The Character of Kingship

Declan Quigley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000190045
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Why has monarchy been such a prevalent institution throughout history and in such a diverse range of societies? Kingship is at the heart of both ritual and politics and has major implications for the theory of social and cultural anthropology. Yet, despite the contemporary fascination with royalty, anthropologists have sorely neglected the subject in recent decades. This book combines a strong theoretical argument with a wealth of ethnography from kingships in Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Quigley gives a timely and much-needed overview of the anthropology of kingship and a crucial reassessment of the contributions of Frazer and Hocart to debates about the nature and function of royal ritual. From diverse fieldwork sites, a number of eminent anthropologists demonstrate how ritual and power intertwine to produce a series of variations around myth, tragedy and historical realities. However, underneath this diversity, two common themes invariably emerge: the attempt to portray kingship as timeless and perfect, and the dual nature of the king as sacred being and scapegoat.

—1— Introduction: The Character of Kingship

Declan Quigley

Kingship's Leitmotif

Kingship is a unique principle of political organization in that it straddles societies of every type apart from the very simplest hunter–gatherer communities. Clearly not all societies where kingship is present can have historical or cultural connections to each other since they range from small Pacific islands through the classic cases of sub-Saharan Africa to the complex city-kingdoms of south and southeast Asia to modern European democracies. The structural basis of this kind of organization must therefore be found in conditions that are very widespread in human societies. It is undeniable that many countries today function perfectly well without a monarch. And yet, in a great many others, a sizeable proportion of the population clings to the idea that kingship provides an indispensable mechanism for transcending political division and underwriting stability and harmony. While some consider that the symbolic function served by kings and queens has become redundant in the contemporary world, for others this symbolic function is as indispensable as ever because no other form of political authority comes close to providing such a ‘shared symbol of a sacred authority above politics or personal power’.¹

Certain contemporary misconceptions impede the understanding of kingship and to get to the heart of the institution we must go beyond these. In our own historical experience and imagination we are so accustomed to the encapsulation of kingship within states that we can scarcely conceive of kingship as being something other than political. We see the modern monarch occupying a position within the overarching political machinery of the state and we thus conceive of this individual as playing a political role. But kingship has its roots in the pre-modern world, and it is only by looking at that world that we can see clearly that kings reign rather than rule, and that their function is as much ritual as political. As Scubla puts it below, paraphrasing Frazer: ‘To reign does not mean to govern or to give orders, but to guarantee the order of the world and of the society by observing ritual prescriptions.’ Kingship is an institution that develops its full reality in a world where the political has not emerged as an autonomous sphere from the ritual. With the skilful guidance of the contributors to this volume, the reader will be able to transport his or her imagination beyond the layer that the state – the agency that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence – has added to the societies with which they are likely to be more familiar.

Another common misconception about kingship is the idea that one country has one monarch. As the chapters below demonstrate, this is generally not the case in Asia and Africa and the Pacific, and indeed the norm is that there is competition and fragmentation with kingship being devolved throughout the society’s nobility insomuch as the quality of kingship inherent in any particular office is relative to that office. This is seen particularly clearly in Drucker-Brown’s chapter on northern Ghana, below, where she shows that the quality that is embodied in kingship – naam – is transmitted to each chief by the king when they in turn are installed. The British concept of nobility, with all its dukes and marquises and so on, echoes this refraction of the monarchy. In fact, it is not just nobility that is in the image of kingship. The mechanisms, which permit the setting apart of the king, are replicated in all status positions. We are, perhaps, misled by expressions such as ‘the divine king’ and ‘the king is dead, long live the king’. It is kingship – not the king – that is sacred (the divinity of kings is an ethnographic oddity), so the chant should be: ‘The king is dead, long live the kingship’ as Evans-Pritchard (1962: 84) and other anthropologists have pointed out.

A third misconception is the tendency to identify nobility and royalty with opulence that is beyond the reach of common people but which could, in principle, be accessible to others if only they had the means of generating sufficient wealth. Royalty is not fundamentally about material privilege. It is perfectly possible to be extremely wealthy and have no connection to royalty or nobility whatsoever – though it is an interesting fact that people who have accumulated wealth or power very frequently try to convert it into status through marriage to people of more noble pedigree.

Royalty and nobility are essentially about separation. While this may convey privilege from one perspective, the comparative ethnographic literature from Africa and elsewhere suggests a rather different picture. Simonse in this volume nicely describes kingship as a drama in which there are ‘two principal protagonists’: the king and the people. More often than not the king is portrayed as a kind of prisoner of the people and of the institution of kingship, hemmed in by numerous taboos that severely restrict his behaviour (Evans-Pritchard 1962: 79; Fortes 1968: 6). It would seem that the idea is not just that the monarch’s behaviour should be seen to be distinctive: there appears to be a frequent desire to separate him or her from the earth quite literally. The king of the Mamprusi in Ghana, for example, while called ‘the owner of the world’ (Drucker-Brown 1992: 75), is confined to his palace and forbidden from touching the earth: ‘the skins of animals sacrificed at his enthronement must always be placed between the earth and his feet’ (de Heusch 1997: 222). Indeed this separation is sometimes taken to its logical limit when, during the rites of enthronement, a form of symbolic death takes place. That is to say, the king is symbolically killed at the very moment he is installed, making him into ‘a living dead man’ (de Heusch 1997: 218; 1982: 24). He is thus categorically separated first from his own kin, then from all other mortals.

The underlying preoccupation here seems to be a desire to pre-empt the natural death of the monarch by making culture more powerful than nature. This idea is endlessly repeated during the king’s reign. One does not simply assume the kingship at the installation ceremony; one must continually live up to its heavy demands. Should the king evade, or fail in, his responsibilities, he can expect at least to be ostracized (a social or symbolic death) if not literally to be put to death. Other attempts to make culture override nature include being confined to the palace at night, being obliged to be carried everywhere, having the space around the royal personage as free as possible from contamination, being dressed in special clothes, being housed in special kinds of residences, and being prevented from talking or being addressed in the same manner as ordinary people. All of these features are, of course, still prominent in the way in which royals are treated today. Imagine, for example, that the Queen of England decided one day to go jogging in Hyde Park wearing a torn T-shirt, or if, on some great ceremonial occasion, she substituted a Harley-Davidson motorcycle for her Rolls Royce or carriage and horses. There is no doubt that this would cause a great deal of upset, even panic. If she decided one evening to ‘hang out’ at a local bar for a few hours downing copious amounts of alcohol, this would also undoubtedly affront those who have a certain conception of the dignity of her office – which is most of us. Yet everyone else can go running in the park wearing whatever they want and nobody will pay the slightest bit of attention, and if anyone else has a pint of beer too many, nobody will be too upset. Why?²

The most common answer – because she is the queen and everybody else is nobody in particular – is tautological and gets us nowhere. Another common answer – that it is a question of heredity – does not get us any further. If the queen were automatically the queen because of her pedigree, then we would not need all the ritual palaver that surrounds her. We would not need archbishops and ministers and various ‘people-in-waiting’, all with their very particular roles. Conversely, in most places heredity is clearly not an automatic qualification if the heir is a lunatic. In the United Kingdom today, to be a Catholic or to marry a divorced woman presents intractable difficulties to an otherwise legitimate heir. Clearly something more than heredity is at stake here.

The answer ‘because she is the hereditary queen’ would not explain why we need to make the monarch dress up in clothes which would look ridiculous on anyone else and which are so heavy that they impede her movement. It would not explain why she and her consort are made to eat sleep-inducing eight-course dinners. It would not explain why she has to open each session of parliament, nor why she has to do so in a very formal manner, surrounded by a great variety of functionaries. Why could not a famous actor, or comedian or glamour model or footballer be hired for the day to simply bang a gavel and shout, ‘Right, let’s get on with it!’?

The fundamental idea underlying kingship is the separation of one human being from others. Being set apart is the very crux of the institution. The ways in which this is achieved may appear ridiculous, and sometimes perversely deviant, because they depart so radically from convention. But this is the point: if kings could not be distinguished very easily from ordinary people, then how would we know that they were kings?

The leitmotif of this separation is the recurrence of a bundle of highly ritualized elements revolving around regicide. This bundle appears consistently wherever the institution is found, regardless of historical era or geographical location.³ By ‘bundle’ is meant that these highly ritualized features are systematically related to each other as a package: each of the features only makes sense in terms of the others. In isolation they frequently appear so arbitrary as to be ridiculous to the outside eye – for example, that a monarch may only be addressed in an extraordinarily formalized way, must live in a kind of dwelling that no-one else would live in, and must, on occasion, wear clothes that clearly serve some purpose other than covering or protection. A nice illustration is given by Drucker-Brown below when she refers to a description of the Asantahene king: ‘so weighted with gold objects that courtiers needed to help him move his body’.

The central issue in the anthropology of kingship is understanding how an individual is extracted from the kinds of economic, political and kinship relations that ‘ordinary’ people also find themselves in, and made into a person (or non-person) who is literally extraordinary – outside conventional society – by using the cultural device of an installation ritual. It is not difficult to see that culture consists of a never-ending series of rituals. It may be less obvious that all rituals are a kind of installation ritual, though this is less obscure than might at first appear. The purpose of all ritual is either to transform a person from one status to another or to maintain him in that status. It amounts to the same thing – the overriding of nature by culture. Without ritual – which is inherently transformative and repetitive – changes of identity and their maintenance are impossible. The process begins for all human beings immediately following birth when the newborn baby is immediately transformed from being a natural entity into a social/cultural entity. Thereafter, successive rituals progressively add new social/cultural identities or seek to deny natural change by recharging an established identity, i.e. repeating the initial installation. A status change made through an initial transformation will lapse unless it is continually reinvigorated by a repetition of the original ritual.

The mechanisms involved in establishing and maintaining everyday identities are often opaque both because of their complexity and because they frequently involve a great deal of concealment and deception. This is partly because changes in social status always involve shifts in power, and partly because such changes are generally embarrassing for the parties involved because of the readjustment in relations that is brought about. With royal installation ritual, however, the transformative process must be clear. Because the kingship belongs to all the people, the inauguration is necessarily very public. And because this particular installation is of concern to all, the steps involved – such as the placing of a crown on the monarch’s head by a bishop, or a proclamation to the effect that the king belongs to all the people and not just to his own family – are transparent.⁴ Few people care if, one day, I cease to regard my brother as my brother by failing to observe the appropriate rituals that distinguish him from other males around me – i.e. which repeatedly install him in that role. However, most people in any given society will care if, one day, the prime minister announces that henceforth there is to be a new king but that there will be no ceremony to mark the installation and no further ritualized markers to keep reminding us who the king is. And most people will mind even more if an individual one day proclaims himself king simply by virtue of his greater force – unceremoniously, as we say.

In either of the above eventualities, people will express their concern for the simple reason that the king is that individual who is uniquely connected to everyone in the society. That is the king’s function. Unlike everyone else, who connect only to some people through kinship and marriage or via various political and economic mechanisms, the king has a relationship with everyone. In order for this to be possible, the mechanism that connects the king to his people is unlike the mechanisms that make other relations possible. It transcends kinship and marriage as well as conventional politics and economics. The essence of the identities given by religion, economics, politics or kinship (without a ‘g’) is that some people are united to each other by separating them from yet others. The essence of kingship, however, is that everyone is united by his or her common relation to the king.

All relationships depend on ritual in order to make those connected into something that they were not before. But the king’s relation to his people is unique in relying on ritual alone to separate him from the world since his function requires him precisely to stand apart as a perfect being who is separated from the contaminating concerns of ordinary people and the political and economic mechanisms which allow these concerns to be acted out. It is not for nothing that kingship is surrounded by constant ritual and it is a mistake to perceive this as ‘mere pomp and ceremony’ in the sense of a superstructural gloss on materialist realities, or icing on the cake. It is the cake. The ritual must be continually repeated because as soon as it stops the king becomes sucked into the mundane world of intrigue and poison.

All royal ritual thus flows around two interconnected paradoxes. The first is that the king is simultaneously united to, yet separated from, all of his people. To be made king through the transformative act of an installation ritual is to be made into a figure who is at the very centre of society and yet must simultaneously be removed from it. The second paradox is that the king should always be pure yet can only be so for the instant after a purification ritual is performed. Since the king is, as a matter of fact, immersed in social relations like everyone else, he partakes of the inauspicious qualities of social life like everyone else. Indeed, since his function is to be related to everyone, he is a conduit for everyone’s inauspicious qualities. Purification ritual provides an escape from this, but only at the moment of expiation. As soon as the ritual finishes, the king re-enters the world of compromising relations.

Modern society has become so caught up with material explanations of social life that many professional social scientists – let alone the average lay person – have lost sight of the fundamental role that ritual plays in all our lives every second that we are engaged in relations with others. Yet it is obvious that we continually have to re-make the statuses that link us to others – both ours and theirs – and we do this using a variety of ritual mechanisms. Mostly we take our relationships so much for granted that we are incapable of seeing how they are made. When I talk to my mother, I do not consciously say to myself every second: ‘this is my mother; therefore I must address her in the appropriate way’. I just say, ‘hi’. When I interact with a friend, I do not have to question myself about the appropriateness of using his first name, as opposed to behaving formally and addressing him with a title and his surname. I just know how to behave. But how do I know how to behave, and indeed how do I know that this woman is my mother, and this other person is my friend? Of course I know, you may say: the question is absurd. But is it?

Consider that I go to a community where I know no one. How am I going to work out who is related to whom? To me they are people with no particular identity. I may see that some are older, some younger; some are differently dressed from others; some look poorer, some richer; some appear to live in one ho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction: The Character of Kingship
• 2 Forms of Sacralized Power in Africa
• 3 Sacred King, Sacrificial Victim, Surrogate Victim or Frazer, Hocart, Girard
• 4 A Reply to Lucien Scubla
• 5 Tragedy, Ritual and Power in Nilotic Regicide: The Regicidal Dramas of the Eastern Nilotes of Sudan in Comparative Perspective
• 6 The Transgressive Nature of Kingship in Caste Organization: Monstrous Royal Doubles in Nepal
• 7 Kingship and Untouchability
• 8 Kingship and Caste in Africa: History, Diffusion and Evolution
• 9 King House: The Mobile Polity in Northern Ghana
• 10 Kings and Tribes in East India: The Internal Political Dimension
• 11 Japanese Monarchy in Historical and Comparative Perspective
• 12 Chiefs and Kings in Polynesia
• Index