Welcome 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.”
Welcome to the seminar. Several persons have expressed an interest in participating, so it should be a lively time (forgive me if I don’t write “energizing” or, God forbid, “empowering”). The seminar runs through Friday, April 24. Please know that the seminar is not “closed” – OAC members are encouraged to contribute their ideas at any time during the seminar. Hey, it’s totally cloudthink!
And on to the introduction:
David Graeber is a conceptual alchemist: he transforms the dross of our commonsense assumptions into sparkling, counterintuitive ideas that describe a world utterly unlike the one we think we inhabit. In his modern classic, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, he advances, with tremendous erudition, the claim that debt – which we assume we acquire through the exchange of money – in fact preceded by a long way the creation of money. In the essay before us in this seminar, on the divine kingship of the Shilluk, he proposes an even more provocative idea: Sovereignty, here in the form of kingship, is not an outgrowth of processes within an established society, but the very phenomenon – the king’s ability to wreak wanton violence on a populace – that brings what we call “a society” into being.
“. . . 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.” (page 12)
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 arbitrary violence unleashed by a sovereign (in his effort to become a god) against his subjects that impels them to coalesce as “a people.” It is the antithesis of Durkheim’s famous “effervescence.”
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 my “Invitation” to the seminar I suggest that Graeber’s essay poses a whole set of issues more specific than this overarching puzzle (see Invitation), and seminar participants are asked to pursue any of these or, preferably, introduce their own concerns. There is much to explore here. David Graeber has kindly agreed to participate in the seminar, so some of your contributions might take the form of direct questions to him. I hope it is a rewarding experience for all – participants as well as readers.
Preliminary Inquiry.
To start things off, I’d like to mention an aspect of Shilluk kingship that intrigues me, one that looms large in Graeber’s analysis: the king is at once the source of the health and prosperity of his subjects and, in his god-like persona, the agent of their death and misery. Hence the chilling epigraph to his essay: “God kills us.” This contradiction is one among others that pervade Shilluk society / culture (for the sake of brevity I won’t detail them here) and that together comprise what he describes as the “fundamental dilemma[s] of the human condition.”
How is it that a beneficent divine being is also a murderous psychopath? Pondering this critical question caused me to reflect on a daunting puzzle that has been with me for a long time: the role of the shaman in lowland South American Indian groups. I’m not an Africanist, and the size and complexity of African societies frankly intimidate me, but my concern here is, I think, not too much of a reach. Like the Shilluk king, the Amerindian shaman – two of whom I’ve known fairly well – is at once a source of health and a killer. In what one might call his “public relations” guise, he heals the sick by invoking the spirits through shak shak rattle and chant. But on the “dark side,” he turns his power against someone, often the person who has afflicted his patient, and kills or injures him by shooting a spirit dart (usually a quartzite crystal). Again, as with the Shilluk king, this is dramatically counterintuitive. It’s as though you visited your family doctor, who diagnosed a serious condition that required surgery. He then recommends the best surgeon he knows for such a case. Then, as you grasp at this ray of hope, he informs you that the surgeon is also a professional assassin.
Introducing the notion of divinity here greatly amplifies the puzzle, the dilemma. The Amerindian “doctor” (who is called just that in the English Creole of Guyanese Arawak and Carib) derives his powers to heal and kill from the spirit world; he is in touch with and in a way a part of a supernatural realm. The belief in the existence of that world – the belief in a divinity of some form – is inseparably bound up with a life lived in a social world, a “society.” This is the disturbing fact to which Graeber’s argument seems to alert us: A normal life regulated by custom and moral rules is possible only by incorporating the principle of a supernatural force which at any moment may rain down death and destruction – terror, in short. And if divinity entails a moral order, then the inverse of that proposition may hold, that a loss of faith in divinity, in immortality, entails the end of a moral order. No belief in God, no morality. You can do anything; nothing is excluded. It is Ivan Karamazov’s thesis.
So the question is even more pressing: If a notion of the divine, of the supernatural, is of such fundamental importance to social life, how have we come by it?
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Permalink Reply by Kristian Garthus-Niegel on
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OK, Well, I'll gladly admit the fear component is a strong barrier to my imagination here. What fears hamper yours? To me it feels reductionist to claim that modern nation states are simply "based on" a centralised monopoly of violence; I see it rather as a piece of the puzzle that, in spite of the beauty of the Shilluk-case, can't just be easily disentangled from the rest.
It's hard to walk backwards into the future without a sense of unease towards the human potential to violence left floating. Though far from the only player on the field, the survival of the fittest is undoubtedly a significant one in social life. Politically sovereign institutes, though products of wobbly circumstances, highly imperfect, corrupt, self-contradictory, and unfair in their everyday affairs with their constituent "peoples", should, I think, in some sense ultimately be understood as accumulations of collective trial-and-error processes aimed at engineering clear, grounded institutional frameworks for regulating human being's incessant use of violence against each other (which is not to say that humans are simply violent by nature; by nature they are at least 88.000 things).
Our post-2008-social-reality bubbles with dissent to our nation state sovereigns; political blasphemy seems the new mainstream, from the left to the right. In other words, the stage seems ripe for all sorts of peace and violence. How do you imagine a social system without centralised monopoly of violence in lieu of the pragmatic context of the day?
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Permalink Reply by Huon Wardle on -
Going back to Keith's point about the republic, Kant has four types of civil state combining freedom, violence ('force') and law:
A. Law and Freedom without Force (Anarchy)
B. Law and Force without Freedom (Despotism)
C. Force without Freedom and Law (Barbarism)
D. Force with Freedom and Law (Republic)
Kant was in favour of D; but what looks like the highly attractive option, A, is simply dismissed along the lines that no civil constitution could be created on that basis. I took the Shilluk case to be an exploration of how a group of people, at various levels including unconsciously, wrestle with the question of what to do about 'force'/violence in making a society.
One question I realised I was unsure about had to do with the logical relation between sovereign and people -- presumably there can be notions of belonging to 'a people' that do not involve the state and which don't implicate the use of centralised violence. For example the Piaroa, in Overing's description, have a strong sense of shared kindred and have a fearful and exclusive view of non-Piaroa, but they are or were non-violent within the group and are/were 'against the state'; so corporation of that kind seems to exist without a state or sovereignty. Perhaps I misunderstood, but you seem to be arguing that the notion of 'a people' comes into existence in relation to the idea of sovereign violence.
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Permalink Reply by Huon Wardle on
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Esther Goody on 'Herrschaft' . I forgot about this. Here is what seems to be a version of the paper I remembered, only that was not a published version unlike this which is more elaborated based on what I recall.
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Permalink Reply by Eugene on
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David:
I am not sure if you were giving some kind of advice to those on this forum or replying directly to me. In no way did I imply that the EZLN was a separatist movement. I have been in Mexico for quite sometime and I am aware of diversity.
I would have brought this element to the discussion because that is my experience, So really it could have been anyone that had written this paper and i would have felt the same.
Thank you for adding additional comments I am interested in the relevance of anthropology, and will have to think more about what you typed and get back to the forum.
John:
I will have to think more about your reply as well, and get back to you. Thank you for passing me the ball. For now, I need to read the comments more carefully and attempt to write an adequate reply, given my complete lack of knowledge toward anthropology.
thank you everyone for being patient.
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Permalink Reply by Lee Drummond on
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Notes for a Cultural Analysis of Shilluk Origin Myth and Installation Ritual
The great merit of David’s essay – its genuine profundity in my view – is that he grounds an original and intricate analysis of Shilluk political organization (Shilluk sovereignty) in the mythic and ritual contexts of that organization. In his concluding remarks he provides what may well be the most lucid statement I’ve seen for conducting a cultural analysis of society:
I have framed my argument in cosmological terms because I believe one cannot understand political institutions without understanding the people that create them, what they believe the world to be like, how they imagine the human situation within it, and what they believe it is possible or legitimate to want from it. (page 48)
Here I’d like to present a shorthand version of another cultural analytic take on the Shilluk, one that emphasizes the myth and ritual and thus relegates the issue of sovereignty to a somewhat derivative status. I write “shorthand” because in putting together what follows I’ve assembled pages of quotes from the essay, with lots of comments and questions spread among them. I realize these are too lengthy and burdensome for our seminar, so I’ll try to keep things rather stark here. Instead, I’d ask interested participants and readers to review pages 18 - 44 of the essay.
The main question here, following David, is: What do the Shilluk “believe the world to be like?” David and I seem to agree on some of the main points here, but my reading – obviously based on far less exposure to the literature than his – differs in important respects.
Keeping things stark, let me float my main thesis right off: Shilluk origin myth and installation ritual chart the contours of a conceptualized world – an Umwelt – in which the Shilluk mind wrestles with an irresolvable dilemma of identity: Are we nomads who raid and plunder or farmers who value the peace and security of a sedentary life? The dilemma sets in motion a dynamic that makes itself felt in myth, ritual, and society, a dynamic which tries and fails at a resolution. Because that dilemma won’t go away, what the Shilluk “believe the world to be like” is one shot through with a fundamental ambivalence: They desperately want to be both nomad and farmer, but realize they can be neither.
That ambivalence is mapped, literally, onto Shilluk territory, North vs. South – a distinction filled with historical, mythic, and ritual significance. The demi-god Nyikang’s father’s father was Heaven and his mother was Nyakaya ,a crocodile deity who is “the embodiment of the totality of riverine creatures and phenomena” (“Offerings to her are left on the bank of the Nile. She is also the goddess of birth.” ) (pages 21 – 22)
Nyikang thus represents a synthesis of the antipodes of the Shilluk world: Heaven, remote, male, punishing (through violent storms – but also replenishing with rain) and Water (specifically the deep waters of the Nile and the great lake of Nyikang’s origin; a chthonian realm vs. the empyrean realm of the father). Nyikang is also referred to as “child of the river.”
The North vs. South dichotomy continually threatens to undermine the unifying, fecund, nourishing influence that is Nyikang’s principal nature (but he can also bring death and misery). This “child of the river” is from the South:
Originally Nyikang and his brother Duwat lived in a faraway land by a great lake or river in the south.
They speak of it as the end of the earth, or some call it the head of the earth. . . . In that land death was not known. (page 22)
But in order to fashion Shilluk land he had to conquer the North – the dry and bleak “raiding country” where predatory nomadic bands hold sway. As David describes, throughout history this problem of unification has been with the Shilluk king, who can never put together a State apparatus to conquer and hold it. But the Shilluk keep trying – through myth and ritual.
If Nyikang is the mythic “charter” of a peaceful agricultural society, how did those of the North become so violent? Well, Nyikang had a son (two actually, but one far more important), Dak. Dak is a relentless aggressor, always getting into fights (some requiring Nyikang’s rescue), and it is Dak who is mainly responsible for the deaths of individual Shilluk through illness. He is a figure found in myths everywhere: the embodiment of disorder, chaos, in a word, evil (Dak Vader!).
I know, even my shorthand is running on, so . . . on to the installation ritual.
The empyrean and chthonic, fire and water, destruction and creation, man and woman, agriculture and pastoralism – if these realities / antipodes of a Shilluk Umwelt cannot be reconciled in the social world, cannot forge North and South into a Shilluk polity, then it is left to ritual to make that effort – at least that show of effective action. Here things get really interesting in antipode-land, because all kinds of “border crossing” goes on in the installation ritual. The king (reth) dies, and since he is the “body” of the people, a new one must be selected. First, the spirits of both Nyikang and Dak reside in wooden effigies of ambach wood (note, apart from being a soft wood – like flesh – it would be good to know other properties of the tree). Upon his death, the Shilluk must create a new effigy for Nyikang. Remember, Nyikang incorporates the valences of South, water, sedentary agriculture. Now here is a major reversal (for which myth and ritual are famous – “they resemble themselves through their differences” as someone has said): To find a suitable ambach log for Nyikang’s effigy, Dak – that badass – assembles a raiding party and heads North into “raiding country.” Moreover, his party is made up of members of a Northern clan. Through this ritual mechanism North and South with their attendant contradictions are reconciled – Shilluk land is restored.
What really jumped out at me in all this is the fact that Nyikang’s effigy log must be found by divers, brought up from the depths of a Northern river: the “child of the river”!
Now two things hit me here. First, the Hidatsa-Mandan whom I’ve mentioned here select the Sun Dance pole from driftwood found in the Missouri River. What are the odds? Second – don’t get me started, but – dendrolatry anyone? Or, better, log-olatry. The tremendous symbolic import of the tree is a fixture of myth the world over (the World Tree, the Bodhi Tree, the World Ash, hey, even the Christmas bush wrapped up in plastic mesh you pick up at Home Depot). Why? Here’s a passing thought: The tree is an immense living thing, it is born, grows to spectacular heights, dies. Its branches reach up to the always elusive Heaven, its roots tap into the chthonic Waters. It is the perfect symbol of unity, of bridging the forever-separated.
Okay, and finally. The preceding is short, fast, rough, but hopefully the sketch is enough for present purposes. And please don’t think I’m getting all retro-Lévi on you. Although I’ve been strewing around the binary oppositions, I don’t think they are “binary” at all. Rather, the oppositions or antipodes are dynamic forces that operate in a vector-space of the Umwelt. Rather than LS here think VT – Victor Turner – whose classic Schism and Continuity . . . explores in detail the impossible task before the Ndembu in attempting to reconcile conflicting modes of descent and residence. Like the Shilluk, they gave it their best shot – through ritual (not LS’s waltz of categories).
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Kristian, David
Re: Norway: A State of Social Equality
I don’t know any Swedish anarchists, and I don’t read Norwegian, so my knowledge of Norway and its form of government is -- probably like that of most of the Western world – limited to stereotypes.
But somehow a couple of humdingers have come out of the country. Since I’ve been thinking just now about antipodes, I’ve gotta say, Norway takes the cake:
1) In this most peaceful society, one Anders Behring Breivik goes on a rampage killing 77 people – even our American home-grown gun nuts haven’t come close. The awful scenes of the massacred kids have to be burned into the retinas of millions of folks who never heard of “political anthropology.”
2) On a much, much lighter note, have you guys ever seen TV episodes of Lillehammer? It’s about a mobster, Frank “The Fixer” Tagliano, turned FBI informant (Steven Van Zandt, who played a real knuckle-walker, Silvio Dante, in The Sopranos).
In return for his testimony, the FBI offers to relocate him anywhere he wants to go. Frank has just been watching the Lillehammer Winter Olympics; it looks like a good, safe place, far away from Brooklyn, so he has the feds send him there. Settled in Lillehammer, Frank proceeds to upset the welfare state apple cart in a big, big way. He opens a rowdy, hugely successful bar, starts dealing in contraband, bribes or threatens anybody who gets in his way. Social equality in the town would never be the same. Trust me, it’s a hoot!
Granted, the image of Norway the show imparts is another stereotype. I have no idea how Europeans view Norway, but I wonder if it’s not something like a prevalent stereotype Americans hold of Canadians: b-b-b-boring.
Boring, that is, until another Anders shows up. Talk about your antipodes!
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Permalink Reply by David Graeber on
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I do, but I'm defining "the people" in a rather circular fashion as that notion of commonality created by such sovereign power. Hence, the Nuer or Dinka, for example, saw themselves as a group, but not as "the people" in this sense.
How different forms of group solidarity and recognition of commonality (I'm trying not to say "identity" here) are created is a very good comparative question to be asking. This essay explored only one. I would like to think that anthropologists, having all the world's examples at their disposal, could come up with better typologies than Aristotle or Kant, but we'd have to start getting to serious work in that case, up to now we've been a bit remiss.
Huon Wardle said:Going back to Keith's point about the republic, Kant has four types of civil state combining freedom, violence ('force') and law:
A. Law and Freedom without Force (Anarchy)
B. Law and Force without Freedom (Despotism)
C. Force without Freedom and Law (Barbarism)
D. Force with Freedom and Law (Republic)
Kant was in favour of D; but what looks like the highly attractive option, A, is simply dismissed along the lines that no civil constitution could be created on that basis. I took the Shilluk case to be an exploration of how a group of people, at various levels including unconsciously, wrestle with the question of what to do about 'force'/violence in making a society.
One question I realised I was unsure about had to do with the logical relation between sovereign and people -- presumably there can be notions of belonging to 'a people' that do not involve the state and which don't implicate the use of centralised violence. For example the Piaroa, in Overing's description, have a strong sense of shared kindred and have a fearful and exclusive view of non-Piaroa, but they are or were non-violent within the group and are/were 'against the state'; so corporation of that kind seems to exist without a state or sovereignty. Perhaps I misunderstood, but you seem to be arguing that the notion of 'a people' comes into existence in relation to the idea of sovereign violence.
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Sounds like you have your work cut out for you! Like what you have so far. I agree these terms are in unresolvable dialectical tension. My only hesitation would at giving too much agency to "the Shilluk" as a whole, rather than various factions within them. I thought the story of Queen Abudok, and my hypothesis about the creation of the sacred kingship as a political compromise between factions, was one of the more innovative and challenging bits of the analysis. No one else has really suggested it (rather they seem to absurdly imagine a Shilluk king single-handedly sets up a system where he doesn't get to choose his successor and his wives can execute him for poor sexual performance, which, I don't know, to me, seems a bit implausible.) What also interested me was the way that every time they started to create state-like institutions everyone rebelled.
But the tree stuff - yes, follow up on that.
Lee Drummond said:Notes for a Cultural Analysis of Shilluk Origin Myth and Installation Ritual
(...)
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Oh no it was someone else who used the phrase "indigenous separatist."
Eugene said:David:
I am not sure if you were giving some kind of advice to those on this forum or replying directly to me. In no way did I imply that the EZLN was a separatist movement. I have been in Mexico for quite sometime and I am aware of diversity.
I would have brought this element to the discussion because that is my experience, So really it could have been anyone that had written this paper and i would have felt the same.
Thank you for adding additional comments I am interested in the relevance of anthropology, and will have to think more about what you typed and get back to the forum.
John:
I will have to think more about your reply as well, and get back to you. Thank you for passing me the ball. For now, I need to read the comments more carefully and attempt to write an adequate reply, given my complete lack of knowledge toward anthropology.
thank you everyone for being patient.
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Why has Google Books got so rotten? When I was researching Debt, they'd give you 90% of the book. Now you're lucky if you get one chapter. Fuckers. It makes it so much harder to do research. I'll have to track down the actual essay somewhere.
Huon Wardle said:Esther Goody on 'Herrschaft' . I forgot about this. Here is what seems to be a version of the paper I remembered, only that was not a published version unlike this which is more elaborated based on what I recall.
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Oh no it was someone else who used the phrase "indigenous separatist."
My bad.
David, the Natchez seems like a tremendously relevant comparative case, Lee, so does the Hidatsa-Mandan, and, Huon, the Piaroa (if in a more contrasting sense). I'd love to hear any one of you elaborate on how these individual cases fill out/refine the general propositions on political sovereignty derived from the Shilluk case.
Some superficial confirmatory additions to your analysis Lee; the tree was tremendously important also in Norse mythology, where the ash tree Yggdrasil was seen as the cosmic core architecture holding heaven and earth (and their 1001 correlate binaries) in place. Also, when Viking chieftains started conquering their neighbors to make kingship-claims around 1000AC, it seems to have produced quite some mythological tensions between the fertility/agriculture god Frøy and the sorcery/war god Odin, the latter gradually expelling the former from a central to a more peripheral position
Abudok came to power and ruled for some years, but eventually Shilluk chiefs took umbrage at being ruled by a woman, and demanded she step down. She concurred, naming Tugo, then a young man in her care, as her successor. (p. 16)
David, anyone, I'm confused; this passage doesn't fit much with the succession system described later on (e.g. election by chieftain councils). How does it hang together? How could a woman be elected in the first place?
Stereotypes, Lilyhammer, ABB
Living in a generally peaceful society does, I'm sorry to say, easily include quite a bit of boredom. So thanks Hollywood for livening up our lives with some recognizable gangster-action on TV; let's keep it in the realm of entertainment.
I think the terms of the text at hand are way to poor to decently capture what the 22/7/11-tragedy in Norway was about. They easily have the effect of looping cases of regicide into the logic you might hear from many anarchists; after all, the state imposed itself on the people first, so blame on you. This buys directly into the logic of the perpetrator. Now, David's argument may not be one of cause and effect, but that doesn't stop the karmic ball of the real world from rolling. I might be missing a lot of subtlety in my theoretical understanding though, so please enlighten me anyone!
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David, the Natchez seems like a tremendously relevant comparative case, Lee, so does the Hidatsa-Mandan, and, Huon, the Piaroa (if in a more contrasting sense). I'd love to hear any one of you elaborate on how these individual cases fill out/refine the general propositions on political sovereignty derived from the Shilluk case.
Me, too. But I have another concern. Cherry-picking cases that closely resemble the Shilluk may deepen our understanding of those particular cases. They may also violate the logic of controlled comparison, which requires close similarity in all potentially relevant factors. Thus, for example, comparing the myths of two Plains Indians tribes, where both are horseback-riding buffalo hunters and raiders with broadly similar cultures operating in a similar environment makes for a strong argument. Leaping continents to compare Shilluk and Natchez raises all sorts of red flags.
On the other hand, if we are arguing at a global level where cases are chosen to illustrate different answers to the same basic conundrum, the relationship of sovereignty to utopian projects and political uses of violence, we may need to consider a wider range of alternatives. As someone who has studied China and Japan, I note the difference between the Shilluk case and traditional forms of sovereignty in these two cases.
In the Chinese case, the critical concepts are the Mandate of Heaven and the dynastic cycle. The dynastic cycle begins in a chaotic interregnum from which a new dynasty is created by the leader who wins his wars. His winning is the sign that he has received the Mandate of Heaven. Then, if his dynasty is to survive, he and his successors must become virtuous rulers, who employ violence only against internal and external enemies, criminals and barbarians. In the best cases, the ruler is so virtuous that he can rule without taking action at all. His subjects bow before his virtue like grass bends in the wind. Alas, however, it is the nature of things that dynasties tend to decay. Emperors become increasingly corrupt until finally things fall apart and a new interregnum begins. A clear difference between the Shilluk and Chinese views of divine or sacred rulers is that in the Shilluk case the health of the realm is tied to the health of the current ruler. In the Chinese case, the health of the realm is tied to the health of the dynasty, a line of emperors instead of an individual.
In Japan there is no dynastic cycle. Here the solution has been to separate the utopian project symbolized by the emperor from the violence controlled by his generals. Things falling apart, as they did during Japan's own Warring States Period, was the result of warlords seizing control of different parts of the country and fighting with each other, while the emperor was left sacrosanct but powerless. The emperor's appointment of the shogun (supreme warlord) was, in effect, the final legitimating touch on a warlord's winning his way to the top of the heap. Interestingly, this bifurcation of leadership can be traced back to the earliest historical records in which the Yamato Queen Himiko lived concealed behind the walls of her palace while her brother exercised power outside them. It survives today in the characteristic behavior of Japanese corporate managers, who become increasingly inactive as they rise in rank, leaving the day to day struggles of commercial warfare to their subordinates, a system that contrasts dramatically with the Anglo-American ideal of the activist CEO leading the corporate charge. Here we see something similar, perhaps, to the Shilluk contrast between Nyikang and Dak.
I do not quarrel with the interpretations of Shilluk mythology and ritual offered by David and Lee. But I still find myself curious about the geographical and political relationships of the Shilluk to the Dinka, Nuer and other peoples of the Southern Sudan. So far in our discussion, I have seen
- David mentioning as received wisdom that the Dinka are the prototypical Nilotic people differentiated from the Nuer by the presence (greater elaboration?) among the Nuer of segmentary lineages and from the Shilluk by the presence among the Shilluk of the divine kingship that is the focus of David's paper.
- An assertion by Keith Hart that the current consensus is that Nuer and Dinka are basically the same people.
To this I can add
- An assertion found in the Wikipedia article on the Dinka that the Dinka were more inclined to cooperate with the British Empire, while the Nuer refused to do so, which engendered hostility between the two groups.
I have also noted that the Wikipedia article on the Shilluk gives the dates of the Shilluk Kingdom as running from 1490 to 1865. David's article briefly mentions [I seem to recall, I could be wrong] that the Shilluk were confronted with dealing with the Ottoman Empire before the British Empire. The dates for the Ottoman Empire stretch from 1299-1922. Perhaps more relevant is this map, which, at least to my untutored eye, suggests that the Shilluk were located in the territory said to have been acquired by the Ottomans in the reign of Selim I (1512-1520) and certainly exposed to Ottoman influence during the subsequent reign of Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-1566). Thus, I find myself oscillating between two visions of the Shilluk, one based on Shilluk mythology, which asserts local roots for the Shilluk where we now find them, and one based on fragments of history and geography that suggests a people pushed and pulled around by events of which that mythology takes no account whatsoever. This makes the likely wholly unanswerable question, how that mythology came into being, a very interesting question, indeed.
P.S. While chasing my tail around these thoughts, I have found a website called Gurtong, which proclaims on its masthead that it is for "Bringing South Sudanese Together." The page to which I point includes short ethnographic summaries of all sorts of peoples with whom the Shilluk may have been in contact of one kind or another.
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