Sahlins Marshall The Stranger-King Elementary Forms of The Politics of Life

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THE STRANGER-KING OR, ELEMENTARY

FORMS OF THE POLITICS OF LIFE
Marshall Sahlins
Published online: 29 Sep 2009.
To cite this article: Marshall Sahlins (2008) THE STRANGER-KING OR, ELEMENTARY
FORMS OF THE POLITICS OF LIFE, Indonesia and the Malay World, 36:105, 177-199, DOI:
10.1080/13639810802267918
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Marshall Sahlins
THE STRANGER-KING OR,

ELEMENTARY FORMS OF THE
POLITICS OF LIFE
Stranger-king formations in Indonesia and Oceania are set in the larger context of similar
Downloaded by [UNAM Ciudad Universitaria] at 18:10 17 February 2015
polities the world around. Across these societies, the same structures of the potency of alterity
appear in a variety of political forms – the experiential archetype of which, it is argued, is
the transaction of vitality between consanguinal and affinal kindreds. The conclusion is that
elementary forms of kinship and politics are one.
If humans were immortal, perhaps society could be confounded with the cosmos.
Since death exists, it is necessary for society to be linked with something that is
outside itself – and that it be linked socially to this exterior . . . [A]ffinity will be
used to domesticate this founding bond, the bond with death and exteriority.
(Viveiros de Castro 1992: 190 –91)
A Chinese traveller to Cambodia in the late 13th century tells of a certain ritual that
takes place nightly atop the golden tower in the Khmer royal palace at Angkor Wat:
Every night before he can sleep with his own royal wives, the king mounts the tower to
mate with a Naga spirit, Somā: a snake with nine heads who turns into a woman. She is
said to be the ‘owner’ of the kingdom – the autochthonous owner, to judge from her
serpentine form – and if one night she fails to appear, it is time for the king to die.
In uniting with her, the king rehearses nightly the origin of the first Khmer dynasty,
Funan, founded by Kaundinya, a Brahmin from India by most accounts, who sailed
to Cambodia laden with wealth and armed with a magical weapon. With an arrow
or spear the powerful stranger startled and disarmed Somā, daughter of the indigenous
Naga king, then married her, clothed her and initiated the Funan civilization. Since at
Angkor the king must sleep with Somā before he can sleep with his own wives, which is
to say before he can maintain his own dynastic succession, he likewise marks his
sovereignty as the usurpation of earth-sprung rulers – from above, in a golden
tower, as a celestial figure of great wealth.
(Zhou Daguan 2001)
Indonesia and the Malay World Vol. 36, No. 105 July 2008, pp. 177– 199
ISSN 1363-9811 print/ISSN 1469-8382 online # 2008 Marshall Sahlins
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/13639810802267918
178 INDONESIA AND THE MALAY WORLD
I have written about such stranger-kings before. This paper goes over some of the same
ground, but I aim to expand the argument considerably: in the first place, by noting the global
extent and historical range of the phenomenon. From ancient to modern times, the rulers of a
remarkable number of societies around the world have been strangers to the places and
people they rule. By their dynastic origins and their inherited nature, as rehearsed in
ongoing traditions and royal rituals, they are foreigners – who on that ground must
concede certain privileges to the native people. In the same way as the Cambodian rulers
of reputed Indian Brahmin ancestry, the Arabian sayyids who became Malay sultans, or the
Hawaiian ruling chiefs from islands beyond the horizon, immigrant dynasties have been
common since early times in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Africa is likewise the site of numer-
ous dualistic political systems consisting of indigenous or autochthonous ‘owners’ of the land
and stranger-kings of different ethnic origins and inclusive cosmic powers. Referring broadly
to West and Central Africa, Luc de Heusch (1982: 26–7) writes:
Everything happens as if the very structure of a lineage-based society is not capable

of engendering dialectical development on the political plane without the interven-
tion of a new political structure. The sovereignty, the magical source of power,
always comes from elsewhere, from a claimed original place, exterior to society.
Well-known examples from around the continent include Benin, Shilluk, Nupe,
Mossi, Kongo, Luba, Lunda, Zande, Ruwanda, etc. – not to mention the many
lesser kingdoms and chiefdoms that are effectively satellites of greater ones. In the
Americas, the famous empires of the Aztec and Inca were ruled by stranger-king dynas-
ties, as were the Maya as far back as the classic-period cities of Tikal and Copan. Without
even considering the permutation of original kings descended from the heavens – of
which there are many, as this is always a good home address for outsiders of royal
pretensions – the phenomenon is indeed widespread.
To give some further idea of its nature, I rehearse a few founding traditions of stran-
ger-kingship. Despite their cultural diversity, the narratives are noteworthy for their
structural similarity. (I do not use the phrase ‘charter myth’ in this connection, as
Malinowski famously did in his Trobriand ethnography – notably in describing the
imposition of a migrant chiefly group, through intermarriage, on autochthonous
villagers. Inasmuch as ‘myth’ has the connotation of ‘fiction’ in European languages,
‘charter myth’ is an ethnological contradiction in terms. A narrative will not function
as a social or political constitution if it is by definition unbelievable.) Here, for
example, is a Fijian tradition of the origins of chiefship – analogous to the traditions
of Khmer kingship, including the marriage of the stranger to the daughter of the
native ruler. That the Fijian narrative also speaks to the origins of exogamy, wealth
and cannibalism is not coincidental. In their different ways sources of the people’s pros-
perity, all these aspects of good Fijian culture are conditional on the advent of chiefs who
are, as it is said, ‘different people’ (kai tani, ‘foreigners’):
The ‘first man’ was brooding on killing his wife, as she was getting old, and repla-
cing her with their three daughters. But one day a handsome young stranger, victim
of an accident at sea, was cast up on shore and discovered by the daughters. His
name was Tabua, which is also the name of Fiji’s greatest valuable, the sperm
whale tooth, a ‘chiefly thing’, as Fijians say. The daughters desired Tabua and
THE STRANGER-KING 179
offered to become his wives. The angry father, however, required the stranger to
accomplish a miracle in order to win his daughters – which Tabua succeeded in
doing by means of a cunning trick. The old man was not only defeated but sexually
humiliated, as in glee his wife plucked out his beard, a customary sign of virility
affected by mature men. Reluctantly he yielded his daughters and his supremacy
to the stranger, but only on certain conditions: most notably that all subsequent
strangers who wash ashore be eaten lest like Tabua they trouble the land.
(Sahlins 1983:72 –3)
Among other parallels to the Cambodian foundational narrative, notice how the princely
or godly stranger, rather terrible and treacherous himself, is thus empowered to
sublimate the pre-social, anti-social dispositions of the native people – the incestuous
inclination of the Fijian ‘first man’, the nakedness of the Naga princess. Also notable
in the Fijian account is the ambiguous mixture of contract and chicane attending the
transfer of power from the original ‘owners’ of the land (i taukei) to their parvenu
rulers. Something similar is almost always found in these foundational traditions,
usually including demonstrations of violence on the part of the stranger – which will
turn out to have positive values for the indigenous people. In the Fijian case the cannibal
victims promised by the reign of the foreigner, and in essence doubles of him, are human
sacrifices whose consumption by the indigenous people in conjunction with the god will
afford them divine benefits. Man-slayers are welcomed home by crowds of women as
heroes of sex as well as war, and the collective orgy that follows is testimony of the
fecundity they bring to society. In sum, the legend of Tabua amounts to a human political
system of godly powers, as effected through the assimilation of stranger-kings cum
sacred enemies. Life from without.
Referring to an analogous dynastic charter from the Fijian island of Viti Levu, James
Fox (1995: 217) observes ‘In form this is a classic myth that is repeated throughout the
Austronesian world.’ Conceivably one could argue for some historical continuity among
these Austronesian sovereignties, but when we come upon very similar texts in classical
antiquity, it suggests we are in the presence of a more general condition of human
political order:
Oenomaus, ancient king of Pisa in the Peloponnesus, could not persuade his daughter
Hippodamia to sleep with him, his first recourse against the prophecy that whomever
she married would kill him. As a second recourse, he challenged each of her suitors to
a chariot race, they carrying Hippodamia, he in full armor: if the king overtook the
suitor, he killed him; if not, the suitor won her. Many were killed. However, Pelops,
the handsome Zeus-descended stranger gained Hippodamia’s favor, and she conspired
to have the king’s chariot fixed so that it fell apart. According to the version, he died
in the accident or else Pelops killed him. In any case, Pelops won her hand, and after
subjugating certain other lands, he succeeded to Oenomaus’ kingdom.
(Apollodorus 1921, Epitome ii.3 –9)
According to J.G. Preaux (1962: 82), this tradition of the stranger who wins the native
princess and the kingdom by mayhem or mendacity was a general pattern among the
Indo-European ancients:
Every foundation of a city, every conquest of royal power becomes effective from
the moment that the stranger, charged with a sacredness by the gods or the
fates, endowed moreover with the force of the warrior, symbolically gains posses-
sion of a new land either by receiving peacefully, or by conquering, valorously or
through a ruse, the daughter of the king of the land.
There was no genetic connection between the stranger-kings of Greece and the Malayo-
Polynesians, but there was a remarkable historical convergence when another Zeus-
descended hero, Alexander the Great – alias Iskandar Dzu’l-karnain of Koranic
fame, militant propagator of the Faith from the setting to the rising sun – appeared
as the ancestor of ruling sultans in the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra and coastal Borneo.
A critical episode from the Sejarah Melayk or the ‘Malay Annals’ (Brown 1952),
written probably in the early 16th century after the fall of Malacca, but drawing on
earlier traditions, epitomises the historiographical convergence in structural as well as
genealogical terms. Summarising and eliminating some details:
Three handsome youths in royal garb appear on a mountain above Palembang in
Sumatra, site of the once-great state of Srivijaya. Like Tabua in the Fijian narrative,
they miraculously bestow great wealth on the land, here represented by the two
widowed women who discover him. When it is learned that the youths are descended
from the world ruler Iskandar/Alexander the Great, people come from various Malay
states to take them as their king. The youngest, Sri Tri Buana, is so acknowledged by
the Raja of Palembang. Yet he is not installed until the Raja is able to neutralise a
certain malevolent power that becomes manifest in the affliction the stranger visits on
the 39 princesses who are brought to him to be his wife. Upon sleeping with him,
they all come down with a disfiguring skin condition (chloasma). However, when Sri
Tri Buana asks for the hand of the Raja’s beautiful daughter, the native ruler imposes
the condition that the stranger will never shame or humiliate his subjects, in return for
which the Raja promises eternal loyalty. This contract concluded, the marriage takes
place without ill effect; Sri Tri Buana is installed as ruler, and the Raja becomes his
chief minister. Recorded more than once in the Malay Annals and in eastern Indonesia,
this diarchic arrangement of immigrant sacred king and active second king from the
indigenous people, as established by the marriage of the first with the daughter of
the second, is also characteristic of a number of other Malayo-Polynesian dynastic
charters – including many in Fiji.
In a few generations a lineal successor of Sri Tri Buana will found Malacca and
become sultan of a flourishing Islamic commercial kingdom. They and other rulers
tracing descent to Alexander the Great will thereby inherit powers of global dimensions,
world-dominating powers, originating in the great centre of ‘Rum’ – referring usually
to Istanbul and the Ottoman emperors but sometimes to Rome or Macedonia – and
running through rule of western and southern India (‘Kalinga’), as well as the undersea
world, before reaching Indonesia. On an edict issued in the late 18th century by a sultan
of Minangkabau were affixed three seals representing three sons of Alexander/Iskandar:
the Sultan of Rum, the oldest; the Sultan of China, the second; and himself, Sultan of Min-
angkabau, the youngest but nonetheless ‘king of kings [. . .] lord of the air and clouds [. . .]
possessed of the crown of heaven brought by the prophet Adam’ (Marsden 1811: 339).
But then the historical Alexander himself, Alexander III of Macedonia (r. 336– 23
BC), conqueror of Egypt and western Asia, was a stranger-king of universal ambitions.
In the so-called Alexander romances – of which at least 80 versions are extant in 24

languages including Malay – as well as the historical chronicles of Arrian, Diodorus,
Plutarch and Curtius, a genre not always distinct from romance, Alexander is
represented with the distinguishing characteristics of stranger-kingship: including his
marriage to the daughters of the kings he has defeated and replaced, most notably his
union with the daughter of his greatest adversary, the Persian Darius III. At the end
of his conquests Alexander staged the spectacular ‘Susa Weddings’, the occasion not
only of his marriage to Darius’ eldest daughter, as well as another royal woman, but
the union of his main companions by the score with other Persian noblewomen, and
the legitimation of the liaisons of thousands of his Macedonian soldiers with the consorts
of their campaigns. In its collective dimensions and political import, the event is
reminiscent of the legendary union of the violent Latin invaders and the indigenous
Sabine women. (Yes, Romulus was a stranger-king, as was Aeneas of Troy before
him.) Important cultural unions between the Greek victors and the vanquished
Barbarians were also happening, with influences going in both directions. On one
hand, Alexander adopted certain dignities, costumes and customs of his defeated
royal predecessors, especially Darius, and encouraged his followers to likewise adopt
Barbarian habits. Generally understood as a politically inspired act of conciliation, the
same can also be perceived as the domestication of the oftimes brutal conqueror.
On the other hand, Alexander constructed numerous cities on Greek models from
Alexandria in Egypt to Kandahar in Afghanistan; he set thousands of young Asians to
learning Greek and enlisted them in his armies; he appointed Persian satraps over
certain territories. The counterpart of his own domestication was the civilising of the
Barbarians – Hellenisation.
Taking the Oriental romances into account, Alexander’s civilising mission went
down in history in two parallel forms: Islamisation, the conversion of the infidels, as
well as the Hellenisation of the Barbarians. The famous tutor of the young Alexander,
Aristotle, and a book associated with his teachings, had roles to play in both genres.
Indeed in the Malay Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain (Winstedt 1938) it was Aristotle of
Istanbul who taught Alexander/Iskandar to recite the Koran; and in the Oriental
romances Aristotle often appears as a political counsellor – and sometimes, as
Alexander’s vizier. Not to exaggerate too much, in the western historical accounts
the revered book was the Iliad. Alexander is said to have owned a copy annotated by
Aristotle that he carried on campaigns, sleeping with it under his pillow (along with
a dagger) and taking it as a guide, insofar as he identified with his warrior-ancestor
Achilles and emulated the great Asian expedition of Agamemnon. Waxing romantic
himself, Plutarch says that Alexander made the Iliad common reading among Asians
and set their sons to reciting the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides. Bringing
Asians into such community with Greeks, however, could not have pleased Aristotle,
who held Barbarians to be natural slaves. On the other hand, in building cities,
making laws and otherwise taming the ‘savagery’ of Asian peoples, Alexander would
be following Aristotelian prescriptions for controlling the appetitive soul by good edu-
cation and good legislation. According to Plutarch, Alexander persuaded the Sogdians to
support their parents instead of killing them, the Persians to respect their mothers
instead of marrying them and the Scythians to bury their dead instead of eating
them. And this made him a great philosopher in his own right. For if philosophers
take the greatest pride in civilising the untutored elements in human character, ‘and
if Alexander has been shown to have changed the savage natures of countless tribes, it is
with good reason that he should be regarded as a very great philosopher’ (Plutarch, On
the fortune of Alexander).
Alexander III of Macedonia, like his royal father Philip, already had considerable phi-
losophical practice as a stranger-king before he even crossed the Hellespont to subdue the
‘countless tribes’. The rulers of Macedonia, the Argeads, claimed descent from the Her-
aclid kings of Argos in the Peloponnesus – and Alexander doubled his exalted derivation
from Hercules on his father’s side by his reputed descent from Achilles on his mother’s.
Coming to power in the early 5th century, the Argeads governed a Macedonian
population that sophisticated Athenians still considered ‘Barbarians’ in Alexander’s
day. At a time during his Asian campaigns when he had occasion to rebuke his
Macedonian soldiers for ingratitude, Alexander reminded them that his father Philip
had transformed them from a weak bunch of nomads, dressed in animal skins and wan-
dering the mountains with their small herds of sheep, into trained warriors and properly
clad, well-ordered city-dwellers of the Macedonian plain. ‘He made you city dwellers and
established the order that comes from good laws and customs’ (Arrian 1983). Philip had
greatly enlarged Macedonia by successful wars against neighbouring kings – whose
daughters he took to wife. (It was already a standing joke in antiquity that ‘Philip
always married a new wife with each campaign he undertook’, Greene 1991: 27). More-
over, the Argeads did not only practice stranger-kingship; as descendants of the Heraclids
they positioned themselves in a series of Zeus-born, immigrant dynasties that succeeded
the original earth-born kings of Sparta. Heraclids, Atreids, Lacedaemonians: it was stran-
ger-kings all the way down – to the autochthonous Lelegians. The conquering Heraclids
killed the last king of the House of Atreus or caused him to flee. Descended from Zeus via
Pelops, Atreus had appeared on the scene with the reputation of having killed his own
sons, a crime that his descendants complemented with fratricide and matricide – not
to mention the sacrifice of Iphigenia. The family gained the kingdom of Sparta
through Menelaus’ fateful marriage to Helen, ranking princess of the Lacedaemonians.
For their part the Lacedaemonians had come to power through the marriage of their
eponymous ancestor, another son of Zeus, with Sparta, daughter of the line of the
earth-born Lelegian kings.
Max Weber believed that scholarly attempts to create some sort of politico-social
equality in history by putting the long-despised Bantu peoples on the same footing as
the Athenians was ‘quite simply naı̈ve’ (Veyne 1994: 52), but this didn’t stop
Georges Balandier from drawing explicit parallels between classical Greek and
Central African dynastic traditions. Speaking of a certain Wene, the violent immigrant
who in the course of founding the old Kongo kingdom transcended the native matrilineal
order by murdering his mother’s pregnant sister, a ‘high deed’ that gained him
recognition as a real chief, Balandier was put in mind of the ‘heroes of Greek legends
who seek the royal succession only after they have ceased to respect the prevailing
laws’ (Balandier 1968: 36). Like the draconian deeds of Pelops, Romulus, Atreus or
Alexander, the advent of African stranger-kings is generally marked by antinomian
exploits of power and violence, including murder, incest or other crimes against
kinship and morality. Often represented as a wandering hunter, the African hero and
his royal successors remain identified with the wild – and with the dark forces of
evil and destruction, of secrecy and animality, that reign there. Just so, the Shambaa
ruler is king of the night:
At night the whole country resembled the wilderness (nyika). There is darkness. A person
cannot move. Night is danger. But he [the king] rules even at night. He does not sleep. In
the darkest hours of the night the ruler listens. He sleeps in the afternoon.
(Feierman 1974: 59)
The protective function evokes the other, seemingly contrary aspect of the stranger-
king: the benefits he bestows on the people once out of the wild and in power. His
violence is then turned outward towards the aggrandisement of the realm, even as
his powers deployed inward bring order, justice, security and prosperity, as well as
arts of civilisation such as metallurgy – again, a mission civilisatrice. Balandier can
speak of the sovereignty of the Kongo founder Wene as contradictory and ambivalent;
yet as he, Heusch and others have noted of the two sides of the African stranger-king, the
terrible and the beneficial, the first is a condition of the possibility of the second. In the
charter traditions, the two phases are successive, the ability of the king to constitute a
new order being sequitur to his ability to violate the old. His initial transgressions put him
above and beyond society, alienated even from his own kin; but in so demonstrating that
he is stronger than society, he is then able to recreate it. In the analogous Indo-European
context, Dumézil (1988) described the excesses of the youthful founder as a kind of
creative violence, inasmuch as it empowered the statecraft of his later age and his
successors. Accordingly, the king’s darker nature is never extinguished.
In Kongo it was celebrated notably at the installation of a new ruler. In a way much
like Evans-Pritchard (1966) described for Shilluk in his well-known Frazer lecture, the
king was enthroned in ceremonies that reproduced the narrative of the founding of the
dynasty by the immigrant hero. Report has it that the proceedings included the ritual
murder of one of the new king’s matrilineal kin. But they also entailed the compulsory
marriage of the ruler with a daughter of the aboriginal chief: she became the queen, even
as her father, the lord of the land, retained the permanent spiritual control of it in the
new dispensation. This, too, had been part of the foundational narrative, for although
Wene the foreign warrior could conquer the land, he found himself unable to rule it
without submitting to it himself, that is, without the concurrence of the native chief.
Thus the contractual aspect of the transfer of rule, the legitimation of the usurpation.
Stricken with a debilitating illness, Wene had to abase himself before the indigenous
chief and apply for a cure, the price of which was his acknowledgement of the
latter’s priority as the ‘elder’ and ‘grandfather’ of the kingship. Since then, the native
lords have kept the function of declaring the successors of deceased kings and transfer-
ring the sovereignty to them. Although the Kongo installation rites apparently do not
include the abusive treatment of the new ruler of the sort found elsewhere, there is
one moment that similarly signifies his domestication – indeed his transformation
from male conqueror to female nurturer. It is when he places a heavy iron chain
with many pendants around his neck – it is called the samba, a word meaning ‘to
seize’ – and arranges the pendants on his back, ‘as a woman holds her child’. So if
the king does not lose his transcendent powers, they must nevertheless be socialised
if he is to become the benefactor of the land. This is the dialectical work of the original
people, who master him as their enemy in order to acknowledge him as their ruler. The
civilising mission goes both ways.
Summarising and at some risk generalising, in these stranger-kingships, two forms
of authority and legitimacy coexist in a state of mutual dependence and reciprocal
incorporation. The native people and the foreign rulers claim precedence on different
bases. For the underlying people it is the founder-principle: the right of first occupancy
– in the maximal case, the claim of autochthony. Earth-people by nature, often charac-
terised as ‘the owners’, their inherent relation to the land gives them unique access to
the divine and ancestral sources of its productivity – hence their indispensable ‘reli-
gious’ authority and ritual functions. But the stranger-kings trump these claims of pri-
ority in aggressive and transgressive demonstrations of superior might, and thus take
over the sovereignty. Typically, then, there is some enduring tension between the
foreign-derived royals and the native people. Invidious disagreements about legitimacy
and superiority may surface in their partisan renderings of the founding narratives, each
claiming a certain superiority over the other.
More than political, however, the conjunction here is cosmological, which is what
helps it endure. Perhaps it is only lately in human history that power became a purely
social fact, as established by real-instrumental means of coercion – the way it seems to
contemporary Social Science. In the instance at hand, the foreign rulers are to the native
people in some such encompassing relation as the Celestial is to the Terrestrial, the Sea
to the Land, the Wilderness to the Settled; or in abstract terms, as the Universal is to
the Particular, a ratio that also holds for their respective gods. We see, then, why the
narratives of the original stranger hero function as all-round cultural constitutions: the
union with the other, which is also an elemental combination of Masculine and
Feminine, gives rise to the society as a self-producing cosmic totality, if it does not
also restore a cosmogonic unity. On a specifically human plane, the same is replicated
in the legendary marriage of the god-like stranger with the native princess that syn-
thesises their opposition in the dynastic line they initiate. But then, as a fruitful union
of socially and sexually differentiated persons, marriage itself demonstrates the principle
that the acquisition of alterity is the condition both of fertility and identity.
As in the founding anthropological charter that goes back to Levi-Strauss and
Edmund Leach, unity is constituted by and as complementarity – though it may
entail regret for a forsaken autonomy. Hence the wild arguments I pursue in this
paper: most generally, that the social incorporation and distribution of external life
powers is the elementary form of the political life, and that marital alliance is its experi-
ential archetype. More especially, that the stranger-king polity is a developed expression
of these principles, stranger-kings being to the native peoples as affinal relatives are to
consanguines. All the critical features of the kingness of strangers – all the attributes of
hierarchy, temporality, conflicts of precedence, usurpation, assimilation of the other,
life-giving and life-taking – are always already present in the complementary relations
of external affines to internal consanguines. In a way and as they say, all politics is local.
Somewhat paradoxically, I also say that the sources of political power are generally
foreign, drawn from realms beyond the self-governing community. Ranging from beasts
to gods and ineffable forces – by way of the generic dead or the ancestors, of beings
embodied in creatures and features of heaven and earth, and of other peoples and
their remarkable gifts – the extraordinary subjects and agents that control the
human fate live outside the space of human control. More precisely, the lack of
control translates as being-in-other-space. I am speaking of the so-called and misnamed
‘supernatural’. I say misnamed because the term supposes ethnocentric concepts of
‘nature’ and ‘natural’ – an autonomous world of soulless material things or Cartesian
res extensa – ethnocentric concepts not pertinent to people who are engaged in a cosmic
society of interacting subjects, including a variety of non-human beings with the con-
sciousness, soul, intentionality and other qualities of human persons. Admittedly, my
notions of the so-called ‘supernatural’ rest on simple-minded and old-fashioned
premises. I take the rather positivist and Malinowskian view that people must in
reality depend for their existence on external conditions not of their own making –
hence and whence the spirits. The going anthropological alternatives argue that divinity
is some misrecognition of humanity. For Durkheim (1947), god is the misplaced appre-
hension of the power of society, a power people surely experience but know not whence
it comes. For a certain Marxist anthropology, god is an alienated projection of people’s
own powers of production and reproduction, an unhappy consciousness that has trans-
ferred human self-fashioning to the deity. Such theories may address the morphology of
divinity, whether as projection or mystification, but they do not tell us why society is set
in a cosmos of beings invested with powers of vitality and mortality beyond any that
humans themselves know or control, produce or reproduce. Neither sense of false con-
sciousness takes sufficient account of the generic predicament in the human condition:
this dependence on sui generis forces of life and death, forces not created by human
science or governed by human intentionality. If people really were in control of their
own existence, they would not die. Or fall ill. Nor do they control the biology of
sexual or agricultural generation. Or the weather on which their prosperity depends.
Or, notably, the other peoples of their ken: peoples whose cultural existence may be
enviable or scandalous, but by their very difference from themselves, proof of a trans-
cendent capacity for life. Endowed with transcendent powers, the foreign is often an
object of desire – and by the same token, of danger.
‘If humans were immortal’, as Viveiros de Castro says, ‘perhaps society would be
confounded with the cosmos. Since death exists, it is necessary for society to be linked
with something outside itself – and that it be linked socially to this exterior’. If so,
society will be confounded with the cosmos in some measure, that is, insofar as people
interact with exterior beings of many kinds in the overcoming of human finitude. The
Amazonian peoples to whom Viveiros de Castro refers enter into external relations of
predation, propitiation, reciprocity, spirit possession or some such means for harnessing
the being and powers of otherness to their own existence. Here are peoples with ‘a passion
for exteriority’, to the extent that the other is not so much a ‘mirror for man’ as a destiny
and indeed an identity. This is not just a Hegelian or G.H. Meadian dialectic of knowing
the self from the responses of the other. Rather, as Philippe Erikson (1996:79) observes of
Pano people, the incorporation of the powers of outsiders is an internal necessity of social
order; hence the concept of the stranger ‘connotes not only the indispensable antagonist
but also serves as self-reference’. (One is reminded of the Plains Indian who told the eth-
nographer that people need enemies in order to be happy.) The Jivaro, observes Philippe
Descola (2005: 467), find it necessary to ‘ceaselessly incorporate the bodies and identities
of their neighbors in order to persist in being themselves’. Sustaining the life of the
community through the part-conflictual, part-ritual assimilation of the potent enemy:
is this not stranger-kingship in another form?
For head-hunters in the Southeast Asian hinterlands, the structural resemblances are
right on top. The transformation of potent enemies into local benefactors in the
head-hunting feasts of the Ifugao, Toraja, Iban, Land Dayak and Kayan, among the
better-known, was documented some years ago in a seminal article by Robert McKinley
(1976). Ritually domesticated, the warrior-powers of the victims were thus turned to
sustaining the lives and livelihood of the victors, prospering both agricultural production
and human reproduction. When formally sacrificed, as was common, the victims’ heads
rendered these beneficent services as alter-egos of the victorious sacrifiers; that is, insofar
as the offering is something of the victor’s self renounced in favour of the god. The enemy
heads were then likely to be as honoured as they were previously reviled. Often they were
installed in special places in temples; offered food, rice wine or betel; perhaps kept warm
with fires on cold nights. By such means, Kayan people say, ‘those who were once our
enemies thereby become our guardians, our friends, our benefactors’ – the benefits
including bountiful harvests and immunity to illness. At the end of the Ifugao head-
feast, the quondam enemy is enjoined to combat sickness, sorcery, famine, evil gods
and the Ifugao’s own enemies – ‘For you’, they say, ‘have become one of us.’ Suggestively
(of stranger-kingship) the name ‘Ifugao’ means ‘earth dweller’ and like other inland
Southeast Asian groups, the Ifugao live at the centre of a cosmos that includes other
peoples, upstream and downstream, who are something less and more than human.
They are less because they are beyond the Ifugao pale, culturally as well as spatially:
they are orang bukai, meaning approximately ‘people who are not people’. Yet they are
more than ordinary humans because they are closer to the gods of the still more
distant celestial and underworld realms. Ideally, it is in these distant worlds of gods
that heads should be sought, these being the most potent. But in practice heads are
taken from the enemy ‘people who are not people’ on the principle that they ‘are
similar to spirits residing in strange and wild places’.
In a Toraja tradition of the origin of the head-feast, the hero indeed undertakes an
arduous trip to the Upperworld to exact revenge on the killers of his parents, and then
descends to the Underworld to take the heads of his victims’ ghosts. Corollary Toraja
narratives tell that the village of the head-hunter has been dead during his absence
but revives upon his triumphal return, and that the hero also brings home the
magical daughter of his victim and marries her after the head-feast – thus transforming
enemies into affines and marking their equivalence as reproductive agents. In sum, the
Toraja warrior returns from a cosmic exploit with a foreign subject (the head) and
enhanced reproductive virtue (the wife) in order to give life to (revive) the whole
society. Allowance made for the inversion of the stranger-king formation – the local
hero who captures foreign power as opposed to the foreign prince whose power is
captured locally – here is another modality of the same relationship. Indeed, de Josselin
de Jong likened the initiation rites of Toraja head-hunters to the foundation narrative of
the Negri Sembilan kingdom of the Malay peninsula by a Minangkabau hero from
Sumatra.
The so-called ‘importing cultures’ of Melanesia similarly benefited by the appropriation
of exterior powers, except that here it was in the form of the subjects embodied – or should
we say ensouled? – in the objects of intertribal exchange. To adopt a distinction recently
proposed by Descola, these peoples rely more on reciprocity than predation. Yet by such
means they are equally absorbed in desires of alterity – the more so where hierarchical
relations obtain among the interdependent peoples, as in the Sepik region of New Guinea
focused on the dominant Iatmul, whose cultural forms are considered by their neighbours
to be ‘surrounded by an aura of especially dangerous power, and are therefore valuable to
acquire’ (Harrison 1990: 20). Insofar as the peripheral peoples have their own powers of
wildness, a certain mutually beneficial traffic in mystical effects links the Iatmul with
others in chains of reciprocal exchange. Like the exploits of the Toraja or Dayak head-taker,
these feats of appropriation from across the cultural border at once benefit the local society
collectively and redound to the status of those who pull them off. For many of the things so
acquired are potent ritual items, including the spells used in productive work. The foreign
provenance of these things, perhaps even the original language of the spells and songs, is a
condition of their efficacy. But then, for people like the Chambri studied by Deborah
Gewertz and Frederick Errington, foreignness may be a condition of their own being, as
in the matter of their ancestry:
Indeed, the Chambri explicitly regard their society as based on borrowing. They
assert that most of their ancestors were of foreign origin; they recognize without
embarrassment that many of their rituals were acquired from the Iatmul along
with much of their esoteric knowledge. (Errington and Gewerth 1986: 99)
Chambri and their neighbors eagerly traded back and forth the ritual items that
conferred and evoked efficacy, such as flutes, masked figures, large rocks, and some-
times ceremonial performances. Many of the incantations through which Chambri
clans regulated portions of the immediate natural environment derive their potency
from polysyllabic names acquired from non-Chambri neighbors.
(Errington and Gewerth 1996: 16)
Note the retention of the marks of foreign origin. The incantations, flutes and the
rest are inalienable things, in the sense that they embody the person-qualities and extra-
ordinary powers of the donors. The objects of exchange are beneficial agents. Like stran-
ger-kings, they are in effect foreign subjects that by means of feats of derring-do enter
into the native society to promote its order and prosperity. Moreover, those who obtain
these life-enhancing powers by travelling and trading ventures beyond their borders gain
renown and prestige in their own right, which is to say, superiority among their own
people. Here again are structural equivalents of the stranger-king – where there are
only local big-men.
Foreign objects functioning as regalia and palladia have played critical roles in the
constitution of Southeast Asian sovereignties. To follow Heine-Geldern (1942), the
royal regalia were the real rulers of certain coastal Sulawesi kingdoms; the kings
were merely their agents. The kings, here heavenly strangers, were thus objectified sub-
jects; the regalia, subjectified objects. Famous krises of Java and Bali, talking, acting and
striking of their own volition, have been known to convey the kingdom to stranger
princes. One that was sent from Majapahit in Java to a prince of that realm in Bali
allowed him to pacify the island and establish the pre-eminent dynasty of Gelgel
(Klungkung). In her excellent ethnography of Tanimbar in eastern Indonesia, Susan
McKinnon relates a cosmogonic tradition of similar import. After the initial reproduc-
tive unity of heaven and earth was shattered by a culture hero of foreign origin – using a
spear taken from the autochthonous people – humans were left in a kind of Hobbesian
condition, wandering the land in small groups, clashing with one another, while search-
ing for access to the otherworldly powers that would allow them to create a fixed
existence. McKinnon relates what they were looking for:
Named heirloom valuables, acquired by the ancestors through actions that trans-
cended the social order, became signs of the powers that lie before, beyond,
outside and even against society, but also signs of the powers that underlie
society and constitute the very basis of its possibility. It was by forays into the
heavens, the underworld, and lands beyond the horizon that these men appropriated
objects of otherworldly power that would enable them to recompose their own
world, the land within the horizon.
(McKinnon 1991: 62)
Note that a named heirloom, carrying thus a history of its ordering effects, is probably
more than a sign of external powers; it is, rather, an agent able to exercise such powers.
Here again the mission civilisatrice of the external subject – or stranger-kingship before
the letter.
Of course I am not claiming that differences between stranger-kings, head-hunters
and local big-men – not to mention shamans, cult leaders, hereditary chiefs and
leopard-skin chiefs – are inconsequential. Only that, as modes of political authority,

they are structurally commensurable. All achieve their differential authority by their
instantiation or command of external sources of vitality and mortality.
Moreover, I risk such generalities in part because they are consistent with the equally
broad and eclectically-documented treatises of Mary Helms on the politics of alterity in
so-called ‘traditional societies’ (Helms 1988, 1993, 1998). I read Helms as mapping an
ideal-typical cosmography of power, focused as she says on ‘an organized, morally
informed “cultured” social entity at the centre’, surrounded by a series of concentric
zones populated by all manner of visible and invisible presences of exceptional potency
(Helms 1993:7). Again, power is foreign to the socius it empowers. Certain cosmographic
complexities aside, according to Helms there is a direct relation between remoteness
from the centre and the potency of these supramundane presences. Extending vertically
from the heavens to the underworld and horizontally on the terrestrial plane, the beings
and forces of the exterior increase in ‘supernatural’ power in proportion to their distance
from the human centre – even as, in the same measure, they escape human control. Still,
there being death, they are not beyond human desire: which, I am saying, is what the
politics of so-called ‘traditional societies’ is all about.
By that I mean internal competition as well as external adventure. Indeed exploits
undertaken beyond the border are privileged ways of achieving local status. This competitive
move to the outside is an extreme form of what Gregory Bateson (1958) has described as
‘symmetrical schismogenesis’. Bateson cites the example of an arms race in which each side
tries to best the other by doing more of the same – on the principle of ‘anything you can do I
can do better’. At the extreme, however, competition in quantity is exchanged for difference
in quality: one goes outside the box, trumping the adversary by shifting the terms of con-
tention to means of another kind and greater value – such as introducing a new, devastating
weapon into the arms race. Even in so-called acephalous societies, the appropriation of
outside potencies by hunters, shamans, warriors and traders bring them a certain differential
standing in the community. The big-man politics of Melanesia and of chiefly potlatching in
northwest America are institutionalised systems of rivalry based on trafficking in external
spheres of power and renown. Likewise, the celebrated kula ring of the Massim (New
Guinea) is a great transcultural system for the circulation of potent social values, principally
in the form of shell ornaments. Nancy Munn (1986) has shown at length for Gawa island
how extending one’s being in name and person abroad through success in the kula is then
realised in authority at home. In this connection, European colonial expansion often did
not alter the character of indigenous politics – at least not initially – so much as it
greatly expanded the cosmography of potency, adding a new, transcendent arena from which
local powers-that-would-be extracted goods, identities and other novel means for achieving
authority within their own society.
During the early colonial period in Polynesia, local ruling chiefs became stranger-
kings – by assuming foreign identities. This tactic of taking on the personae of European
greats was practised particularly by ambitious chiefs who could not claim by ancestry the
authority to which they now aspired by power and wealth – through means largely
acquired in trade with the foreigners they were pleased to imitate. Hardly 15 years had
passed since Captain Cook’s death in Hawaii before the rival paramounts of the three
main islands had named their sons and heirs ‘King George’. In 1794, when he was
embarked on the unprecedented unification of the archipelago, the great Kamehameha
posted a man to the galley of one of Vancouver’s ships for the purpose of learning
how to cook. When Vancouver was preparing to leave, Kamehameha made several
requests to the British to supply him with domestic furnishings and kitchen utensils.
Master’s Mate Thomas Manby (1929: 46) comments in his Journal:
And now that he was in possession of the requisites for the table, a tolerable cook
and every kind of implement for culinary purposes, the monarch boasted with
evident pride and satisfaction that he should now live like King George.
Manby had already heard from a high priest that the Hawaiian ruling family traced its
descent to white men who had come to the islands some generations before – a story
of an ultimate connection with Europeans of the kind told by many indigenous peoples
the world over. Perhaps this genealogy played in Kamehameha’s addressing George III
in a letter as ‘Dear Brother’. In the last years of Kamehameha’s reign, John Adams
Kuakini was governor of Hawai’i Island, Cox Ke’eaumoku ruled Maui and Billy Pitt
Kalaimoku was the ‘Prime Minister’ of the Kingdom. These were not just sobriquets
bestowed on Hawaiians by Europeans for their own amusement. Kalaimoku insisted on
being called ‘Pitt’, and the casket in which Ke’eamoku was buried in 1824 was simply
inscribed ‘Cox’. Also to be seen in Honolulu in those days were Billy Cobbet, George
Washington, Charley Fox, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Napoleon Bonaparte.
This kind of identification with powerful others is interesting in light of the question,
of urgency especially to historians, of whether traditions of immigrant kingship actually
happened, or at least reflect such happenings in a fantastical way. The suggestion of this
history is: not necessarily. As indigenously formulated, stranger-kingship may be a struc-
ture without an event.
Of course, in a more general sense, the contingent advent of powerful strangers
seems a necessary condition for claims of foreign provenience, identity or genealogy
on the part of indigenous rulers. The intervention may take the form of European colo-
nialism as in the Hawaiian case, but may also arise in some other globalising process, such
as the Persian and Arab participation in Indian Ocean trade that brought Alexander the
Great to the Malay Peninsula. Likewise, the mode of stranger-kingship constituted by
immigrant rulers who claim descent from long-lost native ancestors – like the ruling
Kafika clan of Tikopia or the Abahinda kings of Ankole – may develop without the
benefit of European colonialism. In any event, as has been said of the origins of Sumatran
rajas in Rum, the irruptions from other worlds add a new and transcendent dimension of
power to their own, offering unprecedented opportunities for magnifying native rule by
grafting it on to a hegemony of greater scale and authority. Fijians of the 19th century
similarly told of comings of their ruling lineages from Tanganyika, Egypt, Turkestan,
Turkey, and/or the Malay peninsula – an innovation on older traditions of chiefly
origins in Tonga. Incongruous only in our own eyes, such narratives have been subject
of a small industry in historical debunking, if not just pooh-poohing, on the part of
western scholars – too often at the expense of ethnological understanding.
Whether by means of outside rulers who become insiders or insider rulers who
become outsiders, the politics of so-called ‘traditional societies’ aims to invert Helmsian
cosmography by accumulating ‘supernatural’ resources at the centre and bringing them,
and hence the world, under human control. Rather than increasing in proportion to dis-
tance, divine power is concentrated in an axis mundi at the heart of the kingdom, whence
it is diffused outwards in progressively diminishing degrees. At the hierarchical extreme
are imperial systems governed by rulers of universal pretensions, such as the Buddhist
Chakkavati King of Kings, the Persian Achmaenid dynasts of similar description or the
Chinese Ruler of All Under Heaven, potentates who fashion their hegemony in the form
of cosmocracy. By means of a bureaucracy that extends their presence as well as their
power, these cosmocrators synthesise the ontological and theological dualisms that
mark stranger-king polities to produce a distinctive system of totalised and centralised
rule. No particular authority or ritual privilege remains to the underlying people on the
basis of their indigeneity. They are an unmarked demos, whereas the king detains the
powers of heaven and earth both. J. Gonda (1966: 81) tells of the consecration
ceremonies of the ancient Vedic king, wherein:
Placing his feet on the earth he pronounces formulas in which he declares himself to
be established on, or to find support in, the sky and the earth, in both kinds of
breath, in day and night, in food and drink, in brahma and ksatra – that is to say,
in the highest complementary pairs in the universe.
Or consider this oft-cited Confucian text from the Han dynasty:
Those who invented writing in ancient times drew three [horizontal] lines and
connected them [vertically] through the middle, calling the character ‘king.’ The
three lines are Heaven, Earth and Man, and that which passes through the middle
joins the principles of all three. Occupying the center of Heaven, Earth and Man
passing through and joining all three – if he is not the king, who can do this?
(Granet 1968: 264)
By their privileged relations to world-encompassing gods – whether by descent, incarna-

tion or superior virtue – such rulers would finally overcome human finitude by confounding
their polis with the cosmos and submitting both to their own agency. They represent and
condense the universe in their royal palaces, cosmopolitan courts, exotic regalia and foreign
tributes – including all manner of monsters and wonders collected from the world periph-
eries. These tributary products, ensouled with the wild potency of the hinterland peoples,
thus empowered their imperial recipients. Edward Schafer observed that the incense from
Southeast Asia wafting through the T’ang Emperor’s court ‘marked the presence of the
royal afflatus, breathing supernatural wisdom through the worlds of nature and human
affairs’. In the formal levees of the ministers, a ‘table of aromatics’ was placed before
the Son of Heaven. ‘The great councilors of state then stood before the table and, perfused
with the magical fragrance, proceeded to conduct the business of state’ (Schafer 1963:
155–56). Inhaled by the court officials, the scent of sandalwood from Borneo insinuated
the virtuous presence of the emperor into their own persons, whence it was realised in
imperial statecraft and spread through the world.
Just so, another Confucian scholar, writing in Qing times, reflected on a certain
European emperor of long before:
During the T’ang dynasty, Charlemagne, a wise and learned man, gifted with civil
and military talents, became Emperor of the Germans and the French. His fame and
virtue spread far afield, and all the barbarians submitted to him.
(Wang 1967: 123)
The text refers to the civilising mission of the Emperor: his transmission of celestial
order to All Under Heaven by means of his wisdom and virtue – backed, if need be,
by military strength. The cosmocracies not only accumulate other-worldly power but
generate a dynamics of its circulation, which is to say a dynamics of cultural constitution.
Politico-spiritual power moves outward by such means as main force and proxy forms of
the emperor’s presence, while it is drawn inward from the ‘barbarian’ peripheries by the
force of attraction of the imperial centre.The attraction lies in the competitive uses the
peripheral peoples can make of their contact with this power – thereby sending it out-
wards again to order the hinterland. Richard von Glahn relates that long after the
famous Shu Han minister, Zhuge Liang, pacified certain ‘barbarians’ along China’s
southwestern marches, the subdued peoples continued to give him a place among
their own deities. According to local traditions, moreover, ‘their chieftains’ bronze
drums, the universal symbol of authority in the southwest, originally were bestowed
by Zhuge Liang’ (von Glahn 1987). Such honours were even paid to Zhuge Liang in
areas he never actually conquered or visited, thus by local people on their own initiative,
in the interest of giving their authority a Chinese cachet. Magnus Fiskesjö (2000: 85)
tells of ‘Sinicized local potentates’ on the southwestern frontier in more recent
periods ‘who came to discard their original non-Chinese names and take Chinese
ones, in order to claim Chinese ancestry, or even traced a purely invented ancestry
to those specific Chinese conquerors who had imposed civilization in ancient times’
– like the European ancestors of Hawaiian chiefs. Just as the potency of imperial
centres is sustained by tributes from the peripheries, so conversely do cosmocratic
rulers empower and ‘civilise’ the tributary peoples – thereby becoming strategic
sources of the rise of local chiefs and the advent of stranger-kings.
The effect is the de facto organisation of the planet in regional systems of greater and
lesser polities focused on powerful apical states from which the others derive their own
legitimacy – and often enough their ruling dynasty. Or else the more distant places refer
their ruling groups to tertiary and secondary centres, while the ancient primary king-
ship, perhaps superseded, persists only in historical memory. Common around the
world are political genealogies tracing the descent of recent kingdoms to ancestral
names to conjure with: Toltec, Teotihuacan, Funan, Champa, Sina (China), Majapahit,
Rum (Byzantium, Turkey), Ife, Lunda, Zande, Troy, Mycenae and so forth – although
as Janet Hoskins (1993: 35) comments of the similar claims of eastern Indonesian
aristocrats, ‘it could hardly be that all the peoples of the outer islands were descended
from exiled Javanese princes’.
Anthropologists will recognise here the process of ‘secondary state formation’ as
described by Morton Fried (1967) and its effects in the form of ‘galactic polities’ as
described by Stanley Tambiah (1976). Ethnographically they will be reminded of
Edmund Leach’s observations in The political systems of highland Burma of the continuum
of political and ritual forms stretching from imperial China through the Burmese king-
doms and Shan states to the Kachin Hills chiefdoms (gumsa), becoming progressively less
elaborate as they move from the imperial heartland to the mountain hinterland. In
recording how some Kachin leaders ‘become Shan’, Leach also presented another
instance of local people fashioning themselves as prestigious foreigners. More recently,
Magnus Fiskesjö (2000) has documented how certain Shan princes, who themselves held
titles (tusi) of indirect rule from the Chinese, displaced and subordinated the autochtho-
nous Wa peoples in the irrigable lowlands of the Yunnan-Burma borderlands by means of
a classic stranger-king arrangement. The marriage of a daughter of the native chief to the
immigrant Shan prince sealed the Wa retreat to the highlands and their tributary
relations to the Shan, even as it perpetuated certain ritual functions of the Wa in the
lowlands, including their sometime participation in the installation ceremonies of
Shan rulers. From these and other sources, we also know that the galactic systems
are often marked by war and instability, especially where there are conflicting claims
of universal domination among powerful neighbouring states or between the cosmocra-
tors and their major vassals. In any case, the galactic polities generate regional ecumenes
of power that are at the same time hierarchies of cultural order. The combined action of
cosmocratic ambitions at the centre and upward mobility at the peripheries amounts to a
politics of acculturation in which the circulation of concepts, objects, persons and even
religions is effected through the tactical pursuit of the potency of alterity.
In the event, the hinterlands of the galactic systems are breeding grounds of stranger-
kingships – as I will continue to illustrate, all too summarily, from Southeast Asia. The
outlying island and inland peoples of the region present an interesting array of political
variations on the common dualistic theme of foreign-derived rulers and indigenous
‘owners’. As in Africa and elsewhere, the parvenu outsiders overturn the principle of super-
iority on the basis of temporal priority by which the native people were and are organised.
Typically associated with a complementary division of cultural labours – the immigrants
taking political office, the original owners controlling the cult of the land – the two
sectors are integrated in various degrees, in more or less direct relation to their distance
from the great historical kingdoms of the mainland and nearby large islands. Some outlying
areas (Gayo, Sumba, Tanimbar, Mambai, Toraja, etc.) know a sort of colonial status, with
certain local officials appointed by a dominant neighbouring potentate, principally to collect
tributes. In the more peripheral reaches, the ruling group and the native people do not
comprise anything like a unified society. Ethnically distinct and geographically separated,
they constitute a transcultural stranger-kingship – held together not so much by the
power of the distant foreigners as by the indigenous people’s desire to acquire some of it.
The so-called ‘tribal’ peoples of the region are well known for actively seeking the
means of their own life enhancement and political advancement by voyages of derring-do
to remote centres of power, wealth and order. Often involving trading and raiding along
the way, the voyages culminated in tributary gift-exchanges with the foreign ruler. In
olden times, the foreign centre may have been a secondary or tertiary focus of a galactic
polity; more recently, it was a European colonial outpost; and now it is a modern coastal
city where wage labour and market exchange have replaced traditional tributary
relations. Aside from heads and plunder taken on the journey, the trophies of these
border-transcending exploits included titles and goods bestowed by the foreign ruler,
embodiments of his agency that function to extend it in space and time. The bejalai
or journeys of young Dayak men to the coastal centres of Sarawak and beyond are
classic ethnographic examples. J.H. Walker (2002: 20) writes of them:
Many of the goods acquired through bejalai were themselves sources of potency.
Antique jars, for example, were credited with supernatural powers and healing
virtues and would thereby contribute to the potency of the community to which
they were taken. Moreover, the successful accumulation of prestige goods
and other wealth would indicate, in itself, an increase in spiritual powers, status
and strength.
This passage is taken from Walker’s book on James Brooke, the famous ‘white rajah of
Sarawak’, a work that among other virtues has the merit of showing how successive
waves of European colonials have been incorporated in long-standing local practices
of capturing external spiritual authority. For the Iban and other interior peoples of
Sarawak, Brooke was a source of attraction of the kind the Chinese literati attributed
to the Celestial Emperor – and Charlemagne. Indeed only the Chinese settlers of
Sarawak – who precisely had their own imperial traditions and ancient gods – were
immune to the powerful virtue (semangat) the native peoples sought from contact
with Brooke. Some Iban considered Brooke the son of their ancestral mother and
father – hence a recuperation in his own person of a lost cosmogonic unity. Others
say he was not the son of the ancestress, Kumang, but her lover – thus a repetition
of the topos of the stranger-king who marries the indigenous princess and becomes
ruler of the land. On a visit to a certain interior group, Rajah Brooke and the Bishop
of Sarawak were received by an old woman who proceeded to wash their feet in
coconut milk, which she then set aside for steeping the rice seed before planting.
Others ‘brought portions of cooked rice in leaves and begged the Englishman to spit
on them, after which they ate them up, thinking they should be better for it’
(Walker 2002: 116). Although it is sometimes claimed that the notion of the European
as native god is just an imperialist fiction, one wonders if western art did not follow
indigenous life in the matter of Conrad’s Lord Jim, and Heart of Darkness, and Kipling’s
The Man Who Would Be King.
If the Sarawak people thus absorbed semangat from the European raja, at the eastern
extreme of Indonesia the Biak islanders absorbed the Islamic equivalent, barak, from the
Sultan of Tidore in the Moluccas. The sultan claimed a certain sovereignty as far as the
coasts and offshore islands of western New Guinea. The voyages of Biak people from
offshore New Guinea to the Moluccas were proof enough of the sultan’s reach – or
as the Chinese might say, of his virtue. Trading and sometimes raiding as they went,
the Biak carried tribute to the sultan and returned with the mana-like barak ensouled
in his goods and his person, having been accorded gifts of the former and the privilege
of prostrating before the latter. One may judge the boost thus given to the Biak people’s
own status by their transmission of this power upon their return through handshakes
with their relatives – who proceeded to rub their own faces with it. In her excellent
ethnography of Biak, Danilyn Rutherford (2003) provides a detailed analysis of how

these foreign journeys and prestige goods were engaged in the local politics of distinc-
tion, notably through affinal relationships.
Internally, Biak politics is played out in the long-term exchanges between houses or
patrilineages allied by marriage, between wife-givers and wife-takers. Considered as the
male side and superior as donors of life to their affines, the wife-givers distinctively put
foreign wealth into these transactions, as against the foods presented by the female and sub-
ordinate wife-takers. The exchanges, which were both collective and individual, provided an
arena in which men could differentially make their names by gifts of prestigious foreign
objects in support of their out-married sisters’ children – thus testifying to their feats of
appropriating valuables from abroad. At the same time, the foreign wealth acquired from
their mothers’ brothers distinguished these children as valued persons in their own right.
For they were endowed by the agency of the foreign goods with special talents, not least
being those that gave sisters’ sons unusual gifts of love-making – again, reproductive
virtues – and the ability to raid the lands of foreigners themselves. Such achievements
could even earn sisters’ sons the honourable status of amben or ‘foreigner’: a term Biak
use for Europeans and Indonesians of other parts, but also for their own elite of civil servants,
soldiers, pastors and village chiefs. If in Sarawak, foreigners can become local elites, in Biak
people of standing can become foreigners – a domestic integration of the stranger-king
ideology of the kind we have seen elsewhere.
Affines as life-giving outsiders: clearly we need another amendment of Helms’s model
of ‘supernatural power’ increasing by social distance. It will help explain this fundamental
contradiction – the common conflation of intimate affinal relatives with remote cosmic
powers – which Helms recognises at length but for which she does not provide an effective
conceptual place. ‘Certain categories of people’, she writes, ‘especially affines (in-laws), are
associated with the cosmographically charged outside world and, therefore, convey distinc-
tive supernaturally informed qualities associated with the wider cosmos’ (Helms 1993: xii).
(Especially interesting in the present connection would be the symbolic assimilation of bride
and groom to royalty in marriage ceremonies, a phenomenon to which Hocart (1927)
devoted a chapter of his work on Kingship, including examples of ritualised marriage-by-
capture that in effect replicate the foundation narratives of stranger-kingship). Helms
notes that the series of concentric zones surrounding the social nucleus in the ideal-
typical cosmos is generated by a recursive opposition of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, each exterior
zone being ‘outside’ to the ‘inside’ zones it encompasses. But she does not explore the struc-
tural dimension that is critical for the present discussion: precisely that this is a nested seg-
mentary system of social categories, the outer and greater ones including the lesser and
inner ones. Hence ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ are relative and contextual terms, their use depend-
ing on the familiar principle of segmentary opposition. Other houses in my village are out-
siders in relation to my own, but they are insiders relative to other villages of my tribe or
language-group, although all of these are again insiders relative to other tribes, etc. Under
this structural condition, direct proportionate relations, as between geographical distance
and other-worldly power, must be qualified, since ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ do not represent
determinate positions on a linear scale. Different social zones at various distances may be
meaningfully conflated as ‘inside’ or ‘outside’, to the extent that certain outsiders within
the home community, most particularly kinsmen by marriage, are identified with distant
and foreign peoples – and even with gods. ‘The other’, Vivieros de Castro says of
Arawete, ‘is first and foremost an affine’, including in that category guests, friends,
foreigners, allied communities, trade partners, forest spirits, certain animals and, as
husbands of the female dead, the gods themselves. Not incidentally, a lot of structuralist
analysis rides on this sort of segmentary relativity, insofar as it provides the logical oppor-
tunity for categorical equations between different cultural registers, as between affinity,
polity and cosmology. It is the actual sociology of seeming metaphor.
The outsider or stranger, then, is a qualitative relation of difference rather than a
quantitative distinction of distance. In Tanimbar, there are strangers even within the
natal house: namely the daughters destined to reproduce the houses of affinal others.
McKinnon (1991) reports that when a child is born, the inevitable question of its sex
is here phrased as ‘stranger or house master?’ As in the old Roman law, a daughter is
the terminus of the family. However, one may judge her beneficial value to Tanimbar
wife-takers, by McKinnon’s report that a pregnant woman ‘is often compared to a
boat that makes a long-distance journey and returns to land laden with valuables’.
Here again, direct relationships with affinal others take on the character of mystical
encounters with distant others. More particularly, the affinal relationship is the experi-
ential ground cum social enactment of people’s dependence for their own existence on
external sources they do not control.
But precisely in the form of marriage people do engage and transact such external
life powers, and in the children of the marriage they assimilate the outside in themselves.
In the classic statement on these matters, Edmund Leach (1961: 2) wrote:
In any system of kinship and marriage, there is a fundamental ideological opposition

between the relations which endow the individual with membership in a ‘we group’of
some kind (relations of incorporation), and those other relations which link ‘our
group’ to other groups of like kind (relations of alliance) and that, in this dichotomy,
relations of incorporation are distinguished symbolically as relations of common
substance, while relations of alliance are viewed as metaphysical influence.
Commenting on this passage, Vivieros de Castro (2004) notes that the so-called
metaphysical influence of affines may also be transmitted by substantial connections
(as between mother’s brother and sister’s son in cross-cousin marriage). Nor are the
consubstantial relations of the ‘we-group’ necessarily without metaphysical powers,
for example first-born sons in many Polynesian societies who are in effect first-fruit
offerings to the group’s ancestors and accordingly hedged in taboos. Yet there
remains a critical metaphysical opposition between ‘relations of incorporation’ and
those of ‘alliance’, or as de Castro characterises the two sides, relations based on simi-
larity and those founded on difference – or then again, for simplicity and comparative
utility, relations of consanguinity and affinity.
If gods in the Amazon are in certain contexts affines, in Oceania certain affines are
conflated with gods. Hocart spoke of the Fijian kinship system as ‘a whole theology’.
The phrase is particularly apposite for the key affinal relationship of mother’s brother
and sister’s son. Ritually and effectively in ordinary practice, the privileged uterine
nephew steals the sacrifice offered to the god of his mother’s brother’s people. He
usurps the place of the mother’s brother’s god: thus the sacred respect he is accorded
by his mother’s people and the powers he assumes over their possessions. As a theology,
then, the affinal kinship practice is also politics. In Fijian traditions, as we have seen,
dynasties are typically founded by a stranger-prince who marries the daughter of the
chief of the original people, a union that gives rise to a royal heir who is the sister’s son
cum living god of the land. By contrast, among Kedang of eastern Indonesia, where
wife-givers are superior to wife-receivers, one’s mother’s brother, reports J.R.
Barnes (1977: 22), ‘is spoken of and regarded as a god’; for ‘through the gift of his
sister he has presented Ego’s patriline with new life, the means of continuing its
existence’.
So to repeat and conclude: my argument is that the affinal relationship is the archetype
of stranger-king politics. Of course the incest taboo is the more fundamental condition,
inasmuch as it requires that life is gained from and lost to the outside, thus establishing
the basic correspondence between the human ontological and sociological predicaments:
the dependence on external sources of existence. But then, I claim, stranger-kingship is a
developed political expression of the same. Its attributes are found in nuce in the opposition
between consanguinity as constituted relations of being and affinity as formative relations of

becoming – a description that would equally apply to the difference between the native
people and their foreign rulers. As a Fijian once put it to me: ‘Brothers are only brothers,
but the sister’s child is a new path [of kinship] . . . Brothers are only in the house; they have
been there from the past to today. But the descent of my sister is a new line’. Effectively, this
holds even in the case of marriage within prescribed kinship categories. Notice too the
difference in temporality. Consanguines are original as well as forever, as contrasted to
the in-marrying people, a difference also of nature and contract. Like the native people
in the stranger-king polity, the consanguinal group are generally localised and stable, the
‘owners’ of their ancestral sites in contrast to their in-coming, late-coming affines. Also
like the original owners of the kingdom, the consanguineal group is ordered by temporal
priority, by the authority of the seniors in age or in descent, if not also the ancestors, as
compared to the current privileges acquired by arriviste affines.
Then there is the intrinsic ranking effected by marital alliance. Marriages create the
greatest of advantages and disadvantages in transferring generative powers from one
group to another – simultaneous exchanges of sisters or brothers excluded. At least
temporarily, the relationship between affines and consanguines is unbalanced. The
inequality may be reversible or reproducible, depending on the marriage rule. It may
favour the wife-givers as in island Southeast Asia or the wife-takers as in Fiji or North-
west America: the former by virtue of the irredeemable debt of life-powers; the latter
by the capture thereof. But in any case, there is a critical element of inequality, thus a
relationship at once contractual and conflictual.
Yet if the affines represent contradictory and transgressive principles of relationship,
they nevertheless order the consanguineal group. I revive another old chestnut from
structural-functional anthropology: lineage mates are differentiated by their respective
affinal connections. External alliances become points of segmentation among consan-
guines, thus imposing from the outside a discontinuous ordering of the diffuse solidarity
of relations by common descent. Here again is identity made by the assimilation of alter-
ity, the way that patrilateral kinsmen are distinguished by their respective matrilateral
affiliations. Moreover, as we have seen, the status of senior affinal relatives as sources
of a child’s life is commonly associated with their endowing him or her with life-enhancing
means and talents. In practice this means providing the children of their out-marrying
members with ritual and material services that again distinguish them as valued social
beings. Like the benefits conveyed by the stranger-king, persons are differentiated and
prospered by their outsider-affines – which is also to say, they are thus organised and
civilised. And on the negative side, perhaps nothing resembles the blasting powers of
kingship so much as the curse of the senior affinal relative.
My modest conclusion is that the elementary forms of kinship, politics and religion
are all one.
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THE STRANGER-KING OR,

to West and Central Africa, Luc de Heusch (1982: 26–7) writes:

Everything happens as if the very structure of a lineage-based society is not capable

In the so-called Alexander romances – of which at least 80 versions are extant in 24

leopard-skin chiefs – are inconsequential. Only that, as modes of political authority,

Or consider this oft-cited Confucian text from the Han dynasty:

By their privileged relations to world-encompassing gods – whether by descent, incarna-

(Wang 1967: 123)

ethnography of Biak, Danilyn Rutherford (2003) provides a detailed analysis of how

In any system of kinship and marriage, there is a fundamental ideological opposition

between consanguinity as constituted relations of being and affinity as formative relations of

eighteenth century. New York: Pantheon Books.

Granet, Marcel. 1968. La pensée chinoise. Paris: Editions Albin Michel.

Cambodia. Bangkok: Siam Society.

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