The New Science of the Enchanted Universe by Marshall Sahlins;

Author:Marshall Sahlins;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

These are rich texts, from which Junod draws an instructive conclusion about the inherent ambiguity of the gods as the source of good and evil, and the corresponding ambivalence of the people toward them as submissive and dismissive. On one hand, the ancestor-gods are omniscient and omnipresent. On the other hand, “they are still, however, but men! They are not transcendent beings before whom miserable sinners tremble and offer prayers” (Junod 1913, 386; emphasis original). Bystanders at most rituals invoking the gods talk among themselves, joke, even obscenely, while the invocation itself, as just noted, harangues the ancestral powers as much as it supplicates them. The ancestors are far from moral paragons. “Their character,” as Junod describes it, “is that of suspicious old people, who resent any want of respect, or of attention, on the part of their descendants. They wish to be thought of and presented with offerings. It seems that they are not actually in need of anything, for they live in abundance, but they exact a punctual observance of the duties of their descendants in regard to them” (387; emphasis original).

Marked by lengthy genealogies that often reach into the heavens, the most elaborate ancestral cults in the cultures of immanence are those of kings and ruling chiefs. In collective ceremonies, as those of the New Year or the ruler’s inauguration, and also at individual graves or shrines, the ancient potentates continue to ensure the welfare of the people and polity. And particularly also, their powers are enlisted in the service of their current successor, the living ruler. For the latter is otherwise vulnerable to an inherent process of entropy in aristocratic genealogies: the rulers of later generations being progressively distanced from, and subject to invidious comparison with the great achievements of the dynastic founders (David Graeber, personal communication; Graeber and Sahlins 2017, 9–11; 429–31). The new king or chief starts with nothing to brag about except his descent from illustrious predecessors. Hence the various documented means by which the living rulers assume the personage of the dynastic founder and the deeds of his predecessors as his own. The subjectivity of the king thus engulfs the kingship, its accumulated history and dominion. At his installation, the east African Shilluk king “becomes Nyikang,” the ancestor of the ruling line—although Nyikang, as Evans-Pritchard shrewdly observes, is not the Shilluk king ([1948] 2011, 413–14; Graeber and Sahlins 2017, 63–64). The Kwakiutl chief inherits the name of the founding ancestor, and thereby the powers and deeds not only of the founder but of all prior incumbents of the chiefly name. The Kwakiutl chief is an “eternal individual,” as Stanley Walens puts it (1981, 79). Indeed, he recites the great deeds of his ancestors in the first-person singular: “I conquered such-and-such a place; I married princesses all over the world”—referring to events that occurred before he was born. The Danish anthropologist J. Prytz Johansen ([1954] 2012, 29–31) refers to comparable practices of New Zealand Māori chiefs as “the kinship I,” embracing, as it does, not only the chiefly ancestors but the doings of their clan.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.