divine kingship of shilluk
divine kingship of the shilluk (2011) by david graeber via 61 pg kindle version from anarchist library [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-the-divine-kingship-of-the-shilluk]
notes/quotes:
The divine kingship of the Shilluk – On violence, utopia, and the human condition, or, elements for an archaeology of sovereignty
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Abstract
Since Frazer’s time, Shilluk kingship has been a flashpoint of anthropological debates about the nature of sovereignty, and while such debates are now considered irrelevant to current debates on the subject, they need not be. This essay presents a detailed analysis of the history, myth, and ritual surrounding the Shilluk institution to propose a new set of distinctions: between “divine kingship” (by which humans can become god through arbitrary violence, reflexively defining their victims as “the people”) and “sacred kingship” (the popular domestication of such figures through ritual), and argues that kingship always represents the image of a temporary, imperfect solution to what is taken to be the fundamental dilemma of the human condition—one that can itself only be maintained through terror.
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No one has been more responsible for the Frazerian revival than the Belgian anthropologist Luc de Heusch—who, ironically, began his intellectual journey (1962) setting out from Evans-Pritchard’s point that in order to rule, a king must “stand outside” society. Essentially he asked: what are the mechanisms through which a king is made into an outsider? In any number of African kingdoms, at least, this meant that at their installations, kings were expected to make some kind of dramatic gesture that marked a fundamental break with “the domestic order” and domestic morality. Usually this consisted of performing acts—murder, cannibalism, incest, the desecration of corpses—that would, had anyone else performed them, have been considered the most outrageous crimes. Sometimes such “exploits” were acted out symbolically: pretending to lie next to one’s sister or stepping over one’s father’s body when taking the throne. At other times they were quite literal: kings actually would marry their sisters or massacre their close kin. Always, such acts marked the king as a kind of “sacred monster,” a figure effectively outside of morality (de Heusch 1972, 1982, 2000)
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The question of governance, then, is not the same as the question of sovereignty. But what is sovereignty? Probably the most elegant definition is that recently proposed by Thomas Hansen and Finn Stepputat (2005, 2006): in its minimal sense, sovereignty is simply the recognition of the right to exercise violence with impunity. This is probably the reason why, as these same authors note, those arguing about the nature of sovereignty in the contemporary world—and particularly about the breakdown of states, the multiplication of new forms of semi-criminal sovereignty in the margins between them—rarely find the existing anthropological literature on sacred kingship particularly useful.[5]
sovereignty.. david on sovereignty
endnote 5: I am simplifying their argument. Sovereign power for Hansen and Stepputat is marked not only by impunity but by a resultant transcendence—the “crucial marks of sovereign power” are “indivisibility, self-reference, and transcendence” (2005: 8), as well as a certain “excessive” quality. In many ways their argument, especially when it draws on that of Georges Bataille with his reflections on autonomy and violence, comes close to the one that I will be developing. But it is also exactly in this area that it deviates the most sharply, since Bataille’s position is ultimately profoundly reactionary, reading authoritarian political institutions back into the very nature of human desire. My position is more hopeful.
Starting instead from the principle of sovereignty means beginning instead from the idea of moral order, and realities of violence. It then follows from the understanding that the various “exploits” or acts of transgression by which a king marks his break with ordinary morality are not normally seen to make him immoral, but a creature beyond morality. As such he can be treated as the constituent principle of a system of justice or morality—since, logically, no creature capable of creating a system of justice can itself be already bound by the system he creates.
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Walter Benjamin posed the dilemma quite nicely in his famous distinction between “law-making” and “law-maintaining” violence. Really it is exactly the same paradox, cast in the new language that became necessary once the power of kings (“sovereignty”) had been transferred, at least in principle, to an entity referred to as “the people”—even though the exact way in which “the people” were to exercise sovereignty was never clear. No constitutional order can constitute itself. We like to say that “no one is above the law” but if this were really true laws would not exist to begin with: even the writers of the United State constitution or founders of the French Republic were, after all, guilty of treason according to the legal regimes under which they had been born. The legitimacy of any legal order therefore ultimately rests on illegal acts—usually, acts of illegal violence. Whether one embraces the Left solution (that “the people” periodically rise up to exercise their sovereignty through revolutions) or the Right solution (that heads of state can exercise sovereignty in their ability to set the legal order aside) the paradox itself remains. In practical terms, it translates into a constant political dilemma. How does one distinguish “the people” from a mere unruly mob? How does one know if the hand suspending habeas corpus is that of a contemporary Abraham Lincoln, or of a contemporary Mussolini?
What I am proposing here is that this paradox has always been with us. Obviously, any thug or bandit who finds he can regularly get away with raping, killing, and plundering at random will not, simply by that fact, come to be seen as a power capable of constituting a moral order or national identity.[7] The overwhelming majority of those who find themselves in such a situation never think to make such claims—except perhaps among their immediate henchmen. The overwhelming majority of those who do try fail. Yet the potential is always there. Successful thugs do become sovereigns, even, creators of new legal and moral systems. And genuine “sovereignty” does always carry with it the potential for arbitrary violence. This is true even in contemporary welfare states: apparently this is the one aspect that, despite liberal hopes, can never be completely reformed away. It is precisely in this that sovereigns resemble gods and that kingship can properly be called “divine.”
endnote 7: Benjamin himself suggested that popular fascination with the “great criminal” who “makes his own law” derives from precisely this recognition.
(and bearing in mind that while there is no way to know if these incidents ever actually happened, it doesn’t really matter, since the repetition of stories constitutes the very stuff of politics)
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Myself, I would prefer to see the kind of violence he describes not as revealing of the essential nature of society, but of the essential nature of a certain form of political power with cosmic pretensions—one by no means inevitable, but which is very much still with us.
aka: sea world.. wilde not-us law.. hari rat park law.. et al
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Three propositions
The core of my argument in this essay boils down to three propositions, and it might be best to lay them out straightaway, before returning to the Shilluk material in more detail. The first proposition I have already outlined; the second is broadly inspired by the ongoing work of Marshall Sahlins on comparative cosmologies; the third might be considered my own extrapolation from Simonse:
- Divine kingship, insofar as the term can be made meaningful, refers not to the identification of rulers with supernatural beings (a surprisingly rare phenomenon), but to kings who make themselves the equivalent of gods—arbitrary, all-powerful beings beyond human morality—through the use of arbitrary violence.
The institutions of sacred kingship, whatever their origins, have typically been used to head off or control the danger of such forms of power. A direct line can be traced from such divine kingship to contemporary forms of sovereignty.- Sacred kingship can also be conceived as offering a kind of (tentative, imperfect) resolution for the elementary problematic of human existence proposed in creation narratives.
It is in this sense that Clastres (1977) was right when he said that state authority must have emerged from prophets rather than chiefs, from the desire to find a “land without evil” and undo death; it is in this sense, too, that it can be said that Christ (the Redeemer) was a king, or kings could so easily model themselves on Christ, despite his obvious lack of martial qualities. Here, in embryo, can we observe what I have called the utopian element of the state.- Violence, and more specifically, antagonism, plays a crucial role here. It is the peculiar quality of violence that it simplifies things, draws clear lines where otherwise one might see only complex and overlapping networks of human relationship. It is the particular quality of sovereign violence that it defines its subjects as a single people.
This is, in the case of kingdoms, actually prior to the friend/enemy distinction proposed by Karl Schmitt. or, to be more specific, one’s ability to constitute oneself as a single people in a potential relation of war with other peoples, is premised on a prior but usually hidden state of war between the sovereign and the people.The Shilluk kingdom then seems to be especially revealing in all three of these areas, ..I will spend the rest of this essay examining how these three principles—divine kingship, sacred kingship, and sovereign violence—came together in the historical Shilluk kingdom, in its stories of mythic origin and in its royal ritual, before returning to make a final brief reflection on their wider implications.
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Submission is what renders people Shilluk
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What I have described above, at any rate, were the things that an ordinary Shilluk was likely to actually know about Fashoda. The overall picture seems clear. Fashoda was a little image of heaven. However imperfect, it was the closest one could come, in these latter days, to a restoration of the primal unity that preceded the separation of the earth and heaven. It was a place whose inhabitants experience neither birth nor death, although they do enjoy the pleasures of the flesh, ease, treasure and abundance (there was rumored to be a storehouse of plundered wealth and certain clans were charged with periodically bringing the reth tasty morsels), and also engaged in agricultural production—if, like the original couple, Garang and Abuk, only just a little bit.
It is, then, an undoing of the dilemma of the human condition. Obvious it was a partial, provisional one. The Shilluk reth was, as Bernhardt Schnepel aptly put it (1995), “temporarily immortal.” He was Nyikang, but he was also not Nyikang; Nyikang was God, but he was also not God. And even this limited degree of perfection could only be brought about by a complex play of balanced antagonism that would inevitably engulf him in the end.
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What I would suggest is that this is not just a dilemma of interpretation for the outside analyst; it reflects a fundamental dilemma about the nature of political power that Shilluk tend to find as confusing as anybody else. Rituals can be interpreted as ways of puzzling out such problems, even as, simultaneously, they are also ways of making concrete political change in the world.
Critical here is the role of the interregnum, the “year of fear.” Wherever there are kings, interregna tend to be seen as periods of chaos, violence, times when the very cosmological order is thrown into disarray. But as Bernhardt Schnepel (1988: 450) justly points out, this is the reason most monarchies try to keep them as brief as possible. There is no particular reason those organizing the Shilluk installation ceremonies could not have declared, say, a three to five-day period of chaos and terror—in fact, by the 1970s, that’s exactly what they did decide to do, abandoning the year-long interregnum entirely (ibid.: 443). If for centuries before they didn’t, it indicates, if nothing else, that this year of fear was fundamentally important.
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Dak is the human capacity to act like God, to mimic his capricious, predatory destructiveness. In the stories, this is how he first appears: raining death and disaster arbitrarily. From his own perspective “taking what he likes.” From the perspective of his victims, playing God. During the interregnum then, it is not just royal politics that spills over into society at large; it is divine power itself—the violent, arbitrary divine power that is, as Shilluk institutions ensured no one could never forget, the real essence and origin of royalty.
The interregnum, then, is a time when divine power suffuses everything. This is what makes the creation of society possible. It is also what makes the creation of society necessary, since it results in an undifferentiated state of chaos and at least potential violence of all against all. Social order—like cosmic order—comes of separation, and the resultant creation of a relatively balanced, stable set of antagonisms.
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In a larger sense, sacrifice—in all Nilotic religions the paradigmatic ritual—is about the re-establishment of boundaries. Divinity has entered into the world; the ordinary divisions of the cosmos (for instance, between humans, animals, and gods) have become confused; the result is illness or catastrophe. So while sacrifice is, here as everywhere, a way of entering into communication with the Divine, it is ultimately a way of putting Divinity back in its proper place. If the interregnum, the reign of Dak, is a time of indiscriminate violence against every aspect of creation, sacrifice is about restoring discriminations: respect (thek) to use the Nuer/Dinkaphrase, separation, appropriate distance. In this sense, the entire installation ceremony is a kind of sacrifice, or at least does the same thing that a sacrifice is ordinarily meant to do. It restores a world of separations.
So is the king a sacrificial victim on temporary reprieve? I would say in a certain sense he is. Every act of sacrifice does, after all, contain its utopian moment. Here, it is as if the king is suspended inside that utopian moment indefinitely—or at least, so long as his strength holds out.
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According to Lienhardt, for Dinka, such moments of communal harmony are the closest one can come to the direct experience of God—or, to be more specific, God in his aspect of benevolent universality:
…. A man is recognized as a powerful ‘man of Divinity’ because he creates for people the experience of peace between men and of the uniting of forces which are normally opposed to each other, of which Divinity is understood to be the grounds (1961: 157).
It is in this sense that God “also represents truth, justice, honesty, uprightness,” and so on (1961: 158). It is not because God, as a conscious entity, is just. In fact, Dinka—like most Nilotic peoples—seem haunted by the strong suspicion that he isn’t. It is because truth, justice, etc, are the necessary grounds for “order and peace in human relations,” and therefore, truth, justice, etc, are God. The point of sacrificial ritual then is to move from one manifestation of the divine to the other: from God as confusion and disaster, to God as unity and peace.
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My use of the term “utopia” is somewhat unconventional in this context. By “utopia,” I mean any place that represents an unattainable ideal, particularly, an impossible resolution of the basic dilemmas of human existence—however those might be conceived. Utopia is the place where contradictions are resolved.[56]
endnote 56: Or better put, the place where existential dilemmas are reduced to contradictions, so that they can be resolved.
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The very idea of physical perfection is revealing. What does it mean to say someone is physically perfect? Presumably that they correspond to some idealized model of what a human is supposed to be like. *But how do we even know what humans are supposed to be like? There is only one way: **by observing actual humans. But actual humans are never physically perfect; in fact, when compared with the model of generic human we have in our heads, most seem at least slightly wrong, too short, too fat, too thin, misshapen. This is partly because when moving from tokens to types, ***we wipe out change and process: real humans grow, age, and so on; generic humans are, first of all, caught forever at some idealized moment of their lives. But it is also an effect of the process of generalization itself: in moving from tokens to types, we always seem to generate something which we find more proper or appealing than the tokens—or at least the overwhelming majority. In this sense the kind is indeed an abstraction or transcendental principle: the ideal-typical human, though here I am using the phrase not in Weber’s sense, but rather, from the understanding that, like Leonardo da vinci, when we try to imagine the typical, we usually instead end up generating the ideal.[58]
*huge.. we have no idea what legit free people are like.. black science of people/whales law et al
**rather than whales in sea world.. which is all of us.. need global detox leap to see actual free human ness.. need the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
***find the bravery to change your mind ness et al
endnote 58:This is of course what “ideal” actually means: it is the idea lying behind some category.
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To put it in the terms of my three proposals from the first section: there is a kind of circle here. on the one hand, insofar the dangers of divine kingship are contained by the rituals of sacred kingship, the utopian element, the degree to which kings represent a magical resolution of the dilemmas of human existence, themselves become a kind of sacred trap. But ultimately the utopia itself can only be maintained through terror. What we now think of as “the people” or “the nation” emerges as a side-effect.
aka: whalespeak utopia
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What I really want to draw attention to here though is first of all, *the intimate connection between the otherworldly perfection of royal courts and their violence—to the fact that such utopias do, always, rest on what we euphemistically call “force.”
*again.. whalespeak utopia.. not hardt revolution law utopia
What I would suggest is that this has remained the hidden logic of sovereignty. What we call “the social peace” is really just a truce in a constitutive war between sovereign power and “the people,” or “nation”—both of whom come into existence, as political entities, in their struggle against each other. Furthermore, this elemental war is prior to wars between nations.
To call this a “war” is to fly in the face of almost all existing political theory, ..assume there is a fundamental distinction between inside and outside, and particularly between violence inside and violence outside—that, in fact, this is constitutive of the very nature of politics. As a result, just about everyone (with the possible exception of anthropologists) who wishes to discuss the nature of “war” starts with examples of armed conflicts between two clearly defined political and territorial entities, ..involving a clash of armies that ends either with conquest, or some sort of negotiated peace. In fact, even the most cursory glance at history shows that only a tiny percentage of armed conflicts have taken such a form. In reality there is almost never a clear line between what we’d now call “war” and what we’d now call “banditry,” “terrorism,” “raids,” “massacres,” “duels,” “insurrections,” or “police actions.” Yet somehow in order to be able to talk about war in the abstract we have to imagine an idealized situation that only rarely actually occurs.
Obviously, the conceptual apparatus—the way we imagine war—is important. But it seems to me it is mainly important in occluding that more fundamental truth that the Nilotic material brings so clearly into focus. As those European travelers discovered, when asked by Nilotic kings to conduct raids or rain random gunfire on “enemy villages” that actually turned out to be inhabited by the king’s own subjects, there is no fundamental difference in the relation between a sovereign and his people, and a sovereign and his enemies. Inside and outside are both constituted through at least the possibility of indiscriminate violence. What differentiates the two—at least, when the differences are clear enough to bear noticing—is that the insiders share a commitment to a certain shared notion of utopia. Their war with the sovereign becomes the ground of their being, and thus, paradoxically, the ground of a certain notion of perfection—even peace.
Any more realistic exploration of the nature of sovereignty, I believe, should proceed from examination of the nature of this basic constitutive war. Unlike wars between states, the war between sovereign and people is a war that the sovereign can never, truly, win. Yet states seem to have an obsession with creating such permanent, unwinnable wars: as the United States has passed over the last half century from the War on Poverty to the War on Crime to the War on Drugs (the first to be internationalized) and now, to the War on Terror. The scale changes but the essential logic remains the same. This is the logic of the assertion of sovereignty..behind those rules of engagement always lies at least the threat—and usually, periodically, the practice—of random, arbitrary, indiscriminate destruction.
I don’t think there is anything inevitable about all this. The will to sovereignty is not, as reactionaries always want us to believe, something inherent in the nature of human desire—as if the desire for autonomy was always also necessarily the desire to dominate and destroy. Neither however does the historical emergence of forms of sovereignty mark some kind of remarkable intellectual or organizational breakthrough. Actually, taken simply as an idea, sovereignty, like monotheism, is an extraordinarily simple concept that almost anyone could have thought of. The problem is it is not simply an idea: it is better seen, I think, as proclivity, a tendency of interpretation immanent in certain sorts of social and material circumstances, but one which nonetheless can be, and often is, resisted. As Luc de Heusch makes clear, it is not even essential to the nature of government. only by putting sovereignty in its place, it seems to me, can we can begin to look realistically at the full range of human possibilities.
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be you. 