HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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The divine kingship of the Shilluk: On violence, utopia, and the human condition, or, elements for an archaeology of sovereignty
No full textSince Frazer's time, Shilluk kingship has been a flashpoint of anthropological debates about the nature of sovereignty, and while such debates are now considered irrelevant to current debates on the subject, they need not be. This essay presents a detailed analysis of the history, myth, and ritual surrounding the Shilluk institution to propose a new set of distinctions: between "divine kingship" (by which humans can become god through arbitrary violence, reflexively defining their victims as "the people") and "sacred kingship" (the popular domestication of such figures through ritual), and argues that kingship always represents the image of a temporary, imperfect solution to what is taken to be the fundamental dilemma of the human condition—one that can itself only be maintained through terror
What is a parent?
No full textDrafted in 1991, this paper lies at an intersection of interests in debates following the UKHuman Fertilization and Embryology Act (1990), academic discussions aboutinterpretation, first sightings of fractal imagery, then recent modelings of Melanesiansociality, and in the role of knowledge in English kinship thinking. Inspired by questionsabout parenthood and kinship posed of West African materials by Houseman, it explorescertain comparisons—and the possibility of comparison—between motherhood andfatherhood
The chess of kinship and the kinship of chess (Preface by Tony Crook and Justin Shaffner, Roy Wagner’s “The chess of kinship”: an opening gambit)
No full textThe real comparison between the anthropological study of kinship and the game of chess is not immediately apparent from their formal properties, and only becomes relevant when they are viewed as strategies, or patterns of events occurring in time. The single "proportion" that both share in common is a kind of cross-comparison between dualistic variables called a chiasmus, illustrated in kinship by the classic cross-cousin relationship, and in chess by the asymmetric double-proportion between the king and queen, the only gendered pieces on the board, and the moves and tokens of the other pieces in the game. The difference may be summed up in the word "mating." Chess may be described as the "kinship" of kinship. Failure to understand the chiasmatic, or double- proportional essence of both has resulted in many dysfunctional models of cross-cousin marriage, and many very quick games of chess
Twin-born with greatness: the dual kingship of Sparta
No full textThis article examines the comparative configurations of diarchy by means of an extended analysis of the Spartan dual kingship in ancient Greece. Twinned and inseparable, both human and divine, the Spartan kings were themselves descended from celestial twins, hence it is argued that the Spartan diarchy is an empirical instantiation of the king's two bodies – the dual kingship as an expression of sovereign twinship. The essay goes on to consider other royal twins of Greek mythology, one of whom was usually descended from a god, and argues that such myths of dynastic origin constitute a cosmology of sovereign right in which the Spartan myth of stranger-kings of divine descent was opposed to the Athenian ideology of autochthony
Copernican kinship: an origin myth for the category
No full textIn many traditional mythologies, kinship constitutes the privileged idiom of both unity and diversity in the cosmos. In "post-mythological" thought, categories logically conceived attempt to take over the cosmic role of kinship. I compare two accounts of the nature and genesis of categories—those by Durkheim and Mauss on one hand, and by Lakoff and Johnson on the other. Neither account severs ties with mythology or kinship; moreover, the structure of the category, like kinship, offers a mode of projecting the human as the cosmic. To the long-standing anthropological concern with the ways in which humans impose their diverse categories on the world, we should add a concern with the ways category-theorists impose their diverse worlds on the category