structured, as where gods such as Sedna and species-masters such as
Caribou Man encompass and protect the individual inua in their purview. These
hierarchies are organized on two principles which in the end come down to the
same thing: the proprietary notion of the higher being as the “owner”—and
usually also the parent—of his or her lesser persons; and the platonic or clas-
sificatory notion of “the One over Many,” whereby the “owner” is the personified
form of the class of which the lesser persons are particular instances. One can
find both concepts in Viveiros de Castro’s discussion of the Araweté term for
metahuman masters, nā:
The term connotes ideas such as leadership, control, responsibility, and owner-
ship of some resource or domain. The nā is always a human or anthropomorphic
being. But other ideas are involved as well. The nā of something is someone who
has this substance in abundance. Above all, the nā is defined by something of
THE ORIGINAL POLITICAL SOCIETY
43
which it is
the master. In this last connotation, he is at the same time “the repre-
sentative of ” and the “represented by” that something. (1992: 345)9
Although, in a spasm of relativism, Pascal famously said that a shift of a few
degrees of latitude will bring about a total change in juridical principles, you can
go from the Amazon forests or the New Guinea Highlands to the Arctic Circle
and Tierra del Fuego and find the same ethnographic descriptions of greater
metapersons as the “owners”-cum -“mothers” or “fathers” of the individual meta-
personal beings in their domain. Urapmin say “that people get into trouble be-
cause ‘everything has a father,’ using father ( alap) in the sense of owner. . . . In
dealing with nature then, the Urapmin are constantly faced with the fact that
the spirits hold competing claims to many of the resources people use” (Robbins
1995: 214–15). (Parenthetically, this is not the first indication we have that the
“spirits” own the means of production, an issue to which we will return.) Among
Hageners, the Stratherns relate, all wild objects and creatures are “owned” by
“spirits,” and can be referred to as their “pigs,” just as people hold domestic pigs
(1968: 190). “Masters of nature,” to whom trees and many other things “belong,”
these kor wakl spirits are “sworn enemies of mankind” because people tend to
consume foods under their protection without proper sacrifices. “The people are
terribly afraid of them” (Vicedom and Tischner 1943–48, 2: 608, 659).
In the Siberian Arctic, large natural domains such as forests, rivers, and lakes
had their “special owners,” as Waldemar Bogoras calls them. The forest-master
familiar to Russo-Yukaghir had “absolute power” over the animals there; he
could give them away as presents, lose them at cards, or round them up and
cause them to depart the country (Bogoras 1904–9 285). Not unusual either is
the compounded hierarchy of metahuman owners, composed of several levels of
inua-figures: as among Tupí-Guaraní peoples such as Tenetehara and Tapirapé,
where species-masters are included in the domains of forest-masters, who in
turn belong to the godly “owners” of the social territory. Similarly for Achuar,
the individual animal inua are both subsumed by “game mothers”—who “are
seen as exercising the same kind of control over game that mothers exercise
over their children and domestic animals”—and also magnified forms of the
9. These species- and place-masters are known the length and breadth of the Western
Hemisphere. For good examples see Wagley ([1947] 1983) on Tapirapé, Wagley
and Galvao ([1949] 1969) on Tenetahara, Huxley (1956) on Urubu, and Hallowell
(1960) on Ojibwa. As noted, the great Inuit god- inua are also represented as
“owners” of their domains.
44
ON KINGS
species—who, as primus inter pares, watch over the fate of the others. The latter
especially are the social interlocutors of the Achuar hunter, but he must also
come to respectful terms with the former (Descola 1996: 257–60). The chain of
command in these hierarchical orders of metaperson “owners” is not necessarily
respected in pursuing game or administering punishments to offending hunters,
but it is quite a bureaucracy.
As I say (and so have others), this sense of belonging to a more inclusive
power can be read as membership in the class of which the “owner” is the per-
sonified representative—that is, a logical and theological modality of the One
over Many. The ordering principle is philosophical realism with an anthropo-
morphic twist, where a named metaperson-owner is the type of which the sev-
eral lesser beings are tokens. In a broad survey of the concept in the South
American lowlands, Carlos Fausto (2012) uses such pertinent descriptions of
the species-master as “a plural singularity” and “a singular image of a collectiv-
ity.” Anthropologists will recognize classic studies to the effect: Godfrey Lien-
hardt (1961) on the totems or species-beings who subsumed the forms of the
same kind; and Edward Evans-Pritchard (1956) on the Nuer “God” (Kwoth),
manifested in a diminishing series of avatars. (Parenthetically, as species-mas-
ters are more widely distributed in the world than totems proper, the latter may
be understood as a development of the former under the special influence of
descent groups or other segmentary formations.) In his own well-known wan-
dering minstrel tour of animism—rather like the present article, composed of
ethnographic shreds and patches—E. B. Tylor conceived a similar passage from
“species-deities” to “higher deities” by way of Auguste Comte on the “abstrac-
tion” thus entailed and Charles de Brosses on the species archetype as a Platonic
Ideal (1903: 241–46).10
10. This classificatory logic is evident in Hermann Strauss’ reports on the subsumption
of the various Sky People of the Mbowamb into “He, himself, the Above.” As the
beings who “planted” the clan communities, together with their foods and customs,
the Sky People are “owners” of the earthly people, but generally they remain at a
distance and are involved only in times of collective disaster or need. Exceptionally,
however, Strauss cites a number of Mbowamb interlocutors assigning responsibility
to “The Above” for both individual and community misfortunes.
If many men are killed in battle, they say “He himself, the Ogla [Above], gave
away their heads.” . . . When a great number of children die, the Mbowamb say,
“He himself, the Above, is taking all our children up above.” If a couple remain
childless, everyone says “Their kona [land] lies fallow, the Above himself, as the
root-stock man (i.e., owner) is giving them nothing.” ([1962] 1990: 38–39)
THE ORIGINAL POLITICAL SOCIETY
45
That divinity originates as a kind of animism of higher taxonomic order is
not a bad (Platonic) idea. Consider this notice of Sedna: “In popular religious
thought, the Sea Mother is an indweller. She indwells in the sea and all of its
animals. She is immanent in the calm of the sea, in the capes and shoals where
the waters are treacherous, and in the sea animals and fish” (Merkur 1991: 136).
Analogously, for the Aboriginal peoples of Northwest Australia, the cult of their
great Rainbow Serpent, Ungud, could be epitomized as inua all the way down.
A bisexual snake identified with the Milky Way, the autochthonous Ungud
made the world. Les Hiatt summarized the process:
Natural species came into existence when Ungud dreamed itself into new vari-
ous shapes. In the same way Ungud created clones of itself as wonjina [local
versions of Dreamtime ancestors], and dispatched them in various places,
particularly waterholes. The wonjina in turn generated the human spirits that
enter women and become babies. . . . Ungud is thus an archetype of life itself.
(1996: 113)
In his informative account of the local Ungarinyin people, Helmut Petri speci-
fies that the numerous wonjina were transformed into “individual Ungud ser-
pents,” such that “Ungud appeared in the Aborigines’ view at one time as an
; individual entity, at another time as a multiplicity of individual beings” ([1954]
2011: 108). This included the spirit children whom the wonjina deposited in
the waterholes: they were given by Ungud. Hence the One over Many, down
to individual human beings, for each person thus had an “Ungud part” (see also
Lommel [1952] 1997).
It only needs to be added, from Nancy Munn’s revelatory study of analogous
phenomena among Walbiri, that in participating intersubjectively in an object
world created by and out of the Dreamtime ancestors, human beings experienc-
ing “intimations of themselves” are always already experiencing “intimations of
others”: those Dreamtime heroes “who are superordinate to them and precede
them in time” (1986: 75). Accordingly, violation of any part of the country is “a
violation of the essence of moral law” (ibid.: 68). While clearly different from
other societies considered here, these no less “egalitarian” Australian Aborigines
are thus no less hierarchical. “It’s not our idea,” Pintupi people told Fred Myers
in regard to the customs and morality established in perpetuity by the Dream-
time ancestors. “It’s a big Law. We have to sit down beside that Law like all the
dead people who went before us” (Myers 1986: 58).
46
ON KINGS
THE COSMIC POLITY
By way of integration of themes presented heretofore, there follows a sketch of
the cosmic polities of the Mountain Ok-speaking Min peoples of New Guinea.11
There was no visible or proximate political state in the center of New
Guinea, the region of the Fly and Sepik River headwaters traditionally inhabit-
ed by the Mountain Ok or Min peoples. All the same, the Telefolmin, Urapmin,
Feramin, Tifalmin, Mianmin, and others could be fairly described as governed
by metahuman powers whose authority over otherwise politically fragmented
peoples was exercised through obligatory rules effectively backed by punitive
force. The Hocartesian question might well be, “Why not call it a state?” Or else,
if this cosmic polity were unlike a state in that the controlling powers largely
outnumbered the civil society of humans, their regime could be all the more
dominating. Experientially, the people live in a condition of subjugation to a