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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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by John McCreery on
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We agree.
Perhaps it is time for anthropologists to explore The Federalist Papers. I am also ready to contribute some thoughts about sovereignty in China and Japan. But let's see what others have to say.
More to the point for this seminar, I would dearly love to hear someone elaborate that sketch of Nilotic polities—the prototypical Dinka, the segmentary-lineage Nuer, and the divine kings Shilluk—with which David has already provided us.
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Permalink Reply by Keith Hart on
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Some brief comments on the British ethnography of Nilotic peoples.
First, Sudan was the highest status colonial posting after India, because of the strategic importance of the Nile, Egypt and India. The most beautiful monograph is Godfrey Lienhardt's Divinity and Experience: the Religion of the Dinka. Evans-Pritchard wrote each of his monographs in a different style to make a different point. Thus The Nuer is about ordered anarchy, but very much in a liberal rationalist style derived from the Whig interpretation of history. This hinges on the idea that the Anglo-Saxons had a functioni,ng village democracy (ordered anarchy) until it was subverted and transformed by Norman class society, as is the semi-mythical timeless narrative. He doesn't make it obvious, but the segmentary lineage model of Nuer society, a model that he took from Masqueray in Morocco via Durkheim, is based on that. His son, Ambrose, is an incendiary liberal economist for the Daily Telegraph; he says that his father's most prized posession was an original document produced by the American founding fathers in the 1770s.
E-P published another book in the same year (1940) in Cairo on the Anuak. These were a people whom he organized as irreegulars to attack Italian forts in Somaliland during the war. This monograph could not be more unlike The Nuer in style and content. First of all, it is written as historical political economy, showing the nature of the struggle for power in the region between the British and the Ottomans. The Nuer are presented as an expansionist people sucking up neighbouring tribes in the early decades of the twentieth century. Then the analysis settles down into a sort of political ecology (note that ecology plays a big part in The Nuer too). The Anuak live on dry islands in a swamp and E-P shows the dynamic oscillation in their political relations in as varied a social and physical landscape as you could hope to find. Centralization and decentralisation (the stable premise of The Nuer as the latter) are a fluid oscillation in the Anuak case, as is the historical region as a whole).
So it is no straightforward matter drawing up ideal types based on these artfully constructed ethnographies.
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Permalink Reply by John McCreery on -
Keith,
These comments are very, very interesting, but now I am now more puzzled than before. Could you render David's statement that the received version of Nilotic ethnography is that the Dinka were the Nilotic prototype to which the Nuer added segmentary lineages and the Shilluk divine kings a bit more concrete? Did the Dinka lack both? How were they organized?
Also, I remember the Nuer Leopard-skin chiefs, who as I recall functioned as mediators in resolving feuds between lineage segments. David's description of the Shilluk Reth suggests that the Reth played a similar role but also employed armed force to compel communities that refused his mediation to pay compensation that, among other things, provided the goods required to pay his guards. My memory refuses to divulge whether the Nuer Leopard-skin chief brought more to the table than his sacred status. Did he have forces that he could throw to one side or the other? -
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John,
I found it unsettling that you only included the most reactionary instances in history, without mentioning 'alternative' movements. Even at the end of your last statement you mentioned ISIS and side-stepped the Kurdish struggle. I think before shouting genocide, as you mentioned Hitler, it might be 'good' to investigate other possibilities, as well. The relevance of this is, if one were going to do some kind of Wolf historical comparison and thought this way, the result would be...
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Permalink Reply by John McCreery on
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Eugene,
If you have a point to make here, please provide some details. I am aware of struggles like those of the Kurds. The topic at hand, as presented in Graeber's paper, is the relationship between utopian projects and arbitrary violence. HItler, Stalin and Mao are all world-class examples. Asked for examples of utopian projects combined with non-violence, the usual names are Gandhi and Martin Luther King. If the Kurds or any other of the resistance movements you mention represent an interesting alternative between these extremes, I would be delighted to learn more about them. The ball is in your court. If you think that what you know about these other movements adds something interesting to our discussion, please spell it out. -
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John,
It is widely held that the Nuer and the Dinka are the same people, but the relative size of their labels has fluctuated considerably in modern history. Thus th eNuer, as a result of the assimilations I described before, were 70% to Dinka 30% during the colonial period and the proportions have reversed in the postcolonial period. I don't keep up with the numbers, but I intuitively believe the story. It has a parallel for example in caste labelling and numbers during and after colonialism in India. The British introduced legal incentives for higher castes aand their numbers swellled to above two-thirds, but this switched to opposite after independence when being low-caste was now favoured. This 70/30 number is similar to Pareto's 80/20 rule, but not as extreme. Who knows what it is based on, even if the relative preponderance of th etwo groups has obviously moved drastically over time.
What this demonstrates is that the attempt of classical ethnographers to depict tribal peoples as stable, bounded, homogeneous entities largely outside modern history did considerable violence to the historical reality. Recall that E-P arrived in Nuerland just after the Brits had been bombing them (this was the period, pioneered in Iraq, when aerial bombardment was touted as a cheap method of crowd control in the colonies). EP was not allowed in Nuer villages when he entered the field and lived in a tent outside for 9 months or so. That piece of infromation is in the book. Most of it wasn't. Meyer Fortes in West Africa insi,sted on reporting a suspicious death (a body in a well). The authorities pulled in the old chief and locked him up in gaol when he said nothing. He died. Sensitive PR was not part of the job then.
I was never sure about the leopard skin chief, although I suspect it was another colonial stitch up. None of this undermines David's rich and synthetic account. I don't take it that his aim is to tell what really happened. But he does provide lots of fine stories and analysis which help us to think about politics and religion.
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Permalink Reply by John McCreery on
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None of this undermines David's rich and synthetic account. I don't take it that his aim is to tell what really happened. But he does provide lots of fine stories and analysis which help us to think about politics and religion.
I agree. It was, after all, me who first suggested David's paper for a seminar focus and earlier, when it was first published, singled it out right here on OAC as an exemplary piece of work.
That said, if we also agree that
the attempt of classical ethnographers to depict tribal peoples as stable, bounded homogeneous entities largely outside modern history did considerable violence to historical reality
could it not also be said of the attempt to treat articles or books as stable, bounded entities whose value lies in helping us think. If helping us think about politics and religion is the aim, why bother with ethnography? There are tons of history to be read, and whole libraries of historical fiction, science fiction, and fantasy in which these issues are addressed in well-written and exotically and beautifully detailed imagined worlds.
I can and do, in large part, read Graeber's article in the same manner as I read, for example, Hillary Mantel's Wolf Hall, which I'm sure you know but others here may not, is a novel concerning the relation of Thomas Cromwell to Henry VIII and his wives. Cromwell's rise from commoner to the second most powerful man in Britain in an era where the axe lay in wait for the unwary and, in the end for Cromwell himself, and politics were entangled in bloody wars of religion pitting Protestant against Catholic gives us plenty to think about concerning politics and religion and how they interact.
Which brings me back to that question: if Graeber is writing what some now call ethnographic fiction, we can simply agree with the judgment you state so clearly above. Is there something more to ethnography? Or to anthropological theory that claims to be grounded in ethnography? Don't we need at last the level of source criticism than historians bring to their documents?
Not in an effort to destroy great work--which you and I agree Graeber's paper is--but in hope of building on it? -
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Permalink Reply by Kristian Garthus-Niegel on
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A rough consensus seems to have emerged as to the theoretical substance of the core concepts and their interrelations. Here are, in my opinion, the clearest captions:
David:
the notion of sovereignty and some notion along the lines of what we call "the people" are mutually constitutive…. can be observed anywhere where a single centralised form of violence is seen as constitutive of the political order
Keith :
sovereignty is established above all in waging war on outsiders, but it is reproduced daily as a war by rulers on their own subjects. People understand what makes an act arbitrary, given its impervience to any standard notion of justice or respect for others' humanity. This in turn is seen as being god-like. And 'the people' are in a way formed by it, in conjunction with the idea of order which is its twin.
To me, the proper scientific thrust from this point, as John voiced early on, is comparative testing. Many fingers have been pointed to relevant cases:
Lee: the Hidatsa-Mandan, “casino-native-Americans”, tribal Afghanistan. John: the highland Burmese (Leach), the Ndembu (Turner), the Shilluk neighborhood (E-P, Fortes etc. etc.), the Ottomans, Hitler Stalin, Mao, ISIS, Gandhi, Martin Luther King. Huon: Princess Diana. Me: the Kwakitul, Aztecs, and Nazism (Wolf). Eugene: CNT/FAI revolution in 1930s Spain, the Ukrainian Insurrection during the Russian revolution in 1900s, the Paris commune, aboriginal separatist groups (e.g. EZLN, Kurds).
(Sorry if I missed out some)
As John says, the list may seem endless. Considering the vast variations between just these few cases, I sense the delirium he spotted down this path. Keith offered a sensible antidote:
Maybe we should be more selective in our comparisons, asking if some modern states reveal the logic of Shilluk politics more than others.
Hence, the kind of comparison called for is a historical ethnography of states.
Obviously, such a project cannot be driven home within the frame of this discussion. Still, we could perhaps try to sketch out some criteria for what are more and less relevant cases (which is what John and Eugene’s dispute seems to be about).
Thus I’d like to bring to court another odd case, directly inspired by Keith’s quote of Sahlins:
Perhaps "the human sciences should be more concerned with the apparently rare and recent origins of social equality."
The case is “my own” Norwegian welfare state, arguably the one by which social equality as a political reality has been most extensively realized on this planet (this is not a moral claim!). I’ll give a condensed account of an argument recently developed by my supervisor Halvard Vike in a series of articles in the Norwegian Anthropological Journal (anyone interested may get the references, though it's sadly all in Norwegian).
When modern bureaucratic and legal structures started emerging in early 19thC Norway, it did so in a very peculiar ‘outside-inside’-context.
Outside: Colony to Denmark for nearly 400 years, Norway was ceded to Sweden in 1814 in the division of spoils after the Napoleonic wars. Continuing to plot against each other for power over the colony, Swedish and Danish sovereigns competed for vertical alliances with Norway’s dawning nationalist movement. This provided this movement’s constitutional endeavors with remarkable success, whilst more or less exhuming external violent repression (sporadic border skirmishes occurred, but nothing like what went on in most of 19thC Europe).
Inside: Due to the Black Plague eradication of its medieval Viking nobility, its provincial geopolitical location, and rugged ecology, at 1800 the majority of Norway’s rural peasant population were small-scale land-proprietors. With no landed feudal aristocracy, private autonomy (or freedom from arbitrary violence from above) was a widely embodied cultural reality. When the small urban nationalist-liberal bourgeois commenced its state-crafting (inspired by the French and American revolutions) a wellspring of voluntary grassroot associations were mobilized in the countryside to defend this autonomy heritage. Seeking popular legitimacy against the Swedish state, instead of clenching its fist on the peasants (which would anyways have been a rather meek one!), the urban bourgeois largely conceded to their demands, which resulted in a legal formalization of extensive local political autonomy in the Norwegian proto-state.
To cut the story short, at the ethnographic level the result was that state-making came to revolve significantly around local political processes where the same individuals participated in many different, often competing interest associations (the women’s health center, the saw-mill association, the savings bank, the municipal councils, the senior home, the grain reservoirs etc. etc.). Put in more analytic terms, multiple sets of conflict lines started criss-crossing local political fields; individuals allied in one interest field found themselves as opponents in others. Thus, a very real, locally anchored system of social sanctions to ensure that power-aspiring individuals include an extensive diversity of interests in their politics was sustained (the theoretical notion of “crossing conflict lines” as a type of political process was originally coined by political scientist/sociologist Stein Rokkan).
Left to simmer in popular experience in a relatively peaceful, resource-abundant context over generations, this politically formalized system of social control with one’s local and state leaders, the contemporary Norwegian cult of equality was born. Note that the cult is far from merely imaginary; it does indeed derive from, and feed back into a process of extensively realized actual social equality. The account is, of course, an idealized one, containing many cracks: The small indigenous Sami population in the north certainly has had to suffer an unfair share of violent state repression; so is the case more recently for many immigrant asylum seekers.
I’m not sure exactly where I’m trying to get with this. Analytically, the case can be neatly fitted inside Keith and David’s quoted theorizations above. The contentious part, though, seems to be that of the relative position of violence in political sovereignty. Though I’m not very well informed, the most famous non-violent Utopian political projects (Gandhi, ML King were mentioned) look like failures in terms of consolidating as politically sovereign forms. This seems to corroborate Hansen/Stepputat’s somewhat gloomy claim that feats of political sovereignty does per definition include impunitive violence. Yet, the Norwegian case stands out as a stark example of how a politically sovereign state may actually emerge, not completely free of, but at least with very low levels of antagonism between “the sovereign” and “the people”. Which, to me at least, does open for a more “hopeful” notion of the potentials of political sovereigns.
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Permalink Reply by Huon Wardle on
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Many thanks for the clarifications, David. The idea that sovereignty, rather than being a concentration of 'law' in one person, is actually (brought about by) a concentration of the power for arbitrary violence in one person's hands, is striking and worth further discussion. Again, constitutional monarchies still preserve the monarch's ability to use arbitrary power within a very restricted compass triggered by anomalous political events.
Lee rightly asked me to stop rambling and get back to the core issue -- why would people agree to hand over their powers to a sovereign + state.
Here are a few possible reasons that are hinted at in the Shilluk case and which appear as standard reference points elsewhere:
Population density (Durkheim): when too many people cluster together there is pressure to centralise authority. e.g. the Tupi Guarani according to Clastres were living in very large dense populations at the moment of historical contact.
The logic of sacrifice (Frazer): sacrifice is intrinsically hierarchical -- the child sacrifices the fly by pulling its wings off, God sacrifices his 'only begotten son', an entire people sacrifices its king--- each in order to regenerate their own power.
Debt and Guilt (Margaret Mead): Here I am drawing on the Manus island case: according to her, an extreme sense of interpersonal debt led to extreme feelings of guilt related to multiple debt relationships amongst the Manus who were only too relieved when the monotheistic option arrived.
Segmentary opposition (Evans-Pritchard):The British actions in bombing prophet mounds simply strengthened the power of Nuer prophets who were on track to unify Nuer sovereignty.
We don't know much about the middle level of Shilluk social structure, but it would be interesting to see if any of these fit (or not) in different combinations.
Your description of policing reminded me of an elderly policeman in my fieldsite who sat down next to me at the bar, dropped his Webley revolver on the bartop, ordered a drink and then went on to tell me at great length about how he fleeced the local citizenry for small bribes related to marijuana use. The messsage seemed to be "you may think that the law is rational, but you too could be an object of random violence; that is what I am here for"
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Permalink Reply by David Graeber on
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Two brief responses
* about Norway - well, I've talked to Swedish anarchists, and the line they take to me is that almost none of the institutions we think of as typical of the welfare state were actually created by the state, but rather, everything from clinics and social insurance schemes to public libraries were created by bottom-up social movements, parties, trade unions, neighborhood associations, etc. There was a kind of deal they said whereby the state said basically "okay you can have them but you can't run them" and instituted a bureaucratised top down version; this compromise is still referred to tacitly as "the social peace," which anarchists are always accused of violating; i.e., even the most benevolent case is seen as a kind of truce in an ongoing class war, or war of state versus people. That insight actually influenced me.
* PKK/YPG, EZLN, are not "indigenous separatist movements"! Both have set up experiments that are explicitly multi-ethnic (i.e., there have to be at least three language groups represented in any Zapatista caracol, and they put a strong emphasis on multi-ethnic balance in Rojava as well, people emphasised that to me a lot when I was in Cezire (Syria) with a delegation in December. They're also explicitly NOT separatist. They're pushing for autonomous self-governance within the territory of existing nation-states; the PKK wants to make the borders between Kurdish territories in Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria increasingly meaningless but does not want a state of their own. In fact they are explicitly anti-state, Ocalan having adopted the ideas of Murray Bookchin on democratic confederalism. (Hence all the women with guns: this is a revolutionary strategy. One line I heard over and over was "we're anti-capitalist, but you can't get rid of capitalism without getting rid of the state, and you can't get rid of the state without getting rid of patriarchy." How to get rid of patriarchy? Well, making sure all women have access to automatic weapons is definitely a meaningful first step...
But I meander. I'm not entirely sure why we're talking about different forms of revolutionary political experiment in a discussion of an essay about Shilluk kingship. I thought what was most interesting about the Shilluk case was how the principle of sovereignty could exist in relative isolation from any of the other institutions and principles we ordinarily identify with the state. Think of it this way: there are plenty of complex forms of political organisation that look a lot like states from a distance that entirely lack it. In Mesopotamia there doesn't seem to be a principle of sovereignty anywhere until Sargon, and of course he was supposed to have come to a bad end. It was basically a product of conquest. Meanwhile the "heroic" societies that seem to regularly form on the fringes of such commercial-bureaucratic civilisations, with their aristocrats, potlatches, spectacular games and competitions, all of which gets memorialised in later epics... those seem to lack a principle of sovereignty too. However, when some principle of sovereignty does appear, the idea there is a single centre of power that can act with relative impunity, does it tend to produce similar results? I'm looking at a few interesting case studies at the moment which suggest it might: the Natchez "caste system" (probably not really that) seems an excellent case in point. Europeans seem to have thought they were in the presence of an absolute despotism but in fact the Great Sun could do anything he liked - and kill anyone he liked - only where he was physically present, so sovereignty extended around 30 yards around his physical person in any direction. It's all very Shilluk-like. How common is this. How common is it to transform such divine kings into sacred kings and essentially disarm the danger? It's surprising how little comparative literature there is about this stuff, because the few comparativists about are using all these neo-evolutionist categories like "tribe" and "chiefdom" that really don't have much bearing on such questions.
Kristian Garthus-Niegel said:A rough consensus seems to have emerged as to the theoretical substance of the core concepts and their interrelations. Here are, in my opinion, the clearest captions:
David:
the notion of sovereignty and some notion along the lines of what we call "the people" are mutually constitutive…. can be observed anywhere where a single centralised form of violence is seen as constitutive of the political order
Keith :
sovereignty is established above all in waging war on outsiders, but it is reproduced daily as a war by rulers on their own subjects. People understand what makes an act arbitrary, given its impervience to any standard notion of justice or respect for others' humanity. This in turn is seen as being god-like. And 'the people' are in a way formed by it, in conjunction with the idea of order which is its twin.
To me, the proper scientific thrust from this point, as John voiced early on, is comparative testing. Many fingers have been pointed to relevant cases:
Lee: the Hidatsa-Mandan, “casino-native-Americans”, tribal Afghanistan. John: the highland Burmese (Leach), the Ndembu (Turner), the Shilluk neighborhood (E-P, Fortes etc. etc.), the Ottomans, Hitler Stalin, Mao, ISIS, Gandhi, Martin Luther King. Huon: Princess Diana. Me: the Kwakitul, Aztecs, and Nazism (Wolf). Eugene: CNT/FAI revolution in 1930s Spain, the Ukrainian Insurrection during the Russian revolution in 1900s, the Paris commune, aboriginal separatist groups (e.g. EZLN, Kurds).
(Sorry if I missed out some)
As John says, the list may seem endless. Considering the vast variations between just these few cases, I sense the delirium he spotted down this path. Keith offered a sensible antidote:
Maybe we should be more selective in our comparisons, asking if some modern states reveal the logic of Shilluk politics more than others.
Hence, the kind of comparison called for is a historical ethnography of states.
Obviously, such a project cannot be driven home within the frame of this discussion. Still, we could perhaps try to sketch out some criteria for what are more and less relevant cases (which is what John and Eugene’s dispute seems to be about).
Thus I’d like to bring to court another odd case, directly inspired by Keith’s quote of Sahlins:
Perhaps "the human sciences should be more concerned with the apparently rare and recent origins of social equality."
The case is “my own” Norwegian welfare state, arguably the one by which social equality as a political reality has been most extensively realized on this planet (this is not a moral claim!). I’ll give a condensed account of an argument recently developed by my supervisor Halvard Vike in a series of articles in the Norwegian Anthropological Journal (anyone interested may get the references, though it's sadly all in Norwegian).
When modern bureaucratic and legal structures started emerging in early 19thC Norway, it did so in a very peculiar ‘outside-inside’-context.
Outside: Colony to Denmark for nearly 400 years, Norway was ceded to Sweden in 1814 in the division of spoils after the Napoleonic wars. Continuing to plot against each other for power over the colony, Swedish and Danish sovereigns competed for vertical alliances with Norway’s dawning nationalist movement. This provided this movement’s constitutional endeavors with remarkable success, whilst more or less exhuming external violent repression (sporadic border skirmishes occurred, but nothing like what went on in most of 19thC Europe).
Inside: Due to the Black Plague eradication of its medieval Viking nobility, its provincial geopolitical location, and rugged ecology, at 1800 the majority of Norway’s rural peasant population were small-scale land-proprietors. With no landed feudal aristocracy, private autonomy (or freedom from arbitrary violence from above) was a widely embodied cultural reality. When the small urban nationalist-liberal bourgeois commenced its state-crafting (inspired by the French and American revolutions) a wellspring of voluntary grassroot associations were mobilized in the countryside to defend this autonomy heritage. Seeking popular legitimacy against the Swedish state, instead of clenching its fist on the peasants (which would anyways have been a rather meek one!), the urban bourgeois largely conceded to their demands, which resulted in a legal formalization of extensive local political autonomy in the Norwegian proto-state.
To cut the story short, at the ethnographic level the result was that state-making came to revolve significantly around local political processes where the same individuals participated in many different, often competing interest associations (the women’s health center, the saw-mill association, the savings bank, the municipal councils, the senior home, the grain reservoirs etc. etc.). Put in more analytic terms, multiple sets of conflict lines started criss-crossing local political fields; individuals allied in one interest field found themselves as opponents in others. Thus, a very real, locally anchored system of social sanctions to ensure that power-aspiring individuals include an extensive diversity of interests in their politics was sustained (the theoretical notion of “crossing conflict lines” as a type of political process was originally coined by political scientist/sociologist Stein Rokkan).
Left to simmer in popular experience in a relatively peaceful, resource-abundant context over generations, this politically formalized system of social control with one’s local and state leaders, the contemporary Norwegian cult of equality was born. Note that the cult is far from merely imaginary; it does indeed derive from, and feed back into a process of extensively realized actual social equality. The account is, of course, an idealized one, containing many cracks: The small indigenous Sami population in the north certainly has had to suffer an unfair share of violent state repression; so is the case more recently for many immigrant asylum seekers.
I’m not sure exactly where I’m trying to get with this. Analytically, the case can be neatly fitted inside Keith and David’s quoted theorizations above. The contentious part, though, seems to be that of the relative position of violence in political sovereignty. Though I’m not very well informed, the most famous non-violent Utopian political projects (Gandhi, ML King were mentioned) look like failures in terms of consolidating as politically sovereign forms. This seems to corroborate Hansen/Stepputat’s somewhat gloomy claim that feats of political sovereignty does per definition include impunitive violence. Yet, the Norwegian case stands out as a stark example of how a politically sovereign state may actually emerge, not completely free of, but at least with very low levels of antagonism between “the sovereign” and “the people”. Which, to me at least, does open for a more “hopeful” notion of the potentials of political sovereigns.
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David, I'd be ready to contest Scandinavian history with your anarchist Swedish friends any day. A question provoked by your re-framing: What would you say characterized the manifestation of violence in the sovereignty-free complex forms of political organization that you highlight?
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It took all sorts of forms! I mean, maybe we should be asking ourselves why we find it so hard to imagine any social system that isn't based on a centralised monopoly of violence. Or why we think there's necessary any great commonality between those that are not.
It's a little like the notion of "gift economy," the assumption that all systems of exchange or distribution that aren't commercial markets are going to be in some sense the same.
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