Invitation to an Informal Seminar on David Graeber’s HAU essay, “The Divine Kingship of the Shilluk: On Violence, Utopia, and the Human Condition, or, Elements for an Archaeology of Sovereignty.”

Invitation to an Informal Seminar on David Graeber’s HAU essay, “The Divine Kingship of the Shilluk: On Violence, Utopia, and the Human Condition, or, Elements for an Archaeology of Sovereignty.”   (HAU 2011, volume 1, number 1)

 

Full text is available free online at:

http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau1.1.002/24

 

Seminar Dates:  From Wednesday, April 15 through Friday, April 24. 

 

    Following on the impressive OAC seminar organized by John McCreery on Tim Ingold’s essay, “That’s Enough about Ethnography!,” I would like to invite OAC members to participate in the second of what I hope may become a seminar series which examines seminal recent work in anthropology from diverse perspectives.  Such a series fills a pressing need for a public forum in which important ideas receive the detailed discussion and debate they deserve – a treatment that goes well beyond comments by (often anonymous) reviewers, editors, journal contributors, and assorted citations. 

    The very best anthropological writing makes the strange familiar and the familiar strange: through a detailed consideration of apparent “exotica,” we come to regard the routine stuff of our own lives as somehow alien, vertiginous, even threatening.  David Graeber’s essay on the divine kingship of the Shilluk is such a work.  Taking as his subject a practice mostly relegated to anthropologists’ dusty library shelves housing Frazer’s The Golden Bough and other half-forgotten classics of an earlier (less “intersubjective” and “engaged” time), Graeber weaves Shilluk ethnography, history, myth, and ritual into a compelling – and chilling – analysis of a political institution that, as he describes it, is “a temporary, imperfect solution to what is taken to be the fundamental dilemma of the human condition—one that can itself only be maintained through terror.”

    “The fundamental dilemma of the human condition” (or, as he presents his argument, dilemmas plural) is clearly a topic for serious and sustained anthropological debate.  The impossible demand to resolve the irresolvable – body and spirit, mortality and immortality, the individual and the State, to join heaven and earth, – is the focus of Graeber’s inquiry into Shilluk kingship. 

    In the process he advances the counterintuitive and provocative theory that violence in its most unrestrained form – arbitrary destruction, in short terror (a subject with which we become more acquainted with each passing day) – is the catalyst which brings into being those entities we know as “societies” or “peoples..”:

“. . . the arbitrary violence of divine kings—firing randomly into crowds, bringing down natural disasters—is the perfect concrete expression of what makes a people a people—an undifferentiated, therefore political group. All of these peoples—Bari, Pari, Lolubo, etc – became peoples only in relation to some particularly powerful rainmaker; and owing to the rise and fall of reputations, political boundaries were always in flux”.

This is a radical proposition, one that strikes at the foundation of social theory.  We are accustomed to think that human groups constitute themselves in relation to other groups, and from those relations conflict invariably seems to flow.  Graeber would claim that such intergroup relations occur after the fact, the crucial fact here being that it is the wanton violence unleashed by a sovereign (in his effort to become a god) against his subjects that impels them to coalesce as “a people.” 

    Graeber’s detailed analysis of the exotic, now antiquated, Shilluk thus poses what may well be the most critical question in social thought: Why are there societies at all?  In preliminary discussions for this seminar, Huon Wardle framed this issue very well:

 

   Graeber uses the [Shilluk] case to dig into a set of questions that should concern anyone: all of us using the OAC live in some kind of state; but what is a state?
    Specifically, since for most of human history people did not aggregate in states; where did the idea of handing over sovereignty to a centralised authority come from? Even more specifically, states are characterised by their control over the use of violence which in most instances is what backs up their ability to do other things like taxing people and guaranteeing their own debts, but why would a people allow the means to commit violence to be centralised when that violence can be (and often is) used against them?
  Hence the discussion of the Shilluk king who is led backwards on an
[ox] to his own coronation--a ceremony that will lead inevitably to his own death by sacrifice. I am looking forward to [the Graeber] seminar....

 

    The essay turns on other issues that loom large in anthropological debate, any one of which may form a vantage point on the work:  Specifically:

    --  the transition from divine to sacred kinship;

    --  the several accounts / explanations of Shilluk kingship which predate Graber’s;

    --  the comparison of regional societies’ institutions and worldviews (Nuer, Dinka,     Ganda)

    --  the crucial role of women in shaping the sharply contrasting kingships of    neighboring societies;

    --  the analysis of myth, in particular, the mythic representation of the primordial         realms of water, fire, earth, sky;

  --  the analysis of the ritual symbolism of the Shilluk king’s installation ceremony;

  --  and certainly others which you are invited and urged to develop. 

 

Programmatic Notes

    Graeber’s essay is long (over sixty pages) and, although his writing is refreshingly clear, his ideas are subtle, demanding a close reading.  OAC members interested in participating in the seminar need time to read and think about the essay.  Therefore, I would like to begin the seminar, as noted above, on Wednesday April 15, to run through Friday April 24.  I will post an OAC Forum for the seminar on Wednesday morning (SoCal time, which is two hours earlier than Tulsa Time).  Please hold your contributions until then.  If you have preliminary suggestions for the seminar, please post them on the existing Forum, “Suggestions and Comments for the OAC Seminar Series.” 

    I look forward to an enriching, stimulating few days. 

 

Lee Drummond

www.peripheralstudies.org  

 

Views: 540

Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

 

All,

Revision to “Programmatic Notes” for the Seminar

    My organizational skills are clearly almost non-existent.  In issuing an invitation to the seminar on Graeber’s Shilluk essay, I should have asked for preliminary suggestions to be left here, not on the earlier and more general “Suggestions and Comments . . .” OAC Forum.  More importantly, we should use this Forum space to indicate our intention to participate in the seminar and briefly to introduce ourselves. 

    Several individuals already have expressed their interest in the seminar.  I would ask them and any other interested parties to “sign up” here, identifying yourself and providing a brief statement of your background, so that we can all get acquainted. 

    To start things off, I’m a retired cultural anthropologist (McGill University) and for some time have been director of the Center for Peripheral Studies in Palm Springs, California.  My interests are all over the board: South American indigenous groups, Caribbean societies, myth, popular culture (with an emphasis on major movies), cultural criticism of American society.  Most of my work is available at the Center website:

www.peripheralstudies.org

 

The seminar begins one week from today (on Wednesday April 15), so let’s take this opportunity to come forward.

    Thanks for putting up with my ineptitude.  

Thanks, Lee. 

My name is John McCreery. Long ago, on what now seems another planet, I grew up in a conservative Lutheran family in southeast Virginia. As an oedipally rebellious young white male, I went off to do a BA in philosophy at Michigan State (1966), followed by a Ph.D. in anthropology at Cornell (1973). My wife, daughter, and I moved to Japan in 1980. One of my wife's fellow students of Japanese literature provided the introduction to the advertising world in Japan, where after three years at a small corporate communications shop, I became an English-language copywriter at Hakuhodo, Japan's second largest advertising agency. While I was working for Hakuhodo, my wife founded The Word Works, Ltd., where I am now her partner. I still do a bit of copywriting, but currently  most of our business is art-related Japanese-to-English translation for museum exhibitions in Japan. I am an independent scholar. Anthropology is my hobby. 

John, 

    Welcome aboard.  It should be an interesting experience.  

Lee 

Hi,

Kristian Garthus-Niegel my name; child of Scandinavias babyboomer-feminist era; though egalitarianist at heart, also a heretic of the ontological turn in (what used to be called) social science. By that, I don't advocate for a return to the technicalist anthropologies of the imperial ages, lest a scaling down of meta-physical speculation in ethnographic analysis.

My personal focus-fields are public mass education, child-/youthhood, urban-, cognitive- and political anthro. Just about got my phd-dissertation there.

Looking much forward to our joint grapple with this intellectual mastodon.

 

Hello Lee, I teach anthropology in Scotland and research mostly on/in the Caribbean. I live in a peninsula called 'the Kingdom of Fife' which puts me in a unique position in this discussion of sovereignty. I was born in the sixties which means that I am wild and unruly except when the Government Health Advisor says it might damage my life expectancy.

As to that piece by Sahlins I mentioned (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1111/1467-8322.12163/), it does run on a somewhat similar track to Graeber's, though shorter and with a different meta-physical undertow, if Kristian will allow. It is not vital for this discussion, not a must.

If we were running this seminar in the 'groups' type format then the people who 'joined' would be immediately messsage-able collectively and we could distribute the paper without infringing copyright etc. (as far as I understand it, that is). Anyways, I will send it to Lee so if anyone wants it they can ask me or Lee -- we will need an email address. Unless one of the OAC fixers has a fix that is.

Hi Kristian,

    Welcome to the seminar. 

     What is sovereignty?  Why do states exist? – truly an “intellectual mastodon” as you write, well worth (following the example of another Homo crowd that preceded us) poking with a few sharpened sticks. 

Lee 

Hi Huon,

    Welcome to the seminar.

    Fresh from your recent brush with sovereignty and from your residence in the Kingdom of Fife, I’m sure you’ll have a unique perspective on the thorny (hairy?) problems before us in the seminar. 

    I have the Sahlins paper on the origin of the state and am happy to email it to participants -- just email me at leedrummond@msn.com .  

Lee 

Hello Lee,

My name is Eugene. I do not have any formal qualifications; therefore, I am not sure I will have much to offer. 

However, being semi-nomadic, I am familiar with various struggles within and around 'the outside', which some might call autonomy. 

I look forward to this informal seminar.

    Hi Eugene,

    Welcome to the seminar, which is billed (seriously) as “informal.”  No need to show credentials at the e-door.  Feel free to participate as much or as little as you like.

Lee 

Hi all. I'm just me. Testing if it goes up properly.

Reply to Discussion

RSS

Translate

OAC Press

@OpenAnthCoop

Events

© 2019   Created by Keith Hart.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service