Ever since †James Frazer’s Golden Bough, in which the ritual slaying of the divine king provides a central motif, as well as a conscious echo of the Christian account of Christ’s death and resurrection, kingship has been most convincingly treated by anthropologists as a problem of *ritual and symbol, rather than an issue for what became *political anthropology. Despite Frazer’s precipitous fall from anthropological fashion in the 1920s and 1930s, discussions of kingship continued, not least because of the sheer amount of fascinating evidence amassed from Africa and Polynesia, where the rites of kingship were performed in front of fieldworkers, and Asia and South America, where kingship was a central theme in both historical records and local social idioms (there are excellent bibliographies in Feeley-Harnik 1985 and Galey 1990).
Frazer’s two greatest successors as comparative theorists of kingship were the French scholar †Georges Dumézil, for whom the king fulfilled one of the three functions in his comparative account of Indo-European mythology, and †A.M.Hocart, whose work almost dropped from sight during his lifetime but was enthusiastically revived in the 1950s and 1960s. In Kings and Councillors ([1936] 1970) Hocart employed a Frazerian melange of evidence—contemporary ethnographic reports, extracts from literary sources in the Indic and Classical traditions—to put forward the case that kingship, and with it government, was originally a ritual activity directed to the collective regeneration of ‘life’, and only subsequently acquired the executive and governmental functions we now take for granted. In other words, ritual is not some secondary feature of politics; politics is, as it was, primarily a matter of ritual onto which secondary features to do with ordering and running mundane life may be attached.
Hocart’s apparently extravagant argument, which was quite at odds with the stern pragmatism of British political anthropology of the time, in fact finds plentiful support from historical and ethnographic accounts of South, and especially *Southeast Asian kingship. (In *South Asia, the situation was complicated by †Louis Dumont’s influential mischaracterization of Hindu kingship as secular, and encompassed by the ritual role of the Brahmin: see Raheja 1988.) In those regions strongly influenced by Hindu and Buddhist theories of kingship, premodern *states were focused on ritual centres (rather than ritual boundaries, as in modern nation-states), and built on pyramidal ties of lordship and fealty, in which *peasants recognized the ritual centrality of their local lord, and local lords in turn paid ritual homage to the greater lord at the ritual centre. The king, as the focus of all this attention, held power, but power of a quite different sort from that invoked in modern Western theory. Benedict Anderson, in a classic account of Javanese ideas of power, has argued that the ruler’s task was to demonstrate the concentration of ‘power’ at the centre—paradoxically often through inactivity—rather than to transform the world though its exercise (Anderson [1972] 1990).
In these regions, although kings themselves only barely survive (in Nepal and Thailand, for example) representations of kingship are pervasive, and the idiom of lordship structures all manner of everyday activities, from inter-caste relations within a village, to ties of patronage with local politicians, to grand attempts to project the modern nation-state as the legitimate successor to the precolonial kings. In so far as this idiom is rooted in the kind of idea of *power explored by Anderson, then modern mass politics are likely to be subtly different from politics in the West. With a few exceptions (e.g. Burghart 1996) this possibility has barely been explored in anthropology since Anderson’s important essay, partly because of the obvious dangers of essentializing other people’s politics as trapped in frozen tradition, but mostly because of the lingering attachment to a curiously acultural, or anti-cultural, vision of political anthropology.
The second regional strand in the study of king-ship has been in Africa, where anthropologists like the Belgian Luc de Heusch, have systematically explored the rituals and myths of kingship. What emerges from this literature is another important facet of kingship. Rituals of kingship, often involving the reversal of everyday values and norms, are as much as anything about making ordinary *persons into extraordinary kings (Feeley-Harnik 1985). †Sahlins (1985), in an analysis of Polynesian kingship which draws upon Dumézil, Hocart and de Heusch, suggests that the representation of kings as strangers or outsiders, and their ritual transgressions of the world of culture, are again part of a radically different view of power and the political. Power, in this kingly idiom, is not something inherent in society, and thus inherent in every individual; rather it is something which can only be dealt with by representing it as coming from outside the world of normal persons and normal sociability.
Recent work on kingship has quite profound, and mostly unexplored, implications for the anthropological study of politics in contemporary societies. Unfortunately, while the study of king-ship and its implications has been focused on ‘traditional’ (i.e. pre-modern, precolonial) king-ship, political anthropology has shown relatively little interest in different cultural understandings of power and its implications. Bringing the two together is both necessary and, historically and analytically, extremely difficult.
