31865771 Marshall Sahlins Elementary Forms of the Politics of Life

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THE STRANGER-KING OR, ELEMENTARY FORMS OF THE POLITICSOF LIFEMarshall Sahlins

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Marshall Sahlins

THE STRANGER-KING OR,

ELEMENTARY FORMS OF THE

POLITICS OF LIFE

Stranger-king formations in Indonesia and Oceania are set in the larger context of similarpolities the world around. Across these societies, the same structures of the potency of alterityappear in a variety of political forms – the experiential archetype of which, it is argued, isthe transaction of vitality between consanguinal and affinal kindreds. The conclusion is thatelementary forms of kinship and politics are one.

If humans were immortal, perhaps society could be confounded with the cosmos.Since death exists, it is necessary for society to be linked with something that isoutside itself – and that it be linked socially to this exterior . . . [A]ffinity will beused to domesticate this founding bond, the bond with death and exteriority.

(Viveiros de Castro 1992: 190–91)

A Chinese traveller to Cambodia in the late 13th century tells of a certain ritual thattakes place nightly atop the golden tower in the Khmer royal palace at Angkor Wat:

Every night before he can sleep with his own royal wives, the king mounts the tower tomate with a Naga spirit, Soma: a snake with nine heads who turns into a woman. She issaid to be the ‘owner’ of the kingdom – the autochthonous owner, to judge from herserpentine form – and if one night she fails to appear, it is time for the king to die.In uniting with her, the king rehearses nightly the origin of the first Khmer dynasty,Funan, founded by Kaundinya, a Brahmin from India by most accounts, who sailedto Cambodia laden with wealth and armed with a magical weapon. With an arrowor spear the powerful stranger startled and disarmed Soma, daughter of the indigenousNaga king, then married her, clothed her and initiated the Funan civilization. Since atAngkor the king must sleep with Soma before he can sleep with his own wives, which isto say before he can maintain his own dynastic succession, he likewise marks hissovereignty as the usurpation of earth-sprung rulers – from above, in a goldentower, as a celestial figure of great wealth.

(Zhou Daguan 2001)

Indonesia and the Malay World Vol. 36, No. 105 July 2008, pp. 177–199

ISSN 1363-9811 print/ISSN 1469-8382 online # 2008 Marshall Sahlins

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I have written about such stranger-kings before. This paper goes over some of the sameground, but I aim to expand the argument considerably: in the first place, by noting the globalextent and historical range of the phenomenon. From ancient to modern times, the rulers of aremarkable number of societies around the world have been strangers to the places andpeople they rule. By their dynastic origins and their inherited nature, as rehearsed inongoing traditions and royal rituals, they are foreigners – who on that ground mustconcede certain privileges to the native people. In the same way as the Cambodian rulersof reputed Indian Brahmin ancestry, the Arabian sayyids who became Malay sultans, or theHawaiian ruling chiefs from islands beyond the horizon, immigrant dynasties have beencommon since early times in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Africa is likewise the site of numer-ous dualistic political systems consisting of indigenous or autochthonous ‘owners’ of the landand stranger-kings of different ethnic origins and inclusive cosmic powers. Referring broadlyto West and Central Africa, Luc de Heusch (1982: 26–7) writes:

Everything happens as if the very structure of a lineage-based society is not capableof engendering dialectical development on the political plane without the interven-tion of a new political structure. The sovereignty, the magical source of power,always comes from elsewhere, from a claimed original place, exterior to society.

Well-known examples from around the continent include Benin, Shilluk, Nupe,Mossi, Kongo, Luba, Lunda, Zande, Ruwanda, etc. – not to mention the manylesser kingdoms and chiefdoms that are effectively satellites of greater ones. In theAmericas, the famous empires of the Aztec and Inca were ruled by stranger-king dynas-ties, as were the Maya as far back as the classic-period cities of Tikal and Copan. Withouteven considering the permutation of original kings descended from the heavens – ofwhich there are many, as this is always a good home address for outsiders of royalpretensions – the phenomenon is indeed widespread.

To give some further idea of its nature, I rehearse a few founding traditions of stran-ger-kingship. Despite their cultural diversity, the narratives are noteworthy for theirstructural similarity. (I do not use the phrase ‘charter myth’ in this connection, asMalinowski famously did in his Trobriand ethnography – notably in describing theimposition of a migrant chiefly group, through intermarriage, on autochthonousvillagers. Inasmuch as ‘myth’ has the connotation of ‘fiction’ in European languages,‘charter myth’ is an ethnological contradiction in terms. A narrative will not functionas a social or political constitution if it is by definition unbelievable.) Here, forexample, is a Fijian tradition of the origins of chiefship – analogous to the traditionsof Khmer kingship, including the marriage of the stranger to the daughter of thenative ruler. That the Fijian narrative also speaks to the origins of exogamy, wealthand cannibalism is not coincidental. In their different ways sources of the people’s pros-perity, all these aspects of good Fijian culture are conditional on the advent of chiefs whoare, as it is said, ‘different people’ (kai tani, ‘foreigners’):

The ‘first man’ was brooding on killing his wife, as she was getting old, and repla-cing her with their three daughters. But one day a handsome young stranger, victimof an accident at sea, was cast up on shore and discovered by the daughters. Hisname was Tabua, which is also the name of Fiji’s greatest valuable, the spermwhale tooth, a ‘chiefly thing’, as Fijians say. The daughters desired Tabua and

1 7 8 I NDONES I A AND THE MALAY WOR LD


offered to become his wives. The angry father, however, required the stranger toaccomplish a miracle in order to win his daughters – which Tabua succeeded indoing by means of a cunning trick. The old man was not only defeated but sexuallyhumiliated, as in glee his wife plucked out his beard, a customary sign of virilityaffected by mature men. Reluctantly he yielded his daughters and his supremacyto the stranger, but only on certain conditions: most notably that all subsequentstrangers who wash ashore be eaten lest like Tabua they trouble the land.

(Sahlins 1983:72–3)

Among other parallels to the Cambodian foundational narrative, notice how the princelyor godly stranger, rather terrible and treacherous himself, is thus empowered tosublimate the pre-social, anti-social dispositions of the native people – the incestuousinclination of the Fijian ‘first man’, the nakedness of the Naga princess. Also notablein the Fijian account is the ambiguous mixture of contract and chicane attending thetransfer of power from the original ‘owners’ of the land (i taukei) to their parvenurulers. Something similar is almost always found in these foundational traditions,usually including demonstrations of violence on the part of the stranger – which willturn out to have positive values for the indigenous people. In the Fijian case the cannibalvictims promised by the reign of the foreigner, and in essence doubles of him, are humansacrifices whose consumption by the indigenous people in conjunction with the god willafford them divine benefits. Man-slayers are welcomed home by crowds of women asheroes of sex as well as war, and the collective orgy that follows is testimony of thefecundity they bring to society. In sum, the legend of Tabua amounts to a human politicalsystem of godly powers, as effected through the assimilation of stranger-kings cumsacred enemies. Life from without.

Referring to an analogous dynastic charter from the Fijian island of Viti Levu, JamesFox (1995: 217) observes ‘In form this is a classic myth that is repeated throughout theAustronesian world.’ Conceivably one could argue for some historical continuity amongthese Austronesian sovereignties, but when we come upon very similar texts in classicalantiquity, it suggests we are in the presence of a more general condition of humanpolitical order:

Oenomaus, ancient king of Pisa in the Peloponnesus, could not persuade his daughterHippodamia to sleep with him, his first recourse against the prophecy that whomevershe married would kill him. As a second recourse, he challenged each of her suitors toa chariot race, they carrying Hippodamia, he in full armor: if the king overtook thesuitor, he killed him; if not, the suitor won her. Many were killed. However, Pelops,the handsome Zeus-descended stranger gained Hippodamia’s favor, and she conspiredto have the king’s chariot fixed so that it fell apart. According to the version, he diedin the accident or else Pelops killed him. In any case, Pelops won her hand, and aftersubjugating certain other lands, he succeeded to Oenomaus’ kingdom.

(Apollodorus 1921, Epitome ii.3–9)

According to J.G. Preaux (1962: 82), this tradition of the stranger who wins the nativeprincess and the kingdom by mayhem or mendacity was a general pattern among theIndo-European ancients:

THE S TRANGER - K I N G 1 7 9


Every foundation of a city, every conquest of royal power becomes effective fromthe moment that the stranger, charged with a sacredness by the gods or thefates, endowed moreover with the force of the warrior, symbolically gains posses-sion of a new land either by receiving peacefully, or by conquering, valorously orthrough a ruse, the daughter of the king of the land.

There was no genetic connection between the stranger-kings of Greece and the Malayo-Polynesians, but there was a remarkable historical convergence when another Zeus-descended hero, Alexander the Great – alias Iskandar Dzu’l-karnain of Koranicfame, militant propagator of the Faith from the setting to the rising sun – appearedas the ancestor of ruling sultans in the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra and coastal Borneo.A critical episode from the Sejarah Melayk or the ‘Malay Annals’ (Brown 1952),written probably in the early 16th century after the fall of Malacca, but drawing onearlier traditions, epitomises the historiographical convergence in structural as well asgenealogical terms. Summarising and eliminating some details:

Three handsome youths in royal garb appear on a mountain above Palembang inSumatra, site of the once-great state of Srivijaya. Like Tabua in the Fijian narrative,they miraculously bestow great wealth on the land, here represented by the twowidowed women who discover him. When it is learned that the youths are descendedfrom the world ruler Iskandar/Alexander the Great, people come from various Malaystates to take them as their king. The youngest, Sri Tri Buana, is so acknowledged bythe Raja of Palembang. Yet he is not installed until the Raja is able to neutralise acertain malevolent power that becomes manifest in the affliction the stranger visits onthe 39 princesses who are brought to him to be his wife. Upon sleeping with him,they all come down with a disfiguring skin condition (chloasma). However, when SriTri Buana asks for the hand of the Raja’s beautiful daughter, the native ruler imposesthe condition that the stranger will never shame or humiliate his subjects, in return forwhich the Raja promises eternal loyalty. This contract concluded, the marriage takesplace without ill effect; Sri Tri Buana is installed as ruler, and the Raja becomes hischief minister. Recorded more than once in the Malay Annals and in eastern Indonesia,this diarchic arrangement of immigrant sacred king and active second king from theindigenous people, as established by the marriage of the first with the daughter ofthe second, is also characteristic of a number of other Malayo-Polynesian dynasticcharters – including many in Fiji.

In a few generations a lineal successor of Sri Tri Buana will found Malacca andbecome sultan of a flourishing Islamic commercial kingdom. They and other rulerstracing descent to Alexander the Great will thereby inherit powers of global dimensions,world-dominating powers, originating in the great centre of ‘Rum’ – referring usuallyto Istanbul and the Ottoman emperors but sometimes to Rome or Macedonia – andrunning through rule of western and southern India (‘Kalinga’), as well as the underseaworld, before reaching Indonesia. On an edict issued in the late 18th century by a sultanof Minangkabau were affixed three seals representing three sons of Alexander/Iskandar:the Sultan of Rum, the oldest; the Sultan of China, the second; and himself, Sultan of Min-angkabau, the youngest but nonetheless ‘king of kings [. . .] lord of the air and clouds [. . .]possessed of the crown of heaven brought by the prophet Adam’ (Marsden 1811: 339).

But then the historical Alexander himself, Alexander III of Macedonia (r. 336–23BC), conqueror of Egypt and western Asia, was a stranger-king of universal ambitions.



In the so-called Alexander romances – of which at least 80 versions are extant in 24languages including Malay – as well as the historical chronicles of Arrian, Diodorus,Plutarch and Curtius, a genre not always distinct from romance, Alexander isrepresented with the distinguishing characteristics of stranger-kingship: including hismarriage to the daughters of the kings he has defeated and replaced, most notably hisunion with the daughter of his greatest adversary, the Persian Darius III. At the endof his conquests Alexander staged the spectacular ‘Susa Weddings’, the occasion notonly of his marriage to Darius’ eldest daughter, as well as another royal woman, butthe union of his main companions by the score with other Persian noblewomen, andthe legitimation of the liaisons of thousands of his Macedonian soldiers with the consortsof their campaigns. In its collective dimensions and political import, the event isreminiscent of the legendary union of the violent Latin invaders and the indigenousSabine women. (Yes, Romulus was a stranger-king, as was Aeneas of Troy beforehim.) Important cultural unions between the Greek victors and the vanquishedBarbarians were also happening, with influences going in both directions. On onehand, Alexander adopted certain dignities, costumes and customs of his defeatedroyal predecessors, especially Darius, and encouraged his followers to likewise adoptBarbarian habits. Generally understood as a politically inspired act of conciliation, thesame can also be perceived as the domestication of the oftimes brutal conqueror.On the other hand, Alexander constructed numerous cities on Greek models fromAlexandria in Egypt to Kandahar in Afghanistan; he set thousands of young Asians tolearning Greek and enlisted them in his armies; he appointed Persian satraps overcertain territories. The counterpart of his own domestication was the civilising of theBarbarians – Hellenisation.

Taking the Oriental romances into account, Alexander’s civilising mission wentdown in history in two parallel forms: Islamisation, the conversion of the infidels, aswell as the Hellenisation of the Barbarians. The famous tutor of the young Alexander,Aristotle, and a book associated with his teachings, had roles to play in both genres.Indeed in the Malay Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain (Winstedt 1938) it was Aristotle ofIstanbul who taught Alexander/Iskandar to recite the Koran; and in the Orientalromances Aristotle often appears as a political counsellor – and sometimes, asAlexander’s vizier. Not to exaggerate too much, in the western historical accountsthe revered book was the Iliad. Alexander is said to have owned a copy annotated byAristotle that he carried on campaigns, sleeping with it under his pillow (along witha dagger) and taking it as a guide, insofar as he identified with his warrior-ancestorAchilles and emulated the great Asian expedition of Agamemnon. Waxing romantichimself, Plutarch says that Alexander made the Iliad common reading among Asiansand set their sons to reciting the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides. BringingAsians into such community with Greeks, however, could not have pleased Aristotle,who held Barbarians to be natural slaves. On the other hand, in building cities,making laws and otherwise taming the ‘savagery’ of Asian peoples, Alexander wouldbe following Aristotelian prescriptions for controlling the appetitive soul by good edu-cation and good legislation. According to Plutarch, Alexander persuaded the Sogdians tosupport their parents instead of killing them, the Persians to respect their mothersinstead of marrying them and the Scythians to bury their dead instead of eatingthem. And this made him a great philosopher in his own right. For if philosopherstake the greatest pride in civilising the untutored elements in human character, ‘and



if Alexander has been shown to have changed the savage natures of countless tribes, it iswith good reason that he should be regarded as a very great philosopher’ (Plutarch, Onthe fortune of Alexander).

Alexander III of Macedonia, like his royal father Philip, already had considerable phi-losophical practice as a stranger-king before he even crossed the Hellespont to subdue the‘countless tribes’. The rulers of Macedonia, the Argeads, claimed descent from the Her-aclid kings of Argos in the Peloponnesus – and Alexander doubled his exalted derivationfrom Hercules on his father’s side by his reputed descent from Achilles on his mother’s.Coming to power in the early 5th century, the Argeads governed a Macedonianpopulation that sophisticated Athenians still considered ‘Barbarians’ in Alexander’sday. At a time during his Asian campaigns when he had occasion to rebuke hisMacedonian soldiers for ingratitude, Alexander reminded them that his father Philiphad transformed them from a weak bunch of nomads, dressed in animal skins and wan-dering the mountains with their small herds of sheep, into trained warriors and properlyclad, well-ordered city-dwellers of the Macedonian plain. ‘He made you city dwellers andestablished the order that comes from good laws and customs’ (Arrian 1983). Philip hadgreatly enlarged Macedonia by successful wars against neighbouring kings – whosedaughters he took to wife. (It was already a standing joke in antiquity that ‘Philipalways married a new wife with each campaign he undertook’, Greene 1991: 27). More-over, the Argeads did not only practice stranger-kingship; as descendants of the Heraclidsthey positioned themselves in a series of Zeus-born, immigrant dynasties that succeededthe original earth-born kings of Sparta. Heraclids, Atreids, Lacedaemonians: it was stran-ger-kings all the way down – to the autochthonous Lelegians. The conquering Heraclidskilled the last king of the House of Atreus or caused him to flee. Descended from Zeus viaPelops, Atreus had appeared on the scene with the reputation of having killed his ownsons, a crime that his descendants complemented with fratricide and matricide – notto mention the sacrifice of Iphigenia. The family gained the kingdom of Spartathrough Menelaus’ fateful marriage to Helen, ranking princess of the Lacedaemonians.For their part the Lacedaemonians had come to power through the marriage of theireponymous ancestor, another son of Zeus, with Sparta, daughter of the line of theearth-born Lelegian kings.

Max Weber believed that scholarly attempts to create some sort of politico-socialequality in history by putting the long-despised Bantu peoples on the same footing asthe Athenians was ‘quite simply naıve’ (Veyne 1994: 52), but this didn’t stopGeorges Balandier from drawing explicit parallels between classical Greek andCentral African dynastic traditions. Speaking of a certain Wene, the violent immigrantwho in the course of founding the old Kongo kingdom transcended the native matrilinealorder by murdering his mother’s pregnant sister, a ‘high deed’ that gained himrecognition as a real chief, Balandier was put in mind of the ‘heroes of Greek legendswho seek the royal succession only after they have ceased to respect the prevailinglaws’ (Balandier 1968: 36). Like the draconian deeds of Pelops, Romulus, Atreus orAlexander, the advent of African stranger-kings is generally marked by antinomianexploits of power and violence, including murder, incest or other crimes againstkinship and morality. Often represented as a wandering hunter, the African hero andhis royal successors remain identified with the wild – and with the dark forces ofevil and destruction, of secrecy and animality, that reign there. Just so, the Shambaaruler is king of the night:



At night the whole country resembled the wilderness (nyika). There is darkness. A personcannot move. Night is danger. But he [the king] rules even at night. He does not sleep. Inthe darkest hours of the night the ruler listens. He sleeps in the afternoon.

(Feierman 1974: 59)

The protective function evokes the other, seemingly contrary aspect of the stranger-king: the benefits he bestows on the people once out of the wild and in power. Hisviolence is then turned outward towards the aggrandisement of the realm, even ashis powers deployed inward bring order, justice, security and prosperity, as well asarts of civilisation such as metallurgy – again, a mission civilisatrice. Balandier canspeak of the sovereignty of the Kongo founder Wene as contradictory and ambivalent;yet as he, Heusch and others have noted of the two sides of the African stranger-king, theterrible and the beneficial, the first is a condition of the possibility of the second. In thecharter traditions, the two phases are successive, the ability of the king to constitute anew order being sequitur to his ability to violate the old. His initial transgressions put himabove and beyond society, alienated even from his own kin; but in so demonstrating thathe is stronger than society, he is then able to recreate it. In the analogous Indo-Europeancontext, Dumezil (1988) described the excesses of the youthful founder as a kind ofcreative violence, inasmuch as it empowered the statecraft of his later age and hissuccessors. Accordingly, the king’s darker nature is never extinguished.

In Kongo it was celebrated notably at the installation of a new ruler. In a way muchlike Evans-Pritchard (1966) described for Shilluk in his well-known Frazer lecture, theking was enthroned in ceremonies that reproduced the narrative of the founding of thedynasty by the immigrant hero. Report has it that the proceedings included the ritualmurder of one of the new king’s matrilineal kin. But they also entailed the compulsorymarriage of the ruler with a daughter of the aboriginal chief: she became the queen, evenas her father, the lord of the land, retained the permanent spiritual control of it in thenew dispensation. This, too, had been part of the foundational narrative, for althoughWene the foreign warrior could conquer the land, he found himself unable to rule itwithout submitting to it himself, that is, without the concurrence of the native chief.Thus the contractual aspect of the transfer of rule, the legitimation of the usurpation.Stricken with a debilitating illness, Wene had to abase himself before the indigenouschief and apply for a cure, the price of which was his acknowledgement of thelatter’s priority as the ‘elder’ and ‘grandfather’ of the kingship. Since then, the nativelords have kept the function of declaring the successors of deceased kings and transfer-ring the sovereignty to them. Although the Kongo installation rites apparently do notinclude the abusive treatment of the new ruler of the sort found elsewhere, there isone moment that similarly signifies his domestication – indeed his transformationfrom male conqueror to female nurturer. It is when he places a heavy iron chainwith many pendants around his neck – it is called the samba, a word meaning ‘toseize’ – and arranges the pendants on his back, ‘as a woman holds her child’. So ifthe king does not lose his transcendent powers, they must nevertheless be socialisedif he is to become the benefactor of the land. This is the dialectical work of the originalpeople, who master him as their enemy in order to acknowledge him as their ruler. Thecivilising mission goes both ways.

Summarising and at some risk generalising, in these stranger-kingships, two formsof authority and legitimacy coexist in a state of mutual dependence and reciprocal



incorporation. The native people and the foreign rulers claim precedence on differentbases. For the underlying people it is the founder-principle: the right of first occupancy– in the maximal case, the claim of autochthony. Earth-people by nature, often charac-terised as ‘the owners’, their inherent relation to the land gives them unique access tothe divine and ancestral sources of its productivity – hence their indispensable ‘reli-gious’ authority and ritual functions. But the stranger-kings trump these claims of pri-ority in aggressive and transgressive demonstrations of superior might, and thus takeover the sovereignty. Typically, then, there is some enduring tension between theforeign-derived royals and the native people. Invidious disagreements about legitimacyand superiority may surface in their partisan renderings of the founding narratives, eachclaiming a certain superiority over the other.

More than political, however, the conjunction here is cosmological, which is whathelps it endure. Perhaps it is only lately in human history that power became a purelysocial fact, as established by real-instrumental means of coercion – the way it seems tocontemporary Social Science. In the instance at hand, the foreign rulers are to the nativepeople in some such encompassing relation as the Celestial is to the Terrestrial, the Seato the Land, the Wilderness to the Settled; or in abstract terms, as the Universal is tothe Particular, a ratio that also holds for their respective gods. We see, then, why thenarratives of the original stranger hero function as all-round cultural constitutions: theunion with the other, which is also an elemental combination of Masculine andFeminine, gives rise to the society as a self-producing cosmic totality, if it does notalso restore a cosmogonic unity. On a specifically human plane, the same is replicatedin the legendary marriage of the god-like stranger with the native princess that syn-thesises their opposition in the dynastic line they initiate. But then, as a fruitful unionof socially and sexually differentiated persons, marriage itself demonstrates the principlethat the acquisition of alterity is the condition both of fertility and identity.

As in the founding anthropological charter that goes back to Levi-Strauss andEdmund Leach, unity is constituted by and as complementarity – though it mayentail regret for a forsaken autonomy. Hence the wild arguments I pursue in thispaper: most generally, that the social incorporation and distribution of external lifepowers is the elementary form of the political life, and that marital alliance is its experi-ential archetype. More especially, that the stranger-king polity is a developed expressionof these principles, stranger-kings being to the native peoples as affinal relatives are toconsanguines. All the critical features of the kingness of strangers – all the attributes ofhierarchy, temporality, conflicts of precedence, usurpation, assimilation of the other,life-giving and life-taking – are always already present in the complementary relationsof external affines to internal consanguines. In a way and as they say, all politics is local.

Somewhat paradoxically, I also say that the sources of political power are generallyforeign, drawn from realms beyond the self-governing community. Ranging from beaststo gods and ineffable forces – by way of the generic dead or the ancestors, of beingsembodied in creatures and features of heaven and earth, and of other peoples andtheir remarkable gifts – the extraordinary subjects and agents that control thehuman fate live outside the space of human control. More precisely, the lack ofcontrol translates as being-in-other-space. I am speaking of the so-called and misnamed‘supernatural’. I say misnamed because the term supposes ethnocentric concepts of‘nature’ and ‘natural’ – an autonomous world of soulless material things or Cartesianres extensa – ethnocentric concepts not pertinent to people who are engaged in a cosmic



society of interacting subjects, including a variety of non-human beings with the con-sciousness, soul, intentionality and other qualities of human persons. Admittedly, mynotions of the so-called ‘supernatural’ rest on simple-minded and old-fashionedpremises. I take the rather positivist and Malinowskian view that people must inreality depend for their existence on external conditions not of their own making –hence and whence the spirits. The going anthropological alternatives argue that divinityis some misrecognition of humanity. For Durkheim (1947), god is the misplaced appre-hension of the power of society, a power people surely experience but know not whenceit comes. For a certain Marxist anthropology, god is an alienated projection of people’sown powers of production and reproduction, an unhappy consciousness that has trans-ferred human self-fashioning to the deity. Such theories may address the morphology ofdivinity, whether as projection or mystification, but they do not tell us why society is setin a cosmos of beings invested with powers of vitality and mortality beyond any thathumans themselves know or control, produce or reproduce. Neither sense of false con-sciousness takes sufficient account of the generic predicament in the human condition:this dependence on sui generis forces of life and death, forces not created by humanscience or governed by human intentionality. If people really were in control of theirown existence, they would not die. Or fall ill. Nor do they control the biology ofsexual or agricultural generation. Or the weather on which their prosperity depends.Or, notably, the other peoples of their ken: peoples whose cultural existence may beenviable or scandalous, but by their very difference from themselves, proof of a trans-cendent capacity for life. Endowed with transcendent powers, the foreign is often anobject of desire – and by the same token, of danger.

‘If humans were immortal’, as Viveiros de Castro says, ‘perhaps society would beconfounded with the cosmos. Since death exists, it is necessary for society to be linkedwith something outside itself – and that it be linked socially to this exterior’. If so,society will be confounded with the cosmos in some measure, that is, insofar as peopleinteract with exterior beings of many kinds in the overcoming of human finitude. TheAmazonian peoples to whom Viveiros de Castro refers enter into external relations ofpredation, propitiation, reciprocity, spirit possession or some such means for harnessingthe being and powers of otherness to their own existence. Here are peoples with ‘a passionfor exteriority’, to the extent that the other is not so much a ‘mirror for man’ as a destinyand indeed an identity. This is not just a Hegelian or G.H. Meadian dialectic of knowingthe self from the responses of the other. Rather, as Philippe Erikson (1996:79) observes ofPano people, the incorporation of the powers of outsiders is an internal necessity of socialorder; hence the concept of the stranger ‘connotes not only the indispensable antagonistbut also serves as self-reference’. (One is reminded of the Plains Indian who told the eth-nographer that people need enemies in order to be happy.) The Jivaro, observes PhilippeDescola (2005: 467), find it necessary to ‘ceaselessly incorporate the bodies and identitiesof their neighbors in order to persist in being themselves’. Sustaining the life of thecommunity through the part-conflictual, part-ritual assimilation of the potent enemy:is this not stranger-kingship in another form?

For head-hunters in the Southeast Asian hinterlands, the structural resemblances areright on top. The transformation of potent enemies into local benefactors in thehead-hunting feasts of the Ifugao, Toraja, Iban, Land Dayak and Kayan, among thebetter-known, was documented some years ago in a seminal article by Robert McKinley(1976). Ritually domesticated, the warrior-powers of the victims were thus turned to



sustaining the lives and livelihood of the victors, prospering both agricultural productionand human reproduction. When formally sacrificed, as was common, the victims’ headsrendered these beneficent services as alter-egos of the victorious sacrifiers; that is, insofaras the offering is something of the victor’s self renounced in favour of the god. The enemyheads were then likely to be as honoured as they were previously reviled. Often they wereinstalled in special places in temples; offered food, rice wine or betel; perhaps kept warmwith fires on cold nights. By such means, Kayan people say, ‘those who were once ourenemies thereby become our guardians, our friends, our benefactors’ – the benefitsincluding bountiful harvests and immunity to illness. At the end of the Ifugao head-feast, the quondam enemy is enjoined to combat sickness, sorcery, famine, evil godsand the Ifugao’s own enemies – ‘For you’, they say, ‘have become one of us.’ Suggestively(of stranger-kingship) the name ‘Ifugao’ means ‘earth dweller’ and like other inlandSoutheast Asian groups, the Ifugao live at the centre of a cosmos that includes otherpeoples, upstream and downstream, who are something less and more than human.They are less because they are beyond the Ifugao pale, culturally as well as spatially:they are orang bukai, meaning approximately ‘people who are not people’. Yet they aremore than ordinary humans because they are closer to the gods of the still moredistant celestial and underworld realms. Ideally, it is in these distant worlds of godsthat heads should be sought, these being the most potent. But in practice heads aretaken from the enemy ‘people who are not people’ on the principle that they ‘aresimilar to spirits residing in strange and wild places’.

In a Toraja tradition of the origin of the head-feast, the hero indeed undertakes anarduous trip to the Upperworld to exact revenge on the killers of his parents, and thendescends to the Underworld to take the heads of his victims’ ghosts. Corollary Torajanarratives tell that the village of the head-hunter has been dead during his absencebut revives upon his triumphal return, and that the hero also brings home themagical daughter of his victim and marries her after the head-feast – thus transformingenemies into affines and marking their equivalence as reproductive agents. In sum, theToraja warrior returns from a cosmic exploit with a foreign subject (the head) andenhanced reproductive virtue (the wife) in order to give life to (revive) the wholesociety. Allowance made for the inversion of the stranger-king formation – the localhero who captures foreign power as opposed to the foreign prince whose power iscaptured locally – here is another modality of the same relationship. Indeed, de Josselinde Jong likened the initiation rites of Toraja head-hunters to the foundation narrative ofthe Negri Sembilan kingdom of the Malay peninsula by a Minangkabau hero fromSumatra.

The so-called ‘importing cultures’ of Melanesia similarly benefited by the appropriationof exterior powers, except that here it was in the form of the subjects embodied – or shouldwe say ensouled? – in the objects of intertribal exchange. To adopt a distinction recentlyproposed by Descola, these peoples rely more on reciprocity than predation. Yet by suchmeans they are equally absorbed in desires of alterity – the more so where hierarchicalrelations obtain among the interdependent peoples, as in the Sepik region of New Guineafocused on the dominant Iatmul, whose cultural forms are considered by their neighboursto be ‘surrounded by an aura of especially dangerous power, and are therefore valuable toacquire’ (Harrison 1990: 20). Insofar as the peripheral peoples have their own powers ofwildness, a certain mutually beneficial traffic in mystical effects links the Iatmul withothers in chains of reciprocal exchange. Like the exploits of the Toraja or Dayak head-taker,



these feats of appropriation from across the cultural border at once benefit the local societycollectively and redound to the status of those who pull them off. For many of the things soacquired are potent ritual items, including the spells used in productive work. The foreignprovenance of these things, perhaps even the original language of the spells and songs, is acondition of their efficacy. But then, for people like the Chambri studied by DeborahGewertz and Frederick Errington, foreignness may be a condition of their own being, asin the matter of their ancestry:

Indeed, the Chambri explicitly regard their society as based on borrowing. Theyassert that most of their ancestors were of foreign origin; they recognize withoutembarrassment that many of their rituals were acquired from the Iatmul alongwith much of their esoteric knowledge. (Errington and Gewerth 1986: 99)Chambri and their neighbors eagerly traded back and forth the ritual items thatconferred and evoked efficacy, such as flutes, masked figures, large rocks, and some-times ceremonial performances. Many of the incantations through which Chambriclans regulated portions of the immediate natural environment derive their potencyfrom polysyllabic names acquired from non-Chambri neighbors.

(Errington and Gewerth 1996: 16)

Note the retention of the marks of foreign origin. The incantations, flutes and therest are inalienable things, in the sense that they embody the person-qualities and extra-ordinary powers of the donors. The objects of exchange are beneficial agents. Like stran-ger-kings, they are in effect foreign subjects that by means of feats of derring-do enterinto the native society to promote its order and prosperity. Moreover, those who obtainthese life-enhancing powers by travelling and trading ventures beyond their borders gainrenown and prestige in their own right, which is to say, superiority among their ownpeople. Here again are structural equivalents of the stranger-king – where there areonly local big-men.

Foreign objects functioning as regalia and palladia have played critical roles in theconstitution of Southeast Asian sovereignties. To follow Heine-Geldern (1942), theroyal regalia were the real rulers of certain coastal Sulawesi kingdoms; the kingswere merely their agents. The kings, here heavenly strangers, were thus objectified sub-jects; the regalia, subjectified objects. Famous krises of Java and Bali, talking, acting andstriking of their own volition, have been known to convey the kingdom to strangerprinces. One that was sent from Majapahit in Java to a prince of that realm in Baliallowed him to pacify the island and establish the pre-eminent dynasty of Gelgel(Klungkung). In her excellent ethnography of Tanimbar in eastern Indonesia, SusanMcKinnon relates a cosmogonic tradition of similar import. After the initial reproduc-tive unity of heaven and earth was shattered by a culture hero of foreign origin – using aspear taken from the autochthonous people – humans were left in a kind of Hobbesiancondition, wandering the land in small groups, clashing with one another, while search-ing for access to the otherworldly powers that would allow them to create a fixedexistence. McKinnon relates what they were looking for:

Named heirloom valuables, acquired by the ancestors through actions that trans-cended the social order, became signs of the powers that lie before, beyond,outside and even against society, but also signs of the powers that underlie



society and constitute the very basis of its possibility. It was by forays into theheavens, the underworld, and lands beyond the horizon that these men appropriatedobjects of otherworldly power that would enable them to recompose their ownworld, the land within the horizon.

(McKinnon 1991: 62)

Note that a named heirloom, carrying thus a history of its ordering effects, is probablymore than a sign of external powers; it is, rather, an agent able to exercise such powers.Here again the mission civilisatrice of the external subject – or stranger-kingship beforethe letter.

Of course I am not claiming that differences between stranger-kings, head-huntersand local big-men – not to mention shamans, cult leaders, hereditary chiefs andleopard-skin chiefs – are inconsequential. Only that, as modes of political authority,they are structurally commensurable. All achieve their differential authority by theirinstantiation or command of external sources of vitality and mortality.

Moreover, I risk such generalities in part because they are consistent with the equallybroad and eclectically-documented treatises of Mary Helms on the politics of alterity inso-called ‘traditional societies’ (Helms 1988, 1993, 1998). I read Helms as mapping anideal-typical cosmography of power, focused as she says on ‘an organized, morallyinformed “cultured” social entity at the centre’, surrounded by a series of concentriczones populated by all manner of visible and invisible presences of exceptional potency(Helms 1993:7). Again, power is foreign to the socius it empowers. Certain cosmographiccomplexities aside, according to Helms there is a direct relation between remotenessfrom the centre and the potency of these supramundane presences. Extending verticallyfrom the heavens to the underworld and horizontally on the terrestrial plane, the beingsand forces of the exterior increase in ‘supernatural’ power in proportion to their distancefrom the human centre – even as, in the same measure, they escape human control. Still,there being death, they are not beyond human desire: which, I am saying, is what thepolitics of so-called ‘traditional societies’ is all about.

By that I mean internal competition as well as external adventure. Indeed exploitsundertaken beyond the border are privileged ways of achieving local status. This competitivemove to the outside is an extreme form of what Gregory Bateson (1958) has described as‘symmetrical schismogenesis’. Bateson cites the example of an arms race in which each sidetries to best the other by doing more of the same – on the principle of ‘anything you can do Ican do better’. At the extreme, however, competition in quantity is exchanged for differencein quality: one goes outside the box, trumping the adversary by shifting the terms of con-tention to means of another kind and greater value – such as introducing a new, devastatingweapon into the arms race. Even in so-called acephalous societies, the appropriation ofoutside potencies by hunters, shamans, warriors and traders bring them a certain differentialstanding in the community. The big-man politics of Melanesia and of chiefly potlatching innorthwest America are institutionalised systems of rivalry based on trafficking in externalspheres of power and renown. Likewise, the celebrated kula ring of the Massim (NewGuinea) is a great transcultural system for the circulation of potent social values, principallyin the form of shell ornaments. Nancy Munn (1986) has shown at length for Gawa islandhow extending one’s being in name and person abroad through success in the kula is thenrealised in authority at home. In this connection, European colonial expansion often didnot alter the character of indigenous politics – at least not initially – so much as it



greatly expanded the cosmography of potency, adding a new, transcendent arena from whichlocal powers-that-would-be extracted goods, identities and other novel means for achievingauthority within their own society.

During the early colonial period in Polynesia, local ruling chiefs became stranger-kings – by assuming foreign identities. This tactic of taking on the personae of Europeangreats was practised particularly by ambitious chiefs who could not claim by ancestry theauthority to which they now aspired by power and wealth – through means largelyacquired in trade with the foreigners they were pleased to imitate. Hardly 15 years hadpassed since Captain Cook’s death in Hawaii before the rival paramounts of the threemain islands had named their sons and heirs ‘King George’. In 1794, when he wasembarked on the unprecedented unification of the archipelago, the great Kamehamehaposted a man to the galley of one of Vancouver’s ships for the purpose of learninghow to cook. When Vancouver was preparing to leave, Kamehameha made severalrequests to the British to supply him with domestic furnishings and kitchen utensils.Master’s Mate Thomas Manby (1929: 46) comments in his Journal:

And now that he was in possession of the requisites for the table, a tolerable cookand every kind of implement for culinary purposes, the monarch boasted withevident pride and satisfaction that he should now live like King George.

Manby had already heard from a high priest that the Hawaiian ruling family traced itsdescent to white men who had come to the islands some generations before – a storyof an ultimate connection with Europeans of the kind told by many indigenous peoplesthe world over. Perhaps this genealogy played in Kamehameha’s addressing George IIIin a letter as ‘Dear Brother’. In the last years of Kamehameha’s reign, John AdamsKuakini was governor of Hawai’i Island, Cox Ke’eaumoku ruled Maui and Billy PittKalaimoku was the ‘Prime Minister’ of the Kingdom. These were not just sobriquetsbestowed on Hawaiians by Europeans for their own amusement. Kalaimoku insisted onbeing called ‘Pitt’, and the casket in which Ke’eamoku was buried in 1824 was simplyinscribed ‘Cox’. Also to be seen in Honolulu in those days were Billy Cobbet, GeorgeWashington, Charley Fox, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Napoleon Bonaparte.This kind of identification with powerful others is interesting in light of the question,of urgency especially to historians, of whether traditions of immigrant kingship actuallyhappened, or at least reflect such happenings in a fantastical way. The suggestion of thishistory is: not necessarily. As indigenously formulated, stranger-kingship may be a struc-ture without an event.

Of course, in a more general sense, the contingent advent of powerful strangersseems a necessary condition for claims of foreign provenience, identity or genealogyon the part of indigenous rulers. The intervention may take the form of European colo-nialism as in the Hawaiian case, but may also arise in some other globalising process, suchas the Persian and Arab participation in Indian Ocean trade that brought Alexander theGreat to the Malay Peninsula. Likewise, the mode of stranger-kingship constituted byimmigrant rulers who claim descent from long-lost native ancestors – like the rulingKafika clan of Tikopia or the Abahinda kings of Ankole – may develop without thebenefit of European colonialism. In any event, as has been said of the origins of Sumatranrajas in Rum, the irruptions from other worlds add a new and transcendent dimension ofpower to their own, offering unprecedented opportunities for magnifying native rule by



grafting it on to a hegemony of greater scale and authority. Fijians of the 19th centurysimilarly told of comings of their ruling lineages from Tanganyika, Egypt, Turkestan,Turkey, and/or the Malay peninsula – an innovation on older traditions of chieflyorigins in Tonga. Incongruous only in our own eyes, such narratives have been subjectof a small industry in historical debunking, if not just pooh-poohing, on the part ofwestern scholars – too often at the expense of ethnological understanding.

Whether by means of outside rulers who become insiders or insider rulers whobecome outsiders, the politics of so-called ‘traditional societies’ aims to invert Helmsiancosmography by accumulating ‘supernatural’ resources at the centre and bringing them,and hence the world, under human control. Rather than increasing in proportion to dis-tance, divine power is concentrated in an axis mundi at the heart of the kingdom, whenceit is diffused outwards in progressively diminishing degrees. At the hierarchical extremeare imperial systems governed by rulers of universal pretensions, such as the BuddhistChakkavati King of Kings, the Persian Achmaenid dynasts of similar description or theChinese Ruler of All Under Heaven, potentates who fashion their hegemony in the formof cosmocracy. By means of a bureaucracy that extends their presence as well as theirpower, these cosmocrators synthesise the ontological and theological dualisms thatmark stranger-king polities to produce a distinctive system of totalised and centralisedrule. No particular authority or ritual privilege remains to the underlying people on thebasis of their indigeneity. They are an unmarked demos, whereas the king detains thepowers of heaven and earth both. J. Gonda (1966: 81) tells of the consecrationceremonies of the ancient Vedic king, wherein:

Placing his feet on the earth he pronounces formulas in which he declares himself tobe established on, or to find support in, the sky and the earth, in both kinds ofbreath, in day and night, in food and drink, in brahma and ksatra – that is to say,in the highest complementary pairs in the universe.

Or consider this oft-cited Confucian text from the Han dynasty:

Those who invented writing in ancient times drew three [horizontal] lines andconnected them [vertically] through the middle, calling the character ‘king.’ Thethree lines are Heaven, Earth and Man, and that which passes through the middlejoins the principles of all three. Occupying the center of Heaven, Earth and Manpassing through and joining all three – if he is not the king, who can do this?

(Granet 1968: 264)

By their privileged relations to world-encompassing gods – whether by descent, incarna-tion or superior virtue – such rulers would finally overcome human finitude by confoundingtheir polis with the cosmos and submitting both to their own agency. They represent andcondense the universe in their royal palaces, cosmopolitan courts, exotic regalia and foreigntributes – including all manner of monsters and wonders collected from the world periph-eries. These tributary products, ensouled with the wild potency of the hinterland peoples,thus empowered their imperial recipients. Edward Schafer observed that the incense fromSoutheast Asia wafting through the T’ang Emperor’s court ‘marked the presence of theroyal afflatus, breathing supernatural wisdom through the worlds of nature and humanaffairs’. In the formal levees of the ministers, a ‘table of aromatics’ was placed before



the Son of Heaven. ‘The great councilors of state then stood before the table and, perfusedwith the magical fragrance, proceeded to conduct the business of state’ (Schafer 1963:155–56). Inhaled by the court officials, the scent of sandalwood from Borneo insinuatedthe virtuous presence of the emperor into their own persons, whence it was realised inimperial statecraft and spread through the world.

Just so, another Confucian scholar, writing in Qing times, reflected on a certainEuropean emperor of long before:

During the T’ang dynasty, Charlemagne, a wise and learned man, gifted with civiland military talents, became Emperor of the Germans and the French. His fame andvirtue spread far afield, and all the barbarians submitted to him.

(Wang 1967: 123)

The text refers to the civilising mission of the Emperor: his transmission of celestialorder to All Under Heaven by means of his wisdom and virtue – backed, if need be,by military strength. The cosmocracies not only accumulate other-worldly power butgenerate a dynamics of its circulation, which is to say a dynamics of cultural constitution.Politico-spiritual power moves outward by such means as main force and proxy forms ofthe emperor’s presence, while it is drawn inward from the ‘barbarian’ peripheries by theforce of attraction of the imperial centre.The attraction lies in the competitive uses theperipheral peoples can make of their contact with this power – thereby sending it out-wards again to order the hinterland. Richard von Glahn relates that long after thefamous Shu Han minister, Zhuge Liang, pacified certain ‘barbarians’ along China’ssouthwestern marches, the subdued peoples continued to give him a place amongtheir own deities. According to local traditions, moreover, ‘their chieftains’ bronzedrums, the universal symbol of authority in the southwest, originally were bestowedby Zhuge Liang’ (von Glahn 1987). Such honours were even paid to Zhuge Liang inareas he never actually conquered or visited, thus by local people on their own initiative,in the interest of giving their authority a Chinese cachet. Magnus Fiskesjo (2000: 85)tells of ‘Sinicized local potentates’ on the southwestern frontier in more recentperiods ‘who came to discard their original non-Chinese names and take Chineseones, in order to claim Chinese ancestry, or even traced a purely invented ancestryto those specific Chinese conquerors who had imposed civilization in ancient times’– like the European ancestors of Hawaiian chiefs. Just as the potency of imperialcentres is sustained by tributes from the peripheries, so conversely do cosmocraticrulers empower and ‘civilise’ the tributary peoples – thereby becoming strategicsources of the rise of local chiefs and the advent of stranger-kings.

The effect is the de facto organisation of the planet in regional systems of greater andlesser polities focused on powerful apical states from which the others derive their ownlegitimacy – and often enough their ruling dynasty. Or else the more distant places refertheir ruling groups to tertiary and secondary centres, while the ancient primary king-ship, perhaps superseded, persists only in historical memory. Common around theworld are political genealogies tracing the descent of recent kingdoms to ancestralnames to conjure with: Toltec, Teotihuacan, Funan, Champa, Sina (China), Majapahit,Rum (Byzantium, Turkey), Ife, Lunda, Zande, Troy, Mycenae and so forth – althoughas Janet Hoskins (1993: 35) comments of the similar claims of eastern Indonesian



aristocrats, ‘it could hardly be that all the peoples of the outer islands were descendedfrom exiled Javanese princes’.

Anthropologists will recognise here the process of ‘secondary state formation’ asdescribed by Morton Fried (1967) and its effects in the form of ‘galactic polities’ asdescribed by Stanley Tambiah (1976). Ethnographically they will be reminded ofEdmund Leach’s observations in The political systems of highland Burma of the continuumof political and ritual forms stretching from imperial China through the Burmese king-doms and Shan states to the Kachin Hills chiefdoms (gumsa), becoming progressively lesselaborate as they move from the imperial heartland to the mountain hinterland. Inrecording how some Kachin leaders ‘become Shan’, Leach also presented anotherinstance of local people fashioning themselves as prestigious foreigners. More recently,Magnus Fiskesjo (2000) has documented how certain Shan princes, who themselves heldtitles (tusi) of indirect rule from the Chinese, displaced and subordinated the autochtho-nous Wa peoples in the irrigable lowlands of the Yunnan-Burma borderlands by means ofa classic stranger-king arrangement. The marriage of a daughter of the native chief to theimmigrant Shan prince sealed the Wa retreat to the highlands and their tributaryrelations to the Shan, even as it perpetuated certain ritual functions of the Wa in thelowlands, including their sometime participation in the installation ceremonies ofShan rulers. From these and other sources, we also know that the galactic systemsare often marked by war and instability, especially where there are conflicting claimsof universal domination among powerful neighbouring states or between the cosmocra-tors and their major vassals. In any case, the galactic polities generate regional ecumenesof power that are at the same time hierarchies of cultural order. The combined action ofcosmocratic ambitions at the centre and upward mobility at the peripheries amounts to apolitics of acculturation in which the circulation of concepts, objects, persons and evenreligions is effected through the tactical pursuit of the potency of alterity.

In the event, the hinterlands of the galactic systems are breeding grounds of stranger-kingships – as I will continue to illustrate, all too summarily, from Southeast Asia. Theoutlying island and inland peoples of the region present an interesting array of politicalvariations on the common dualistic theme of foreign-derived rulers and indigenous‘owners’. As in Africa and elsewhere, the parvenu outsiders overturn the principle of super-iority on the basis of temporal priority by which the native people were and are organised.Typically associated with a complementary division of cultural labours – the immigrantstaking political office, the original owners controlling the cult of the land – the twosectors are integrated in various degrees, in more or less direct relation to their distancefrom the great historical kingdoms of the mainland and nearby large islands. Some outlyingareas (Gayo, Sumba, Tanimbar, Mambai, Toraja, etc.) know a sort of colonial status, withcertain local officials appointed by a dominant neighbouring potentate, principally to collecttributes. In the more peripheral reaches, the ruling group and the native people do notcomprise anything like a unified society. Ethnically distinct and geographically separated,they constitute a transcultural stranger-kingship – held together not so much by thepower of the distant foreigners as by the indigenous people’s desire to acquire some of it.

The so-called ‘tribal’ peoples of the region are well known for actively seeking themeans of their own life enhancement and political advancement by voyages of derring-doto remote centres of power, wealth and order. Often involving trading and raiding alongthe way, the voyages culminated in tributary gift-exchanges with the foreign ruler. Inolden times, the foreign centre may have been a secondary or tertiary focus of a galactic



polity; more recently, it was a European colonial outpost; and now it is a modern coastalcity where wage labour and market exchange have replaced traditional tributaryrelations. Aside from heads and plunder taken on the journey, the trophies of theseborder-transcending exploits included titles and goods bestowed by the foreign ruler,embodiments of his agency that function to extend it in space and time. The bejalaior journeys of young Dayak men to the coastal centres of Sarawak and beyond areclassic ethnographic examples. J.H. Walker (2002: 20) writes of them:

Many of the goods acquired through bejalai were themselves sources of potency.Antique jars, for example, were credited with supernatural powers and healingvirtues and would thereby contribute to the potency of the community to whichthey were taken. Moreover, the successful accumulation of prestige goodsand other wealth would indicate, in itself, an increase in spiritual powers, statusand strength.

This passage is taken from Walker’s book on James Brooke, the famous ‘white rajah ofSarawak’, a work that among other virtues has the merit of showing how successivewaves of European colonials have been incorporated in long-standing local practicesof capturing external spiritual authority. For the Iban and other interior peoples ofSarawak, Brooke was a source of attraction of the kind the Chinese literati attributedto the Celestial Emperor – and Charlemagne. Indeed only the Chinese settlers ofSarawak – who precisely had their own imperial traditions and ancient gods – wereimmune to the powerful virtue (semangat) the native peoples sought from contactwith Brooke. Some Iban considered Brooke the son of their ancestral mother andfather – hence a recuperation in his own person of a lost cosmogonic unity. Otherssay he was not the son of the ancestress, Kumang, but her lover – thus a repetitionof the topos of the stranger-king who marries the indigenous princess and becomesruler of the land. On a visit to a certain interior group, Rajah Brooke and the Bishopof Sarawak were received by an old woman who proceeded to wash their feet incoconut milk, which she then set aside for steeping the rice seed before planting.Others ‘brought portions of cooked rice in leaves and begged the Englishman to spiton them, after which they ate them up, thinking they should be better for it’(Walker 2002: 116). Although it is sometimes claimed that the notion of the Europeanas native god is just an imperialist fiction, one wonders if western art did not followindigenous life in the matter of Conrad’s Lord Jim, and Heart of Darkness, and Kipling’sThe Man Who Would Be King.

If the Sarawak people thus absorbed semangat from the European raja, at the easternextreme of Indonesia the Biak islanders absorbed the Islamic equivalent, barak, from theSultan of Tidore in the Moluccas. The sultan claimed a certain sovereignty as far as thecoasts and offshore islands of western New Guinea. The voyages of Biak people fromoffshore New Guinea to the Moluccas were proof enough of the sultan’s reach – oras the Chinese might say, of his virtue. Trading and sometimes raiding as they went,the Biak carried tribute to the sultan and returned with the mana-like barak ensouledin his goods and his person, having been accorded gifts of the former and the privilegeof prostrating before the latter. One may judge the boost thus given to the Biak people’sown status by their transmission of this power upon their return through handshakeswith their relatives – who proceeded to rub their own faces with it. In her excellent



ethnography of Biak, Danilyn Rutherford (2003) provides a detailed analysis of howthese foreign journeys and prestige goods were engaged in the local politics of distinc-tion, notably through affinal relationships.

Internally, Biak politics is played out in the long-term exchanges between houses orpatrilineages allied by marriage, between wife-givers and wife-takers. Considered as themale side and superior as donors of life to their affines, the wife-givers distinctively putforeign wealth into these transactions, as against the foods presented by the female and sub-ordinate wife-takers. The exchanges, which were both collective and individual, provided anarena in which men could differentially make their names by gifts of prestigious foreignobjects in support of their out-married sisters’ children – thus testifying to their feats ofappropriating valuables from abroad. At the same time, the foreign wealth acquired fromtheir mothers’ brothers distinguished these children as valued persons in their own right.For they were endowed by the agency of the foreign goods with special talents, not leastbeing those that gave sisters’ sons unusual gifts of love-making – again, reproductivevirtues – and the ability to raid the lands of foreigners themselves. Such achievementscould even earn sisters’ sons the honourable status of amben or ‘foreigner’: a term Biakuse for Europeans and Indonesians of other parts, but also for their own elite of civil servants,soldiers, pastors and village chiefs. If in Sarawak, foreigners can become local elites, in Biakpeople of standing can become foreigners – a domestic integration of the stranger-kingideology of the kind we have seen elsewhere.

Affines as life-giving outsiders: clearly we need another amendment of Helms’s modelof ‘supernatural power’ increasing by social distance. It will help explain this fundamentalcontradiction – the common conflation of intimate affinal relatives with remote cosmicpowers – which Helms recognises at length but for which she does not provide an effectiveconceptual place. ‘Certain categories of people’, she writes, ‘especially affines (in-laws), areassociated with the cosmographically charged outside world and, therefore, convey distinc-tive supernaturally informed qualities associated with the wider cosmos’ (Helms 1993: xii).(Especially interesting in the present connection would be the symbolic assimilation of brideand groom to royalty in marriage ceremonies, a phenomenon to which Hocart (1927)devoted a chapter of his work on Kingship, including examples of ritualised marriage-by-capture that in effect replicate the foundation narratives of stranger-kingship). Helmsnotes that the series of concentric zones surrounding the social nucleus in the ideal-typical cosmos is generated by a recursive opposition of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, each exteriorzone being ‘outside’ to the ‘inside’ zones it encompasses. But she does not explore the struc-tural dimension that is critical for the present discussion: precisely that this is a nested seg-mentary system of social categories, the outer and greater ones including the lesser andinner ones. Hence ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ are relative and contextual terms, their use depend-ing on the familiar principle of segmentary opposition. Other houses in my village are out-siders in relation to my own, but they are insiders relative to other villages of my tribe orlanguage-group, although all of these are again insiders relative to other tribes, etc. Underthis structural condition, direct proportionate relations, as between geographical distanceand other-worldly power, must be qualified, since ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ do not representdeterminate positions on a linear scale. Different social zones at various distances may bemeaningfully conflated as ‘inside’ or ‘outside’, to the extent that certain outsiders withinthe home community, most particularly kinsmen by marriage, are identified with distantand foreign peoples – and even with gods. ‘The other’, Vivieros de Castro says ofArawete, ‘is first and foremost an affine’, including in that category guests, friends,



foreigners, allied communities, trade partners, forest spirits, certain animals and, ashusbands of the female dead, the gods themselves. Not incidentally, a lot of structuralistanalysis rides on this sort of segmentary relativity, insofar as it provides the logical oppor-tunity for categorical equations between different cultural registers, as between affinity,polity and cosmology. It is the actual sociology of seeming metaphor.

The outsider or stranger, then, is a qualitative relation of difference rather than aquantitative distinction of distance. In Tanimbar, there are strangers even within thenatal house: namely the daughters destined to reproduce the houses of affinal others.McKinnon (1991) reports that when a child is born, the inevitable question of its sexis here phrased as ‘stranger or house master?’ As in the old Roman law, a daughter isthe terminus of the family. However, one may judge her beneficial value to Tanimbarwife-takers, by McKinnon’s report that a pregnant woman ‘is often compared to aboat that makes a long-distance journey and returns to land laden with valuables’.Here again, direct relationships with affinal others take on the character of mysticalencounters with distant others. More particularly, the affinal relationship is the experi-ential ground cum social enactment of people’s dependence for their own existence onexternal sources they do not control.

But precisely in the form of marriage people do engage and transact such externallife powers, and in the children of the marriage they assimilate the outside in themselves.In the classic statement on these matters, Edmund Leach (1961: 2) wrote:

In any system of kinship and marriage, there is a fundamental ideological oppositionbetween the relations which endow the individual with membership in a ‘we group’ofsome kind (relations of incorporation), and those other relations which link ‘ourgroup’ to other groups of like kind (relations of alliance) and that, in this dichotomy,relations of incorporation are distinguished symbolically as relations of commonsubstance, while relations of alliance are viewed as metaphysical influence.

Commenting on this passage, Vivieros de Castro (2004) notes that the so-calledmetaphysical influence of affines may also be transmitted by substantial connections(as between mother’s brother and sister’s son in cross-cousin marriage). Nor are theconsubstantial relations of the ‘we-group’ necessarily without metaphysical powers,for example first-born sons in many Polynesian societies who are in effect first-fruitofferings to the group’s ancestors and accordingly hedged in taboos. Yet thereremains a critical metaphysical opposition between ‘relations of incorporation’ andthose of ‘alliance’, or as de Castro characterises the two sides, relations based on simi-larity and those founded on difference – or then again, for simplicity and comparativeutility, relations of consanguinity and affinity.

If gods in the Amazon are in certain contexts affines, in Oceania certain affines areconflated with gods. Hocart spoke of the Fijian kinship system as ‘a whole theology’.The phrase is particularly apposite for the key affinal relationship of mother’s brotherand sister’s son. Ritually and effectively in ordinary practice, the privileged uterinenephew steals the sacrifice offered to the god of his mother’s brother’s people. Heusurps the place of the mother’s brother’s god: thus the sacred respect he is accordedby his mother’s people and the powers he assumes over their possessions. As a theology,then, the affinal kinship practice is also politics. In Fijian traditions, as we have seen,dynasties are typically founded by a stranger-prince who marries the daughter of the



chief of the original people, a union that gives rise to a royal heir who is the sister’s soncum living god of the land. By contrast, among Kedang of eastern Indonesia, wherewife-givers are superior to wife-receivers, one’s mother’s brother, reports J.R.Barnes (1977: 22), ‘is spoken of and regarded as a god’; for ‘through the gift of hissister he has presented Ego’s patriline with new life, the means of continuing itsexistence’.

So to repeat and conclude: my argument is that the affinal relationship is the archetypeof stranger-king politics. Of course the incest taboo is the more fundamental condition,inasmuch as it requires that life is gained from and lost to the outside, thus establishingthe basic correspondence between the human ontological and sociological predicaments:the dependence on external sources of existence. But then, I claim, stranger-kingship is adeveloped political expression of the same. Its attributes are found in nuce in the oppositionbetween consanguinity as constituted relations of being and affinity as formative relations ofbecoming – a description that would equally apply to the difference between the nativepeople and their foreign rulers. As a Fijian once put it to me: ‘Brothers are only brothers,but the sister’s child is a new path [of kinship] . . . Brothers are only in the house; they havebeen there from the past to today. But the descent of my sister is a new line’. Effectively, thisholds even in the case of marriage within prescribed kinship categories. Notice too thedifference in temporality. Consanguines are original as well as forever, as contrasted tothe in-marrying people, a difference also of nature and contract. Like the native peoplein the stranger-king polity, the consanguinal group are generally localised and stable, the‘owners’ of their ancestral sites in contrast to their in-coming, late-coming affines. Alsolike the original owners of the kingdom, the consanguineal group is ordered by temporalpriority, by the authority of the seniors in age or in descent, if not also the ancestors, ascompared to the current privileges acquired by arriviste affines.

Then there is the intrinsic ranking effected by marital alliance. Marriages create thegreatest of advantages and disadvantages in transferring generative powers from onegroup to another – simultaneous exchanges of sisters or brothers excluded. At leasttemporarily, the relationship between affines and consanguines is unbalanced. Theinequality may be reversible or reproducible, depending on the marriage rule. It mayfavour the wife-givers as in island Southeast Asia or the wife-takers as in Fiji or North-west America: the former by virtue of the irredeemable debt of life-powers; the latterby the capture thereof. But in any case, there is a critical element of inequality, thus arelationship at once contractual and conflictual.

Yet if the affines represent contradictory and transgressive principles of relationship,they nevertheless order the consanguineal group. I revive another old chestnut fromstructural-functional anthropology: lineage mates are differentiated by their respectiveaffinal connections. External alliances become points of segmentation among consan-guines, thus imposing from the outside a discontinuous ordering of the diffuse solidarityof relations by common descent. Here again is identity made by the assimilation of alter-ity, the way that patrilateral kinsmen are distinguished by their respective matrilateralaffiliations. Moreover, as we have seen, the status of senior affinal relatives as sourcesof a child’s life is commonly associated with their endowing him or her with life-enhancingmeans and talents. In practice this means providing the children of their out-marryingmembers with ritual and material services that again distinguish them as valued socialbeings. Like the benefits conveyed by the stranger-king, persons are differentiated andprospered by their outsider-affines – which is also to say, they are thus organised and



civilised. And on the negative side, perhaps nothing resembles the blasting powers ofkingship so much as the curse of the senior affinal relative.

My modest conclusion is that the elementary forms of kinship, politics and religionare all one.

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31865771 Marshall Sahlins Elementary Forms of the Politics of Life