Artificial Persons, The New King-Priests.

1
on money,
husbandry and sacrifice.
ARTIFICIAL PERSONS,
THE NEW PRIEST-KINGS.
the hopeful
politics of mourning.
on the cattle herders and the shepherd kings.

on husbandry, property and possession, the management
and control of natural resources, on the history of sovereignty,
on the americas, carnivals and masquerades, on artificial persons,
the theory behind incorporation and on nations,
also ownership and slavery.
property as a legal construct In Anglo-American property law there is freedom to make the most ingenious arrangements.
The concept of the corporation with all its impersonal relations is such an arrangement.
2
The modern corporation, however,
. is a new development in the growth of analytically
conceived property relations.
At the apex of this hierarchy was
the Sun, tutelary deity of the Inkas and "father" of all their sovereigns.
Naturally, the Sun always received the most important sacrifices and was
the most authoritative in the entire panoply of imperial oracles.
Peter Gose on Oracular Representation
Sacrifice and the Commodity Form in the Andes.
l'tat, c'est moi. louis xvi

on the shilluk reth and the roman rex.
on the sun kings, the divine right of kings and their twin effigy,
on property, cattle, chattels and cartels, on nations and corporations,
in the theory of sacrifice, and that nations are the new corporations.
on money,
ARTIFICIAL PERSONS,
the hopeful

His contention is that what makes a unilineal descent group into a corporate group is
the possession, vested in and shared by all its members, of an estate which
consists not merely of a bundle of rights in general, but of rights, specifically, in a
definable good or array of goods, namely property-above all, that which has productive or
reproductive value. But if I follow him correctly, the fundamental reason why property
generates corporation is that it is evaluated as a good or goods that must not be dissipated
but must be preserved for the benefit of succeeding generations. [Fortes, 1970: 296-7]
Capitalism and Individuation. the Sociology of Max Weber
Steven Seidman and Michael Gruber
the chief purpose of the corporation is property-holding, and that of property

is sacrifice. it is why we come to own things by our blood, toil, sweat and tears. property
and
the process to its acquisition
is uniquely sacrifice to the gods.
If we are to understand the place of the kingship in Shilluk society we must,

I think, beware of attempts to define it in terms of judicial and administrative functions
and view it rather as a ritual office and in a wider political context.
The divine kingship of the Shilluk of the Nilotic Sudan. The Frazer Lecture. 1948.
Beidelman described the Swazi king as an intermediary, analogous in many ways to the
sacrificial bulls that bridge the sacred and the profane domains, in the sense that Hubert and
Mauss employed these terms in their essay on sacrifice: "The king, the bull of his nation,
serves as the link between the supernatural world and the world of the living". Hierarchy and
the Haya Divine Kingship: A Structural and Symbolic Reformulation of Frazer's Thesis. Robert G. Carlson
On Seligman. The Hamite thesis. Races of Africa, 1930.

'The civilizations of Africa are the civilizations of the Hamites,
its history the record of these peoples and of their interaction with the two other African
stocks,
the Negro and the Bushman.'
The
history of Africa south of the Sahara is no more than the story of the permeation through the
ages, in different degrees and
at various times, of the
Negro and Bushmen aborigines by Hamitic blood and culture.
The Hamites were, in fact, the great civilizing force of black Africa.
C. G. Seligman. Races of Africa. I930 to I966.
Frobenius divides the peoples of West Africa (and indeed of Africa as a whole)
into 'Hamites' (i.e. state-forming peoples) and 'Ethiopians' (non-state-forming
peoples).
The Hamitic hypothesis born conquerors overcoming settled rural

or municipal populations, the Hamites formed the ruling aristocracy in the states
and kingdoms they created, such as Buganda and Rwanda.
German ethnology and anti-Semitism:
The Hamitic hypothesis. Michael Spottel. The Hamitic hypothesis.
The incoming Hamites were pastoral 'Europeans'"4); they were described as the first carriers
of "the white man's burden" in Africa. However, their position is ambiguous. While in a
superior position as opposed to genuine black Africans, the Hamites stood on the lowest
rung of the Caucasian ladder. Seligman, for example, qualitatively differentiated the
different African societies according to the respective "admixture of Negro blood."5 The less
"black blood" flowing through his veins, the nobler the Hamite. So the Hamitic hypothesis
was at the same time an appeal to the purity of the race.
4
The origin and fate of the Saharan pastoralists remain obscure. It is not known whether their
ancestors domesticated cattle and developed their form of economy in Africa, or whether
they migrated from Asia already in possession of a pastoral way of life. If they migrated from
Asia as pastoralists, one likely route is by way of the Sinai Peninsula, though some scholars'
have assumed that they entered northeastern Africa by crossing the Red Sea from southern
Arabia. Support for this assumption is claimed in the present-day occurrence of certain little
known cattle pastoralists in southern Arabia, who are viewed as possible remnants of
pastoralists once widespread there. These assumptions however, are not generally
accepted.
Whatever their origins may have been, with the decrease in precipitation following c a. 2500
B.C. some Saharan pastoralists are believed to have migrated southward. Clark has argued
that only with the desiccation of the Sahara did the cattle pastoralise enter the Horn, most
likely sometime after 2000 B.C. Suggestions and arguments have been advanced that the
Fulani of West Africa and various cattle tribes of East and South Africa' may be their
descendants.
All centralized government and cultural advances in sub-Saharan Africa

were attributed to these Hamitic conquerors. Where Hamitic languages were not
spoken,
it was argued that Hamitic overlords had
adopted the languages of the conquered
Bantu and that their own speech had disappeared without a trace.
Wherever a case could not be made for prehistoric colonists in Africa being Phoenicians,
Greeks, or Egyptians, they were identified as Hamites. These were assumed to be a racial as
well as a linguistic grouping that resembled populations still to be found in and around
Ethiopia. They were portrayed as tall, light-skinned pastoralists who had originated in
northeastern Africa and were "better armed as well as quicker witted than the dark
agricultural Negroes" who lived to the south and west of them. These qualities permitted
them to push south and either replace or establish themselves as a ruling class among the
indigenous Blacks. All centralized government and cultural advances in sub-Saharan Africa
were attributed to these Hamitic conquerors. Where Hamitic languages were not spoken, it
was argued that Hamitic overlords had adopted the languages of the conquered Bantu and
that their own speech had disappeared without a trace. Sometimes the mere presence of
cattle among any group in sub- Saharan Africa was arbitrarily interpreted as evidence of
Hamitic influence.
Charles Seligman. 1930. The Races of Africa.

The 'Hamitic' myth. Stated most simply, it affirmed that 'the civilizations of Africa' are the
'civilizations of the Hamites, the great civilizing force of black Africa from a relatively early
period' (Seligman 1930). Views that derived all technological and cultural progress from the
north kept alive the idea of divine kingship spreading through Africa from the Nile valley
which, though altered by Oliver and Fage to Sudanic kingship (Oliver and Fage 1962: 44-52),
lingered on into the 1970s.
Seligman linked language, culture, and race to a great extent. For him Bantu was a linguistic
term, a conglomerate of peoples with their cultures, and a group of negroes with Hamitic
blood -- the infusion being stronger in the east and south, weaker elsewhere. Bantu was not
5
a correct term for a pure race, but the term could legitimately be used racially on local
levels, for instance, near the Bantu borderline.
While the Hamites were in turn viewed as inferior to,

and strongly influenced by, the still lighter-skinned and more creative peoples
of the Near East, they were regarded as the disseminators
of high culture throughout Africa.
1907. Donald Mackenzie. AEgyptian Myth and Legend.

A masterful people also appeared in Upper AEgypt. They came from or through Arabia, and
had absorbed a culture from a remote civilization, which cannot be located, in common with
the early Babylonians. Crossing the lower end of the Red Sea, they entered the verdurous
valley of the Nile over a direct desert route, or through the highlands of Abyssinia. They were
armed with weapons of copper, and effected their earliest settlement, it would appear, at
Edfu. Then by gradual conquest they welded together the various tribes, extending their
sway over an ever-increasing area. New and improved methods of agriculture were
introduced. Canals were constructed for purposes of irrigation. The people increased in
number and prosperity, and law and order was firmly established in the land.
The ancient Egyptians therefore were not a black people, it was argued, but a Caucasian
subgroup, the Hamites. established that the ancient Egyptians were not black Africans,
but Hamites. However, it is important to point out here that the Hamites were not
completely shorn off of their early inferior status as descendants of the accursed Ham.
Rather they were considered to be an inferior subgroup of the Caucasian group, but superior
to black peoples. (In other words, a new internal hierarchy was established among the
descendants of Jephet where the Tuetonic Anglo-Saxons were at the very top and the
Hamites at the very bottom and eastern and southern EuropeansSlavs, Italians,
Portuguese
Thus was born the infamous Hamitic theory that was used to explain any expression of
the grandeur of African history that Europeans came across. Hamites were Africans, but they
were Caucasian in originthey came from outside Africa.4
peoples).
"Hirtenkriegertheorie" the herding warriors hypothesis.
States were founded in steppes, the natural environment of warlike herding men.
Friedrich Ratzel
"The mechanism of the origin of the Negro- Hamitic peoples
the incoming Hamites were pastoral 'Europeans' - arriving wave after wave - better armed
as well as quicker witted than the dark agricultural Negroes."
on pastoral peoples,
cattle herders & the shepherd kings.
on how national sovereignty provided charters
for corporations and incorporation.

The legal context is to be captured in the specific meanings
of such formalized relationships as "trusts," "estates," "fee simple," and
"a corporation," among other possibilities- each form having
its own calculus of peculiarities.
Hartmann points out, the end of slavery in the U.S. suspiciously
coincided with the discovery of oil, and its relevance to industrial
production with machines. Survival and prosperity both hinge
on how much sunlight energy is under your control,
whether it be channeled from horsepower,
human power, or fossil fuels.
In the initial classification of tribal groups, authorities used
cattle ownership as the criterion for sorting. Those with ten or more cows were branded
Tutsi,
and those with fewer were labelled Hutu. This
classification process produced
profound effects that
echoed later in history.
Concerning an ox, whether a whole offering or common meal offering or whole offering, to
the priests ten shekels of silver with each animal, and in case of a whole offering there shall
be to them in addition to this tax, flesh of the (weight of three hundred pounds), and in case
of a common meal offering the short ribs and shoulders, but the skin and shin-bones and
feet and the rest of the flesh to the offerer.
[MARSEILLES
INSCRIPTION.]
This accounts for the absence of any tax with the offerings of oxen and larger animals in the
early code. However, the idea soon grew up that in case of a whole offering at least part of
the flesh should be burned. The law therefore came into force that of an ox the
priests should eat only 300 pounds and of a young bull only 150 pounds. However,
the tax paid in with each of these whole offerings in some way recompensed the priests for
the loss of the burned portions.
It is most probable that the flesh of all of the smaller animals, such as the sheep, deer, and
goat, which were offered as whole offerings, was to be eaten entirely by the priests. But here
the skin is in every case retained by the worshipper. Accordingly money fees are substituted
for the skin.
On national sovereignty and the charters from which they spring.
Roberto Unger "Its most tangible feature is the overall coincidence of economic and political
boundaries."
7
At the root of urban(ist) celebration and pastoral lament
is the crime of fratricide, which myth tells us is the origin of the city and politics.
Coincident with transformation from nomadic to settled life was the passage
from the tribe to the more stable and compact national organization with the king
at the head of the state. In this situation the god took on himself the character of supreme
authority,
and the worshiper became his subject, paying that tribute which his
lord demanded, doing homage
to his heavenly
ruler as the condition of standing well with him.
"Nation Building Is a Quagmire" "Nation Building Is a Recent Idea"

Absolutely not. Take a look at how the political map of the world has changed in every
century since the collapse of the Roman Empire-that should be proof enough that nation
building has been around for quite a while. Casting a glance at the 19th and 20th centuries
will reveal that the types of nation building with the most lasting impact on the modern
world are nationalism, colonialism, and post-World War II reconstruction.
Nationalism gave rise to most European countries that exist today. The theory was that each
nation,
embodying a shared community of culture and blood, was entitled to its own state. (In
reality, though, few beyond the intellectual and political elite shared a common identity.)
Colonial powers formed dozens of new states as they conquered vast swaths of territory,
tinkered with old political and leadership structures, and eventually replaced them with new
countries and governments.
Most of today's collapsed states, such as Somalia or Afghanistan, are a product of colonial
nation building. The greater the difference between the precolonial political entities and
what the colonial powers tried to impose, the higher the rate of failure.
The division of the international political system into sovereign states remains a
largely unchallenged premise of popular discourse. Indeed, challenges to the
assumptions of the international system are seen as challenges to a moral
geography of extreme importance. As institutionalized regions, states are best
understood as an ongoing process of creating and maintaining territorial practices and
ideologies,

Between Man and God:
Sacrifice in the Roman Imperial Cult
S. R. F. Price
If the imperial cult is treated as an aspect of a decadent religion or as a counter in
an
elaborate game of politics there is naturally no incentive to study the ritual itself.
In fact, the idea of the decline of traditional cults needs to be entirely rethought,4 and with it
the relationship of ruler cult to these traditional cults. The corollary of the refusal to see ruler
cult as a meaningful religion is to treat it as essentially political. Thus Taylor argued that it
was 'more a matter of practical politics than of religion '.6 Two reasons are given for this.
Some argue, particularly in the context of the western provinces of the Roman empire, that
8
the cult was centrally promoted and exploited, others that the subjects manipulated it for
their own diplomatic advantage. These are rationalistic arguments that tend to imply a
cynical model of human motivation, with an unacceptable gap between consciousness and
ideology.6
If the imperial cult is treated as an aspect of a decadent religion or as a counter in an
elaborate game of politics there is naturally no incentive to study the ritual itself. It is
symptomatic of the state of scholarship that little attention is given to imperial ritual proper
in the majority of the papers in a volume which constitutes the most recent major
contribution to the subject.7
on city-states and their incorporation by Napoleon

A procedure of collective sacrifice involves concepts both of economy and of religious
ideology. The collectivity of a sacrifice is commonly regarded as a symbol of group unity -the
members of a descent group or a neighbourhood, by sharing in the common ritual act, give
overt expression to social bonds which are significant for them, and strengthen the value of
the sacrifice for an individual particularly concerned. But a collective sacrifice often means
not only a common presentation of a victim, but also a lightening of the economic burden
upon each participant. Collective sacrifices may be of various types. In one the sacrifice
specifically represents an offering not by an individual who is the foremost participant but by
the lineage or other group he represents.
. Externally, sovereign authority became a focal point around which to conduct
international affairs. In short, the success of the territorial state can at least partially be
understood by its solution to the tension between markets and hierarchies. The feudal era:
local trade and barter exchange Feudalism essentially entailed decentralized
political authority, private possession of the means of violence, and the lack of
any distinction between public and private authority. Those political factors
created an environment that greatly hindered commerce.
All three were able to respond to the precapitalist opportunities of the period. It is
thus a mistake to argue that sovereign territorial states supplanted feudal organization in a
linear and sequential way. All three institutional arrangements-city-league, city-state, and
sovereign territorial state-could mobilize more resources than could traditional feudal
organization. The question is not why territorial states replaced feudalism but why they
ultimately managed to displace their contemporary competitors.
Competitively, however, the city-states suffered from some of the same problems as the
leagues, in that they lacked internal unity and consequently were slow in rationalizing their
economies. While they formally did not come to an end until their incorporation by
Napoleon, their decline had begun much earlier. Because sovereign territorial states were
competitively more successful, individuals turned to those institutional models for
inspiration.
Specifically in commerce, actors will prefer organizations that reduce transaction and
information costs and can prevent expost reneging. Sovereign authority did just that.
Sovereign rulers centralized fragmented political systems and thus reduced legal
uncertainty and domestic transaction costs. . preventing free riding and by rationalizing
their economies, such systems of rule were able gradually to expand the level of resources
they could bring to bear against opponents. Unity and integrated economies were
prerequisites for success in war. But sovereign authorities also reduced the problems facing
transboundary trade by providing for clear focal points through which to negotiate. Such
rulers, moreover, could more credibly commit their subjects to long-term agreements. Hence
states had good reasons to prefer like units, that is, other sovereign territorial states, in their
environment. Consequently, individuals had reasons to mimic those successful institutions
9
and to shift loyalties. Individuals emulated what they perceived to be successful
arrangements in order to reduce uncertainty and gain legitimacy.
nations are corporations.

on charters of sovereignty and nations the new city-states.
the chief purpose of the corporation is property-holding,

and that of property is sacrifice. it is why we come to own things by our blood, toil, sweat
and tears. property and the process to its acquisition is uniquely sacrifice to the gods.
The 'property theory' of corporations.

Steven Seidman and Michael Gruber.
Another anthropological theory, which Fortes calls the 'property theory' of corporations
(ibid.: 295), is in his opinion only a variant of the functionalist theory. It sees property and its
devolution as the constitutive principle of the corporate group (ibid.: 297). As the main
representative of this standpoint Fortes refers to Goody (1962): His contention is that what
makes a unilineal descent group into a corporate group is the possession, vested in and
shared by all its members, of an estate which consists not merely of a bundle of rights in
general, but of rights, specifically, in a definable good or array of goods, namely propertyabove all, that which has productive or reproductive value. But if I follow him correctly, the
fundamental reason why property generates corporation is that it is evaluated as a good or
goods that must not be dissipated but must be preserved for the benefit of succeeding
generations. [Fortes, 1970: 296-7]
Craig Calhoun
Neither nationalism nor ethnicity is vanishing as part of an obsolete traditional order. Both
are part of a modem set of categorical identities invoked by elites and other participants in
political and social struggles.
At the same time the legal system moved to extend the concept of limited liability to all
corporations. Although this provision was not completely in place until the 1850s, the courts
before that decade protected the assets of most investors not dedicated to the specific
corporation. Risk became encouraged, investments proliferated, and capitalism
expanded.10
Crucial to the changed modes of production was the rise of consumerism.
More and more Americans desired and could purchase goods. The source behind this
consumerism is hard to delineate. Richard Bushman suggests that it came from a
democratized sense of gentility that permeated many levels of society. As Americans
strove toward respectability, so the argument goes, they desired more manufactured goods.
10
This demand increased production, which increased overall wealth, which again increased
demand, creating another cycle that fueled the fires of capitalism.
Society for Historians of the Early American Republic
The Rise of Capitalism in the Early Republic, Paul A. Gilje
on artificial persons and legal fiction.
the liminality and immortality of corporations and kings,
on property and blood sacrifice. the blood price of culture and civilization.
Toward a Democratic Theory of Property and the Modern Corporation
Joyotpaul Chaudhuri
This idea is only imperfectly captured in the concept of "legal fiction," since the latter
concept is epistemologically ambiguous regarding the logical characteristics of constructs.
Ambiguity in the concept of "legal fiction" can result in two opposite and self-contradictory
conclusions regarding corporate personality. One is that the corporation is entitled to equal
protection of the laws, since it is analogous to a
traditionally conceived individual. The legitimized construct lives on as an entity, often in
perpetuity, even after changes in membership or the death of a member of the "interest
group."
After this sketch of the general theory of corporate forms of property, it might be helpful by
way of illustration to point out some problem areas of corporate property in the context of
democratic theory.
In the first part of this analysis, the incompatibility of the labor theory of value and the
construct theory of property was examined. In spite of this logical incompatibility, both these
elements are often fused together in democratic culture. The lawyer's culture provides and
uses the forms and logic of construct theory, while a different relation of property,
possession, and labor is still entrenched in ideologies and belief systems. This is, at least in
part, a reason for the problems of psychological alienation in the wake of the increasingly
abstract and impersonal nature of the constructs of property.


11
Tutsi,

[MARSEILLES
INSCRIPTION.]
Yet the right of property is given its meaning through measurement of labor,
thereby removing it from the realm of any objective measure. The result is the
plethora of categories that developed in labor theories of value: physical labor,
intellectual labor, and even "socialist labor." Seeing property as a legal construct may
help us understand the logical foundations of this complexity. . In Anglo-American property
law there is freedom to make the most ingenious arrangements. The concept of the
corporation with all its impersonal relations is such an arrangement.
the nature of property is further complicated by the appearance of the massive and
relatively new form of property, the modern corporation. The corporation is a relatively new
form of property construct. Corporate bodies, like medieval guilds and craftsmen's unions,
have existed historically in many societies in Europe and Asia. The modern corporation,
however, is not merely an individual or familial piece of property, or even a craftsmen's
union in action. It is a new development in the growth of analytically conceived property
relations.
Perhaps no two authorities on the law of corporations are in complete accord as to the exact
nature of the juristic concepts of corporate entity and corporate personality. Corporations
have been regarded as "but associations of individuals,"' as artificial personalities, as
merely "the sum of legal relations" subsisting in
respect to the corporate enterprise. They have even been regarded as actual persons and
dealt with in a quite anthropomorphic manner. A brilliant writer has recently suggested that
corporate entity is not imaginary or fictitious but quite real, whereas corporate personality is
a fiction whose origin is to be found in the psychological tendency towards personification. It
is not the present purpose of the writer to discuss these divers theories or to indulge in the
tempting but profitless discussion-more metaphysical than legal-as to the true anatomy of
the corporate concept.
Now, if a corporation is merely a legal entity, if it is clothed only with invisibility and
intangibility, it could not, of course, be a citizen of a state.
The Yale Law Journal Company, Inc.
The Power of a Corporation to Acquire Its Own Stock
I. Maurice Wormser
There are two general views of corporate capacity. The first view regards a corporation as
possessed of general capacity, by which is meant that the corporation may do anything that
a natural person can do, unless the act is either expressly or impliedly prohibited by its
charter.' This theory has met with little favor in the United States. In this country, the
doctrine of special corporate capacity has been almost universally adopted. Under this view,
a corporation possesses only the powers conferred upon it in its charter, together with those
12
powers which are incidental to, or consequential upon, or reasonably necessary for
effectuating the main powers conferred. And in the case of the ordinary private corporation,
American courts are inclined to take a liberal view of its powers, inclining more and more to
hold that if the sovereign state does not intervene, there is no valid reason for confining the
operations of the ordinary private corporation too closely.
"One of the prerogatives claimed by English kings in the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries was the right to regulate merchants and commerce."
P. H. Sawyer
peoples).
Edith Sanders. Spttel. On the Hamitic hypothesis.

The German geographer and ethnologist Friedrich Ratzel developed the
"Hirtenkriegertheorie" (the herding warriors hypothesis), which maintained that States were
founded in steppes, the natural environment of warlike herding men.2 In the following
decades this paradigm provided an important concept for the notion of rule, as in the work
of Franz Oppenheimer and Alexander Rstow.3 In the eyes of Oppenheimer even modern
capitalism was a continuation of the nomadism in the steppes, by other means.


Tutsi,
13
[MARSEILLES
INSCRIPTION.]
relations.
I. Maurice Wormser
14
P. H. Sawyer
peoples).
Edith Sanders. Spttel. On the Hamitic hypothesis.

on money,
ARTIFICIAL PERSONS,
the hopeful
The third element of Frazer's thesis was the idea that the king served as an intermediary
between the transcend end to main of spirits and the domain of living human beings
(Grottanelli 1987:313-315). Significantly, Frazer emphasized that the king's role as a
symbolic mediator involved something different from shamanic or priestly forms of
communication between opposed cosmological domains. Frazer (1959[1890]:61) perceived
that the king interceded between opposed domains because his subjects believed that he
took on the qualities of spirit-not in the sense that he was possessed, but in the Frazerian
sense that he was constituted as a "man-god." Much of the ambiguity in the symbolism of
the divine kingship can be interpreted as a consequence of the antinomy inherent in the
king's unique mediating role as a "man-god," or "living-spirit."
Pre-colonial trade between states in the eastern sudan, ca 1700 - ca 1900.
Jay Spaulding
Jean Bethke Elshtain.

On Sovereignty, Identity, Sacrifice.
Sovereignty enters the picture for obvious reasons. It is a concept constitutive of as well as
derivative from nation-state formation and identity: a Western historical form that has been,
and continues to be, universalized. Sovereignty incorporates both a drive toward freedom
from the domination of another as well as a particular understanding of power. Historically,
much of the power of the concept of sovereignty lay precisely in its encoding of the
absolute, perpetual, indivisible power of a masculinized deity, a deity whose power was
absolute and from everlasting to everlasting, as a penultimate political form. State power,
the power of the legitimate ruler and promulgator of laws, tamed and ordered domestic
15
politics even as it set the boundary for autonomous self-sovereignty. The earthly sovereign
shared many of the attributes of his divine counterpart. For Bodin, for example, sovereignty
is the power of an absolute dominus over a vast domestic space. If there is any force to my
musings concerning the metaphysical traces embedded in the full-blown theory of
sovereignty, the genealogy of the concept is nested in the powerful and pervasive
construction of God's sovereign domination, force, and will over what would have remained
a formless void had He not exercised His omnipotent volition. Sovereignty over time shifts
from king to state, and this state cannot alienate its sovereignty. The constructions of
sovereignty allow us to make more sense of the will-to-sacrifice as it shifts from personal
liege loyalty to a feudal lord to an abstract, juridical, imagined tie that nevertheless calls
forth sacrifice in its/his (the sovereign's) name.

boundaries."
the regnum as patria, as an object of

political devotion and semi-religious emotion.
Jean Bethke Elshtain. On Sovereignty, Identity, Sacrifice.
The state as corpus morale, politicum, mysticum can there easily be separated another
notion which came to new life independently of, though simultaneously with, the
organological and corporational doctrines: the regnum as patria, as an object of
political devotion and semi-religious emotion."
Ernst Kantorowicz, in his classic, The King's Two Bodies, traces the ideal of pro patria mori.
He begins by reminding us that the word patria referred initially to a hamlet, village,
township. The warrior died for loyalty to his lord rather than some abstract juridical ideal or
territory. But around the twelfth- thirteenth centuries the concept underwent a
transformation and began to refer to kingdoms, nations, and to have deep emotional and
symbolic content. He writes: "Neither from the idea of polity-centered kingship nor from that
of the state as corpus morale, politicum, mysticum can there easily be separated another
organological and corporational doctrines: the regnum as patria, as an object of political
devotion and semi-religious emotion."5 The community having been endowed with a
"mystical" character- the corpus republicae mysticum- sacrifice in her name grew more
exigent, not only defensible but obligatory. The Christian martyr who had sacrificed for an
"invisible polity" becomes the soldier who remained faithful unto death- the model of "civic
self- sacrifice." Christian doctrine, then, having transferred the political notion of the polis to
the city of God and honoring those who died in her name, now transmutes to underwrite
(not without tension) the "new territorial concept of patria. . . ."6
This love for the wider body is declared by St. Thomas to be founded "in the root of charity
which puts, not the private things before those common, but the common things before the
private . . . the amor patriae deserves a rank of honor above all other virtues." The
magnanimity of the soldier's sacrifice is celebrated in verse and song, for, to the soldier, his
brothers and his "fatherland" are dearer than his life. "Thus it happened that in the
thirteenth century the crown of martyrdom began to descend on the war victims of the
secular state."9 Now, a breathless and rapid leap to the twentieth century: J. Glenn Gray, in
The Warriors, examines the impulse to self-sacrifice characteristic of warriors who, from
compassion, would rather die than kill. He calls the freedom of wartime a communal
freedom as the "I" passes into a "we," and human longings for community with others find a
field for realization. Communal ecstasy explains a willingness to sacrifice and gives dying for
16
others a mystical quality, finding, as Grey does, a similarity between the self-sacrifice of
soldiers and the willingness of martyrs to die for their faith. "Such sacrifice seems hard and
heroic to those who have never felt communal ecstasy," writes Gray. "In fact, it is not nearly
so difficult as many less absolute acts in peacetime and civilian life. ... It is hardly surprising
that men are capable of self-sacrifice in wartime."

authority,
to his heavenly

inspiration.

17

The nature and function of corporate property in a democratic political system.

In early Roman law prior to the influences of Stoic logic, property was regarded as a
possession expressed by the phrase meum esse, "this is mine." Other traditional systems
operated from similar perspectives. In some cases, property was regarded as extensions of
the person.
Corporations originally were special grants of privilege (often a monopoly) to private
individuals to pursue an activity for the general welfare. Morris, Hamilton, and the other men
who organized the first banks argued that their institutions would pursue the public good. In
the years that followed, that notion deteriorated, and a new understanding of "corporation"
evolved. Under a barrage of attacks about whose welfare was being furthered, all
economic activity began to be seen as pursuing the public good and corporations became a
means to pool investment resources for banks as well as many other enterprises. At the
same time the legal system moved to extend the concept of limited liability to all
corporation. Risk became encouraged, investments proliferated, and capitalism expanded.

Joyotpaul Chaudhuri
The modern corporation. a special case of the construct theory of property.
The construct theory of the corporation provides a more elaborate alternative to the "fiction"
18
theory of the corporation.' The construct theory also is to be distinguished from concession
and inherence theories of corporate property. The concession theory sees corporations as
purely subject to the commands of the sovereign. In contrast, the construct theory outlines
the logical components of the corporation in far more detail than the Hobbesian concession
theory. The inherence theories generally see corporations as products of the rights of private
individuals independently of the state. Here, in contrast, the construct theory argues that
the legitimacy of the corporate order is intimately tied up with the logic of a democratic
political system.
group."
democratic theory.
the chief purpose of property is sacrifice.

who are the gods and what do they want from humanity.
the importance of blood sacrifice.
on money,
ARTIFICIAL PERSONS,
the hopeful
19

Jay Spaulding


boundaries."
20
Ernst Kantorowicz, in his classic, The King's Two Bodies, traces the ideal of pro patria mori.
He begins by reminding us that the word patria referred initially to a hamlet, village,
township. The warrior died for loyalty to his lord rather than some abstract juridical ideal or
territory. But around the twelfth- thirteenth centuries the concept underwent a
transformation and began to refer to kingdoms, nations, and to have deep emotional and
symbolic content. He writes: "Neither from the idea of polity-centered kingship nor from that
of the state as corpus morale, politicum, mysticum can there easily be separated another
organological and corporational doctrines: the regnum as patria, as an object of political
devotion and semi-religious emotion."5 The community having been endowed with a
"mystical" character- the corpus republicae mysticum- sacrifice in her name grew more
exigent, not only defensible but obligatory. The Christian martyr who had sacrificed for an
"invisible polity" becomes the soldier who remained faithful unto death- the model of "civic
self- sacrifice." Christian doctrine, then, having transferred the political notion of the polis to
the city of God and honoring those who died in her name, now transmutes to underwrite
(not without tension) the "new territorial concept of patria. . . ."6
This love for the wider body is declared by St. Thomas to be founded "in the root of charity
which puts, not the private things before those common, but the common things before the
private . . . the amor patriae deserves a rank of honor above all other virtues." The
magnanimity of the soldier's sacrifice is celebrated in verse and song, for, to the soldier, his
brothers and his "fatherland" are dearer than his life. "Thus it happened that in the
thirteenth century the crown of martyrdom began to descend on the war victims of the
secular state."9 Now, a breathless and rapid leap to the twentieth century: J. Glenn Gray, in
The Warriors, examines the impulse to self-sacrifice characteristic of warriors who, from
compassion, would rather die than kill. He calls the freedom of wartime a communal
freedom as the "I" passes into a "we," and human longings for community with others find a
field for realization. Communal ecstasy explains a willingness to sacrifice and gives dying for
others a mystical quality, finding, as Grey does, a similarity between the self-sacrifice of
soldiers and the willingness of martyrs to die for their faith. "Such sacrifice seems hard and
heroic to those who have never felt communal ecstasy," writes Gray. "In fact, it is not nearly
so difficult as many less absolute acts in peacetime and civilian life. ... It is hardly surprising
that men are capable of self-sacrifice in wartime."

authority,
to his heavenly
21
inspiration.


22

the person.
Corporations originally were special grants of privilege (often a monopoly) to private
individuals to pursue an activity for the general welfare. Morris, Hamilton, and the other men
who organized the first banks argued that their institutions would pursue the public good. In
the years that followed, that notion deteriorated, and a new understanding of "corporation"
evolved. Under a barrage of attacks about whose welfare was being furthered, all
economic activity began to be seen as pursuing the public good and corporations became a
means to pool investment resources for banks as well as many other enterprises. At the
same time the legal system moved to extend the concept of limited liability to all
corporation. Risk became encouraged, investments proliferated, and capitalism expanded.

Joyotpaul Chaudhuri
political system.
23
group."
democratic theory.

on money,
ARTIFICIAL PERSONS,
the hopeful

the archetype of sacrifice and the sum of human experience remain in
the collective unconscious to emerge again at any time. The challenge for individual
citizens
in a global society is to hold the several versions of
sacrifice that may be operating simultaneously
within current events or as
cultures clash.
24
The important thing is this:
To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.
the shepherd kings and the cattle herders.

Frazer claimed that the first kings were PRIESTS AND 'public magicians' who secured
political leadership over their communities, promoting stability and cohesion and
pulling 'savage' man towards civilisation. Their peoples subsequently began to
discern an immanent divine presence in their persons, and to link their welfare with that
of the natural order. Hence originated the practice of ritual regicide. The king was originally
slain when he threatened to become dangerously frail: he might, for example, be compelled
to duel with would-be successors, or to suffer execution after the expiry of a fixed period of
time, sometimes no longer than a year.
In Mesopotamia, kingship itself was the gift of the gods,
and seems to have been conceived as a means of overcoming primeval disorder.9
Indeed, to a considerable extent, kingship was the possession of the gods
as much as their gift: already in the early Second Millennium,
we find the state god conceived as the true king,
the earthly ruler being merely his vicegerent.
apples and covenants in eden,

the gift of the gods and their reward: blood by covenants,
sacrifice and the contracts of primordial times.
Gods had superhuman strength and supernatural powers,
dined on nectar and ambrosia, were immortal, had ichor in their veins;
Professor W. Robertson Smith. Substances in Semitic sacrifices.

[They] "are drawn from edible substances, and indeed from such substances as form the
ordinary staple of human food." 10 He adds: "All sacrifices were taken by the ancients as
being literally the food of the gods."
"These gifts might therefore be either
vegetable or animal, grain or flesh. The latter were most common, because flesh, regarded
as the most desirable human food, would naturally be most agreeable to the higher powers.
Indeed, Professor Simon goes so far as to derive the custom of animal sacrifice from this root
when he says: "The primary occasion of animal sacrifices, and others rooted in them, was
probably the desire to gratify the gods with the best that man himself enjoys.'"
.Girard, who locates the origins of religion, and of civilisation generally, in sacrifice, which
originally Girard notes that scapegoats are typically marked by marginalising features
such as foreignness and accused of society-destroying crimes such as incest; 139 it is
perhaps unsurprising that kings sometimes fall into the category. In practice, of course, a
ruler commanded to suffer such a fate may easily deflect it onto a more vulnerable target:
perhaps an animal, perhaps a lowlier fellow marginal whose liminal status lends him some
sacral potency and who may temporarily be treated like a king, but who is ultimately
unimportant and expendable.14o
25
The first is the fact that in order to define the term divine king, as distinct from other
monarchs believed to have sacred attributes, Seligman defined this type of ruler even
more closely. I list his criteria because I propose to use them here. A divine king, he
postulated, is one a) who 'has power over nature, exercised voluntarily or involuntarily'; b)
who is believed to be 'the dynamical centre of the universe', whose action and the course of
whose life affects the well-being of this universe so that they must be carefully regulated;
c) who is killed when his powers fade so as 'to secure that the world would not fall into
decay with the decay of the Man-God' (Seligman 1933: 4).
. Another theory, current at the time, reduced sacrifice, whether human or animal,
to the status of a bribe to the gods. This view of the human victim as a mere commodity,
immolated in exchange for tangible benefits, takes little account of the complex links that bound
him both to the priest who took his life and to the community for which he died.
La violence et le sacr. Ren Girard
Who are the gods and what is it that they require of humanity
for the gift of culture, technology and civilization?
The Seduction Theory. The encounter with the gods.
And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth,
and daughters were born unto them, That the sons of God saw the daughters
of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.
Gordon M. Freeman. The Process of Covenant.

A covenant is a relationship. To understand the motivation for entering a covenant, one must
examine why people seek any relationship. The answer seems ironic: one enters a
relationship to guarantee survival as
a meaningful person. If, in protecting oneself from others, one is isolated, one is doomed
to a life of meaninglessness.
It goes back, the Egyptologist explains, to beliefs that people in North Africa held long
before Egypt became a civilized land. To understand it, you have to think of primitive tribes
searching the sky for rain. When the rain fell there was a good crop and plenty of wild game,
and everyone could eat and be comfortable. But when rains held off there was starvation
and misery.
The importance of blood in sacrifice.
It seems the purpose of a religious sacrifice is to sanctify the taking of a life, usually
marked by the spilling of the victim's blood, as is the case with animals and humans. It is a
ceremonious act linking mortals to their gods. The blood is a required 'food' for the gods.
Being not of human flesh, they require the very life-force of humans to nourish and appease
them. Sacrificial blood has divine powers which can sanctify mortals and nourish deities.
the blood spilled from a victim's body was truly a holy substance, one that the deities who
were presiding over the ceremony required. To ensure the gods received their ration, the
blood was sometimes smeared on stone images of gods, collected on bark paper strips and
burnt so the smoke could ascend into the heavens, or consumed by the ruler, the
representative of the deities. In many accounts the body was rolled down the temple, where
it was prepared and consumed by the high nobility.
26
Mahmood Mamdani on Political and market-based identities.

The Role of European Colonialism .... The ethnic divide of Hutu and Tutsi.
According to the Hamitic hypothesis pastoralists from the north had brought civilization to
the rest of the continent through conquest or infiltration (History and Society: Hamitic
Hypothesis). In other words, the Tutsi (more commonly tall, narrow-featured and elegant)
came in from Ethiopia and brought civilization to the Hutu (The Ungodly Missionary Legacy).
The Tutsi were the ideal Hamites. Additionally, Tutsi even wore togas as a part of their daily
attire. This in itself was confirmation to Europeans of a faint connection with the Roman
colonies of North Africa (Diktter, 1485).
In the initial classification of tribal groups, authorities used cattle ownership as the criterion
for sorting. Those with ten or more cows were branded Tutsi, and those with fewer were
labelled Hutu. This classification process produced profound effects that echoed later in
history. During the Rwandan genocide, these identification cards told Hutu extremists who to
kill and who to reprieve (The Ungodly Missionary Legacy). Thus from the application of the
Hamitic hypothesis to the Hutus and Tutsis not only did a great ethnic chasm emerge but a
hatred of Tutsi by Hutu.

The constructions of sovereignty allow us to make more sense of the will-to-sacrifice
as it shifts from personal liege loyalty to a feudal lord to an abstract, juridical, imagined tie
that nevertheless calls forth sacrifice in its/his (the sovereign's) name.
For Bodin, for example, sovereignty is the power of an absolute dominus over a vast
domestic space. If there is any force to my musings concerning the metaphysical traces
embedded in the full-blown theory of sovereignty, the genealogy of the concept is nested in
the powerful and pervasive construction of God's sovereign domination, force, and will over
what would have remained a formless void had He not exercised His omnipotent volition.
Sovereignty over time shifts from king to state, and this state cannot alienate its
sovereignty. The constructions of sovereignty allow us to make more sense of the will-tosacrifice as it shifts from personal liege loyalty to a feudal lord to an abstract, juridical,
imagined tie that nevertheless calls forth sacrifice in its/his (the sovereign's) name.

The Origins of African Kingdoms.
Herbert S. Lewis
Finally, there are several important kingdoms in Africa in which people with a bias for cattle
rule agriculturalists. There are not many, but they have been sources of inspiration for
conquest theorists from Ratzel on. In the case of the Fulani empire, however, we know that
27
states existed in their area for hundreds of years before these partly pastoral people gained
extensive political control over a number of kingdoms (Bovill, I958: 220-232). This is
probably a good indication of how the Ruanda, Burundi, and Ankole states got their Tutsi and
Hima rulers. It is reasonable to assume that the Tutsi and Hima took over kingdoms which
were already in existence, just as the Fulani did. Infiltrating into the area as herders (or
perhaps representing the original inhabitants who were swamped by an influx of Bantu
agriculturalists?) at some point they must have engineered a series of coups and taken over
the kingship established by the agriculturalists. the prevalence of monarchy among the
Bantu and its absence among the Nilotic pastoralists (and the low position of Hima herders
elsewhere in the Lake District) suggest that we are not dealing with primary states of Nilotic
herders over farmers. According to Vansina (personal communication) there is clear
evidence that Ruanda was well established before the Tutsi revolution, and there are
indications of the same thing in Burundi.
peoples).
The Ganda king personified the nation. As Speke approached, he was told he had not seen
Buganda until he had seen the king. As is commonly found in the ritual of kingship, upon
accession the Kabaka "ate" the country-he became one with it, or it with him. He became
the figurative "body" of his nation.40 But, as Gluckman pointed out, the sovereign may
represent the unity of a polity that is not in fact unified, a polity fragmented into changing
constellations of clans, factions, and other internal divisions. Yet the sovereign must
somehow appear to be a unifying force, and this is accomplished through the dramaturgy of
power. Royal ritualr einvigoratest he state and demonstratesi ts nature.41 In the coronation
ritual in which a prince "ate" the country and became king, the Ganda polity reenacted the
myth of its own creation.
peoples).
Tutsi,
Of our legends.
Of our legends is it not even said? It is said.
For is it not known that Levant is the birthplace of Europa?
Even Uropa. Uropa, also Levant, and Tyre?
28
How can a man be born when he is old?

Can he enter the second time into his mother's womb,
and be born?
on blood sacrifice and the shepherd kings and the cattle herders.
the hamitic theory.

A masterful people also appeared in Upper AEgypt. They came from or through Arabia, and
had absorbed a culture from a remote civilization, which cannot be located, in common with
the early Babylonians. Crossing the lower end of the Red Sea, they entered the verdurous
valley of the Nile over a direct desert route, or through the highlands of Abyssinia. They were
armed with weapons of copper, and effected their earliest settlement, it would appear, at
Edfu. Then by gradual conquest they welded together the various tribes, extending their
sway over an ever-increasing area. New and improved methods of agriculture were
introduced. Canals were constructed for purposes of irrigation. The people increased in
number and prosperity, and law and order was firmly established in the land.
A distinction is drawn by Dr. Budge between the Libyan deities and those of Upper AEgypt,
and his theory of one God has forcible application when confined to the archaic lunar deity.
He refers to the period prior to the minglings of peoples and the introduction of Asiatic
beliefs.
Dr. Budge prefers to elucidate AEgyptian mythology by studying surviving African beliefs in
the great forests and on the Nile, Congo, Niger, and other great rivers"
Who are they? Who are the Arcadians who had their land
before the birth of Jove and whose race it is said is older than the moon.

CHAPTER III. Dawn of Civilization
Early Peoples--The Mediterranean Race--Blonde Peoples of Morocco and Southern Palestine-Fair Types in AEgypt--Migrations of Mediterraneans --They reach Britain--Early Nilotic
Civilizations--Burial Customs--Osiris Invasion--The Set Conquest--Sun Worshippers from
Babylonia--Settlement in North--Coming of Dynastic AEgyptians--The Two Kingdoms--United
by Mena--The Mathematicians of the Delta--Introduction of Calendar--Progressive Pharaohs-Early Irrigation Schemes.
The early settlers came from North Africa, which was possessed by tribes of the
Mediterranean race. They were light-skinned "long heads" of short stature, with slender
bodies, aquiline noses, and black hair and eyes. In the eastern Delta they were the Archaic
AEgyptians; in the western Delta and along the coast, which suffered from great subsidences
in later times, they were known as the Libyans. Tribes of the latter appear to have mingled
with a blonde and taller stock. On the northern slopes of the Atlas Mountains this type has
still survival; a similar people occupied southern Palestine in pre-Semitic times. Blue-eyed
and light-haired individuals thus made appearance in the Nile valley at an early period. They
29
were depicted in tomb paintings, and, although never numerous, were occasionally
influential. There are fair types among modern-day Berbers. The idea that these are
descendants of Celts or Goths no longer obtains.
As they multiplied and prospered, the Mediterranean peoples spread far from their North
African area of characterization. Their migration southward was arrested in Nubia, where the
exploring tribes met in conflict hordes of dusky Bushmen, with whom they ultimately
blended. Fusion with taller negroes followed in later times. Thus had origin the virile Nubian
people, who were ever a menace to the Dynastic Pharaohs.
But the drift of surplus Mediterranean stock appears to have been greater towards the north
than the south. Branching eastward, they poured into Palestine and Asia Minor. They were
the primitive Phnicians who ultimately fused with Semites, and they were the Hittites who
blended with Mongols and Alpine (or Armenoid) "broad heads". Possessing themselves of
large tracts of Italy and Greece, they became known to history as the Italici, Ligurians,
Pelasgians, &c., and they founded a great civilization in Crete, where evidences have been
forthcoming of their settlement as early as 10,000 B.C.
on blood sacrifice, the shepherd kings and the cattle herders.

on the fictitiousness of origins of the western world.
we can try to tame and limit the demands of sovereignty.

A politics sans sovereignty: is it possible?
the origins of "early" sacrifice "finish" the history of Western sacrifice
The question of sacrifice as a question of "the West's relation to sacrifice" (54). He asks:
"upon what kind of relation to the sacrifices of the rest of humanity (or the representations
of these sacrifices) does the West map out [. . .] its own 'sacrifice'"?
There would be no man or liberty, no history or individual" (12).
A cut is required, both Nancy and Bataille suggest, a circumcision, to institute "Man" (and
"animal"),
"the West," "the rest of humanity," and so forth. The "distanced
and repetitive relation" that such a situation implies presupposes a "mimetic rupture," or
cut, between "the West" and its other.
One would want to press Nancy on this point, why exactly does the confusion
surrounding the origins of "early" sacrifice "finish" the history of Western sacrifice? Might we
not think the "completion" of West- ern onto-theology, instead, from a more materialist point
of view? Do we recognize, for example, that the violence of imperialism can never satiate its
need for (Western) sacrifice, can never close its own figure by neo-liberal and democratic
means? Nancy is perhaps suggesting that the fictitiousness of origins, on the one hand, com property as a legal construct In Anglo-American property law there is freedom to make the most ingenious arrangements.
30
bined with the historical collapse of sacrifice (in the name of Western "progress" and the
end[ing] of the political), on the other hand, signal the (re) emergence of the inappropriable
figure of finitude. .
Significantly, Nancy begins by situating the question of sacrifice as a question of "the West's
relation to sacrifice" (54). He asks: "upon what kind of relation to the sacrifices of the rest of
humanity (or the representations of these sacrifices) does the West map out [. . .] its own
'sacrifice'"? Such a question recalls Bataille's own radical questioning of the status of Man in
"Hegel, Death, and Sacrifice" (1955): "If the animal which constitutes man's natural being
did not die, and - what is more - if death did not dwell in him as the source of his anguish and all the more so in that he seeks it out, desires it, and sometimes freely chooses it - there
would be no man or liberty, no history or individual" (12). A cut is required, both Nancy and
Bataille suggest, a circumcision, to institute "Man" (and "animal"), "the West," "the rest of
humanity," and so forth. The "distanced and repetitive relation" that such a situation implies
presupposes a "mimetic rupture," or cut, between "the West" and its other. Nancy says that
little if anything can be known about this temporal other (the mimetic cuts presumably
function spatially as well - orient/occident, for example) , what he calls "early sacrifice" (55) .
The " new sacrifice," however, peculiar to "the West," displays a Discourse more or less clear
"onto-theology of sacrifice," and whose mimetic rupture appears in the figures of Socrates
and Christ. About this new sacrifice - a kind of modernity, one would think - Nancy writes:
There would be no man or liberty, no history or individual" (12).
A cut is required, both Nancy and Bataille suggest, a circumcision, to institute
"Man" (and "animal"),
"the West," "the rest of humanity," and so
forth. The "distanced and repetitive relation" that such a situation implies
presupposes a "mimetic rupture," or cut, between "the West" and its other.
peoples).
On the bantu, the bahima and the batwa.

Nancy is perhaps suggesting that the fictitiousness of origins, on the one hand,
combined with the historical collapse of sacrifice (in the name of West ern "progress" and
the end[ing]
of the political) .
Nilotes are the Hamites and Semites
"The mechanism of the origin of the Negro- Hamitic peoples
the incoming Hamites were pastoral 'Europeans' - arriving wave after wave
- better armed as well as quicker witted than the dark agricultural Negroes."
In 1930 Seligman published "Races of Africa," and in this volume he put forth views which
strongly influenced his interpretation of African prehistory in the following "Pagan Tribes of
the Nilotic Sudan." For those who might not have a copy at hand, "Races of Africa" consists
of chapters titled 'Bushmen, Hottentots and Negrillos', The True Negro', 'Eastern Hamites',
'Northern Hamites', 'Nilo-Hamites and Nilotes', 'Bantu' along with 'Semites'. Seligman's
views are classic illustrations of the notion that race, language, and culture are
indissociables. One passage reads: "The mechanism of the origin of the Negro- Hamitic
31
peoples will be understood when it is realized that the incoming Hamites were pastoral
'Europeans' - arriving wave after wave - better armed as well as quicker witted than the dark
agricultural Negroes."
Nilotic Studies Some Past Problems and Prospects by John W. Burton.
Who are the Bantu?
Who are the Hamites? Who are the Tutsis and who are the Hutu?
Who are the Arcadians? Who are the ancients AEgyptians?
Who are the chosen people and why and how come?
Why and how come the curse of Ham?
As early as 1910 Sidney Hartland, a folklorist did the entry "Bantu-South Africa" in the
Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. He described "Bantu" as a variety of Negro with a dash
of Hamite, originating from the Great Lakes and belonging to a "fairly uniform stage of
culture."
In 1911 he returned to
the fray, writing no fewer than three pieces about the topic. A first article dealt with racial
problems." In it he reiterated that the Negro, like the rest of humanity, originated in southern
or southwestern Asia. The white race bred with the others in the Caucasus and produced
there the ancestors of the North African whites as well as the forebears on one side, the
Fulbe, their other forebears being negroid. All families of African speech whose grammatical
structures are built around classes of nouns which impose their classes on the words that
depend from them, including Fulbe and Bantu among others, came from there. These views
owed much to Meinhof's developing opinions on the subject. .... The Caucasus, said
Johnston, also was the birthplace of the Libyan-Hamites and Egyptian cum Hamitic influence
spread about ten thousand years ago widely over eastern Africa, reaching by degrees the
very heart of the continent, perhaps as far as Zimbabwe. Thus the Kuba were Sudanese
negroes with Hamitic blood and come from the Shari. Kuba civilization was indirectly
Egyptian and directly comparable to that of Bagirmi. The Kuba have traces of Caucasian
elements and they influenced the Luba and Lunda civilizations. Johnston's "survey" owed its
notoriety primarily to its undiluted racism.
Who are the Bantu?

Who are the Hamites? Who are the Tutsis and who are the Hutu?
On the Bantu, the Bahima and the Batwa.
Following World War II Belgiums colonial administration had been placed under United
Nations trusteeship, which meant that it was to prepare for the eventual independence of
Rwanda as a self-governing nation. Hutu political activists emerged in great numbers and
exploited this as an opportunity to rally the masses to unite in their "Hutuness" as this was
their chance to finally gain power after decades of oppression. [13] This philosophy, coupled
with other political incidents led to the social revolution of 1959 where ten thousand Tutsis,
predominantly those within the political structure, were killed, and thousands more
displaced from their homes. What followed was essentially a racial and ethnic hierarchy
similar in most respects to that of one year prior; however with the roles simply reversed
Hutu dominated institutions with discrimination in education, the civil service and armed
forces.[14]
This
was unique to Rwanda and Burundi. While other ethnic groups outside Rwanda such as the
Bahima were also identified as "Hamites", they were not given institutionalised superior
status. "Only in Rwanda and Burundi did the Hamitic hypothesis become the basis of a
series of institutional changes that fixed the Tutsi as a race in their relationship to the
colonial state."[15]
32

Tutsi,
[MARSEILLES
INSCRIPTION.]
relations.
I. Maurice Wormser
33

the curtain of slavery and the will to power. Hartmann points to Professor Jack Forbes
adoption of the Native American term wetiko, which means cannibal, arguing that the
worldview of modern cultures is essentially one of consumptionand not just in terms of
contemporary ideas of consumerism. We actually approach the world with an appetite to
consume others: We eat (consume) other humans by destroying them, destroying their
lands, and consuming their life-force by enslaving them either physically or economically.
And this kind of exploitation is attributed not to an evil inherent in human beings, but to
wetiko, a particular and infectious way of thinking that has contaminated modern
populations: to pursue domination and expansion at any cost. A value system of this breed
invariably leads to competition, which, Hartmann believes, is not a natural blemish of the
human condition, but an invented product of ? In another sense, the king must be separated
from society because he is a unique symbolic mediator, a "man-god" in Frazer's
(1959[1890]:61) terms, at once alive and the embodiment of spirit. To use a metaphor, the
king is at one and the same time figure and ground.
Of Robertson Smith, Frazer and Farnell. On totems, kinship and priest-kings.
Scientific theories of sacrifice and primitive religious beliefs, and their
implications.
the custom of eating the victim's body may arise from a desire
to incorporate sanctity which has been imparted to it - which is based on
the idea that eating anything causes its qualities to pass into the eater.
Robertson Smith tried to explain the mysterious rites by the survival of early totemistic
ideas, i. e. the belief in an animal ancestor of a clan or of tribal kinship with a sacred animal.
Whereas Tyler had maintained that sacrifice was originally merely a gift offered the gods by
men to win their favor and curb their enmity-the gift slowly becoming transformed into one
of homage, which in turn became one of renunciation, Smith, on the basis of the recently
34
recognized existence of totemism, distinguished three types-the honorific, piacular and
mystic. The essential feature of the first was that the god and worshippers shared in the
sacrifice and so became commensals or table companions, the sacrificial meal renewing the
bond between them and the victim which originally was the animal of a hostile totem-kin:
the second arose from the need of atoning for bloodshed within the kinship group, where the
culprit, if found, was punished, and if not, a substitute, i. e. the nonhuman member of the
totem-kin, the totem animal: in the third, traced back to the same cycle of ideas as the
second, the god himself is slain and eaten by the worshippers.4 In his theory later
remodeled to meet objections raised, he made god, victim and human group all of one kin,
and the animal or totem the earlier form of the god, and the sacrifice originally a
communion in which god and worshippers have a bond of kinship; from this communal
sacrifice piacular sacrifices grew, explained by the idea of the mystic union of god and
worshippers. In short the essential feature of his reasoning is that a group claims kindred
with an animal god or a sacred animal, from whose flesh the group abstained except on
certain ceremonial occasions when it is eaten to strengthen the tie of kinship.
Similar rituals to that of N. W. Thomas, in his article on Sacrifice, has combated the
commensal doctrine of Smith, denying it was a primitive right of adoption. He believes the
custom of eating the victim's body does not necessarily spring from any idea of communion
with the god, for it may arise from a desire to incorporate sanctity which has been imparted
to it-which is based on the idea that eating anything causes its qualities to pass into the
eater. When the victim-like the corn-spirit-is an animal especially associated with the god,
the god may be said to be eaten, though even here there is no indication of giving a portion
of the victim to the god.
P. H. Sawyer
peoples).

from the domination of another as well as a particular understanding of power. State
power, the power of the legitimate ruler and promulgator of laws, tamed and ordered
domestic politics even as it set the boundary for autonomous self-sovereignty. The earthly
sovereign shared many of the attributes of his divine counterpart. ... Sovereignty over time
shifts from king to state, and this state cannot alienate its sovereignty. The constructions
of sovereignty allow us to make more sense of the will-to-sacrifice as it shifts from personal
35

boundaries."
authority,
to his heavenly
In the sanctuary in Gezer were found two burnt skeletons of six-year-old children and the
skulls of two adolescents that had been sawn in two. At Meggido a girl of fifteen had been
killed and buried in the foundations of a large structure. Excavations show that the practice
of interring children under new buildings was widespread and some were evidently buried
alive. (Davies 1981, p. 61)
Foundation sacrifices dedicated to fertility (as, for example, in storage buildings) often
involved infant and child victims. Captives, slaves, and criminals have also been selected as
sacrificial victims on many occasions. That foundation sacrifices belong only to the remote
past could be an erroneous assumption. In early twentieth-century Borneo an eyewitness
testified that a criminal was buried alive in every posthole for a new building so that he
might become a guardian spirit.

on money,
ARTIFICIAL PERSONS,
the hopeful

36
the archetype of sacrifice and the sum of human experience remain in
the collective unconscious to emerge again at any time. The challenge for individual
citizens
in a global society is to hold the several versions of
sacrifice that may be operating simultaneously
within current events or as
cultures clash.
War and conquest have

always been integral to state-building.

inspiration.

37


group."
38
democratic theory.

War and conquest have

always been integral to state-building.
Thus was born the infamous Hamitic theory that was used to explain any expression of
the grandeur of African history that Europeans came across. Hamites were Africans, but they
were Caucasian in originthey came from outside Africa.4
peoples).
"Hirtenkriegertheorie" the herding warriors hypothesis.
States were founded in steppes, the natural environment of warlike herding men.
Friedrich Ratzel
Beyond Settler and Native as Political Identities:

Overcoming the Political Legacy of Colonialism
Mahmood Mamdani
War and conquest have always been integral to state-building. This was particularly the case
before the era of the extraordinary mobility of finance capital, and certainly of the
globalization that followed the collapse of the Soviet bloc-a development that gave finance
capital a truly global reach.
The Pan-Africanists believe that state crisis is a crisis of colonial boundaries, because these
boundaries were and are artificial- in the African case more so, since they were drawn up
with a pencil and a ruler on a map at a conference table in Berlin in the 1880s. Well, what
would be genuine boundaries? From this point of view the answer would be that
they would be "natural," meaning they would not cut through ethnic boundaries.
In other words, the political map of Africa should have followed its cultural map. I find two
problems with this kind of argument. All boundaries are artificial; none are natural. War and
39
conquest have always been integral to state-building. This was particularly the case before
the era of the extraordinary mobility of finance capital, and certainly of the globalization that
followed the collapse of the Soviet bloc-a development that gave finance capital a truly
global reach.
Violence has tended to occur at key points of political change,

when the interests of the elites were threatened, but it has also always involved massive
popular participation. Why do ordinary people kill other ordinary people?
Peter Uvin on Ethnicity and Power in Burundi and Rwanda:
Different Paths to Mass Violence.
Who are the Hamites?

Who are they when the Arcadians had their land
before the birth of Jove, the Arcadians whose race it is said
is older than the moon.
The Hamitic of old. the cattle herders of Africa. The Shilluks.

the hamites and property holding for the purpose of sacrifice.
the divine right of kings and the charters from which cooperation/sovereignty springs.
Hamites, of the shepherd kings and the primordial Arcadians.
peoples).
a "cradleland" of the Nilotes, to be found "somewhere to the east of the Great Lakes of
eastern-central Africa." "Here, in the welter of partially hamiticized cattle-owning Negroids,
was differentiated a group, black-skinned and wooly-haired, retaining the Hamitic outlook
with regard to cattle .... From this homeland there emerged two great waves . . . which,
using the names of their best known tribes, we may call Dinka and Shilluk waves. The
former, which we may safely regard as the earlier, travelled north, giving rise to the Dinka
and Nuer of the present day an observation, informed observers will recognize, that has
virtually no affinity with ethnohistorical texts recorded for the peoples mentioned].
Various Lwoo peoples as well as the Dinka, Nuer, and Atuot "originated" in a common
homeland to the south of Lake No, and while these peoples then migrated in relatively short
distances, sections of the Lwoo separated, one group moving to the north to become the
Shilluk and others giving rise to peoples such as the Anuak, Acholi, and Alur.
Finally, in his summary of the very rich literature on the association between pastoral
migrations into the interlacustrine region and the emergence of novel forms of political
economy, Oliver suggests, "Hence the Lwo, though politically acephalous in their own
homelands, emerge in Bantu history as kings and nobles in systems built up by others." As
he notes, there is tacit agreement on this general, clearly abstracted process. Still, one must
note that nobles, headmen, and even the unlikely distinction "divine king" are known in the
Nilotic Sudan and indeed, there are numerous reasons supporting the interpretation that the
designation "acephalous" is the exception rather than the rule.
At the center of Kulturmorphologie is a "conflict of cultural styles."11 This is typified in the
contrast between African societies which work the land ("Ethiopians") and those which breed
40
cattle ("Hamites"). This dichotomy was a continuation of the Hamitic hypothesis which was
popular at that time. Frobenius interpreted the opposing forces of agriculturists and cattlebreeding nomads as an expression of metaphysical antagonism between two cultural forms
between two paideuma. ... Hamite cultures, on the other hand, are directed towards
feminine, materialistic and rationalistic values; they are motivated by a profane "will to
dominate." Egoistic behavior is prevalent in the "clans" which are regulated by abstract
laws.
the chief purpose of the corporation is property-holding, and that of property is sacrifice.
it is why
we come to own
things by our blood, toil, sweat and tears. property and
the process to its acquisition is uniquely sacrifice to the gods.

on why they kept on hand herds of animals for sacrifice.
on state formation and the implication for sacrifice
Rex est mixta persona cum sacerdote
The dual personality of the king, an individual and an institution.
The central theme of The Golden Bough .

The divine kingship of the Shilluk of the Nilotic Sudan.
The Frazer Lecture, 1948 by E. E. EVANS-PRITCHARD
The central theme of The Golden Bough was the divine kingship, one of the examples of
divine kingship cited by Sir James Frazer, that of the Shilluk of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan,
and to discuss it as a problem of social structure. All the kings are believed to be descended
from Nyikang, the leader of the Shilluk in their heroic age, who led them into their present
homeland, conquering it from its inhabitants and dividing it among the lineages of his
followers; and Nyikang, or, as we would say, the spirit of Nyikang, is believed to be in every
king and to have passed from king to king down the line of his successors. Nyikang is thus a
mythological personification of the timeless kingship which itself symbolizes the national
structure, a changeless moral order. Nyikang, the culture hero of the Shilluk, their first king,
and the creator of their nation, is immanent in him and this makes him the double pivot of
Shilluk society, the political head of the nation and the centre of the national cult. The
kingship is the common symbol of the Shilluk people and, Nyikang being immortal, an
abiding institution which binds past and present and future generations.
THE KINGS TWO BODIES.

Nyikang is the reth but the reth is not Nyikang.21
The religion and cosmogony of the Shilluk are bound up with the political system through
the identification of Nyikang with the king. Nyikang is the reth but the reth is not
41
Nyikang.21 The participation of Nyikang in the king raises the kingship to a plane above all
sectional interests, Nyikang are centred all those interests which are common to all the
people: success in war against foreigners and the fertility and health of men, cattle, crops,
and of those wild beasts which are of service to man. when a king died the Shilluk say
piny bugon, there is no land23 the centre of the Shilluks world has fallen out. It is
restored by the investiture of a new king, for though kings may perish the kingship, that is
Nyikang, endures.
It possibly arises from the dual personality of the king, who is both himself and Nyikang,
both an individual and an institution, which accounts also for the linguistic convention that a
king does not die but disappears just as Nyikang is said not to have died but to have
disappeared, in his case in a storm. I will return to this question of regicide after I have
reviewed the procedures of election and investiture of kings to show what light they shed on
the nature of the kingship. [21]
In my view kingship everywhere and at all times has been in some degree a sacred office.
Rex est mixta persona cum sacerdote. This is because a king symbolizes a whole
society and must not be identified with any part of it. He must be in the society and yet
stand outside it and this is only possibly if his office is raised to a mystical plane. It is the
kingship and not the king who is divine.
But though I would insist that a sufficient explanation of the sacral kingship can only be
derived from a detailed and painstaking comparative study of a wide range of monarchical
institutions, which implies a yet wider comparative study of types of political structure, I do
not wish to maintain that because all kingship has some of the features of the divine
kingship the divine kingship is not in respect of other features a distinct type of institution. It
is to the credit of Sir James Frazer to have shown that it is; and I would suggest that it is an
institution typical of, though doubtless not restricted to, societies with pronounced lineage
systems in which the political segments are parts of a loosely organized structure without
governmental functions. In societies of this kind the political organization takes a ritual or
symbolic form which in polities with a higher degree of organization gives way, though never
entirely, to centralized administration.
African cases of 'divine kingship' are similarly problematic. The subjects of the Shilluk reth
insist that 'Nyikang is the reth, but the reth is not Nyikang,283 and Nyikang, the first king,
is in any case distinct from Juok, the (supreme) Shilluk god. Deity has been consistently
ascribed to the king of Benin - but, equally, the ascription has long been questioned.284 The
king of the Jukun is sometimes supposed to be a god, but formulations such as 'earthly
image of the plurality of the gods' or 'manifestation of the gods' might be more accurate.285
Similar things may be said of the Bachama and Asante kings.286
There are two separate dynamics at work in constructions of kings as semi- or quasi-divine.
On the one hand, they are mortal men who enter the tabernacle of divinity and emerge,
visages aglow, to dispense supernatural beneficence;287 on the other, they are heavenly
beings travelling along Keith Hopkins' 'U-shaped curve', sojourning in exile in human flesh.
288
on money,
ARTIFICIAL PERSONS,
the hopeful
42
Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle.

Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag.
Only undertakings that pose a serious risk to group survival have magical force for
believers.
At the outset the outcome of ritual effort must be
genuinely uncertain. Great ritual uncertainty requires the most potent magic, which is blood.
. Win or lose, the outcome of ritual effort must be clear and definite. Time and space must
be redefined. History begins from this moment; territorial borders are re-created or
reaffirmed. Time and space are consecrated anew, as if for the first time. This moment
becomes the new beginning of the group, as World War II was for the generation of
Americans now passing from the scene.
... from the bodies of group members. Blood sacrifice, is the holiest ritual of the nationstate. Warfare is the institution that enacts this holy ritual. What constitutes the nation at
any moment is the memory of the last successful blood sacrifice that counts for living
group members.
Robert Kastenbaum. On sacrifice.

Sacrifice is a form of communication with a deity for similar purposes. The word itself
means "to make holy." ., sacrificial offerings include objects of value and symbolic
significance that are given to the gods to earn their favor. The gifts can take many forms,
becoming sacred themselves through ritual consecration. The gods might be offered the
most desirable foods or provided with the finest vessels, carvings, tools, and weapons.
Historians, however, have often regarded blood sacrifice as the most powerful way to
appease the gods. It was not unusual for societies to engage in both animal and human
sacrifice, although the historical trend has been toward a sharp reduction in the latter.
Participants in blood sacrifice rituals experience a sense of awe, danger, or exaltation
because they are daring to approach the gods who create, sustain, and destroy life. The
buildup of tension prior to the blood sacrifice gives way to a festive sense of triumph and
relief. Morale is strengthened by the ritual killing because the group has itself performed the
godlike act of destruction and is now capable of renewing its own existence. The underlying
philosophical assumption is that life must pass through death.
Rituals of Sacrifice and the role of violence
in organizing and maintaining enduring groups.
1. The purpose of ritual is to sustain the group by repeating (at various levels of intensity)
the act of group creation. A successful ritual stops time at the perfect creation moment. It
repeats and freezes the retrospectively golden moment when the group was created out of
sacrifice. In this moment the debt to the bloodthirsty god was paid. The group was pristine.
This was the moment when sacrifice was truly enough, when we were delivered from time
43
and death.
2. Rituals may be contrived or opportunistic. The most powerful rituals of nation-group
solidarity are opportunistic responses, such as war, to group threat. But opportunistic rituals
are unpredictable in their occurrence and expensive in their prosecution. Their magic is
great precisely because they are risky and costly. Contrived or pre-planned seasonal rituals
fill in the intervals between opportunistic group-forging rituals by rehearsing the drama of
sacrifice and regeneration.
3. Rituals have two major dynamics. They create the world by transforming chaos into
cosmos, to use Mircea Eliade's terms, or they remodel and recall the transformation of chaos
into cosmos. All rituals model and transform to one degree or another, but rituals may be
classified by whether they are primarily transforming commemorative.

stocks,
The
The outcome of wars, crop harvests, and the weather were all determined
by the whims of the gods, whims which required appeasement on the part of
mortal humans. Sacrifice was incorporated as a way of 'feeding' these everhungry gods.
Sacrifice keeps the world going. The most sweeping theory is based on an
interpretation of history that pictures the human condition as fearful and
perilous, beset with threats to survival from starvation, attack, and events such as
earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and floods that were taken to be the work of angry gods.
Possessing limited knowledge and technology, societies tried to find a way of negotiating
with rival, demanding, and frequently unpredictable gods if the world and their own lives
were to continue. Sacrifice soon became a significant form of exchange with the gods, a sort
of currency in an age before the establishment of a monetary system. In modern parlance,
sacrifice was a way of doing business.
Sacrifice and Society Human sacrifice is sometimes regarded as a bizarre practice
carried out by a few scattered societies who either were uncivilized or exceptionally cruel
and violent. However, there is persuasive evidence that the sacrificial impulse has been
common throughout history and has played an important role in society.
The origins of blood sacrifice are lost in the mist of prehistory. Nevertheless, inferences can
be drawn from archaeological research and from the practices and beliefs of people whose
rituals continued into the historical period. The same societies usually performed other types
44
of sacrifices as well, but these examples demonstrate the widespread use of ritual murder as
an approved component of social policy.
Human sacrifice was considered so crucial a measure that it persisted for some time even in
societies that had become more complex and sophisticated. For example, the practice of
sacrificing the eldest son was a salient feature of Mediterranean cults 5,000 years ago and
still a powerful theme in Judaism and early Christianity. Sacrifice would be tamed slowly as
societies developed more effective ways to manage their needs and cope with their
environments. The gradual and still
Although suggesting at the least the insufficiency of unequivocal urban celebration, such
concerns also may betray what I have called elsewhere a tendency to pastoralism, an
inclination to purify self and community of aspects of life that are necessary or valuable, an
impulse that may present, in turn, its own threat to autonomy and politics.'
sacrifice and incorporation.

sacrifice, the founding of towns, city-states and civic duties.
on money,
ARTIFICIAL PERSONS,
the hopeful
Foundation and passage sacrifices. There is abundant archaeological evidence that many
societies practiced both animal and human sacrifice to persuade the gods to protect their
buildings and ensure safe passage through dangerous areas where their own gods might
lack jurisdiction. Burials suggestive of sacrifice have been found in the sites of ancient
bridges and buildings throughout Asia, Europe, and North Africa. It was widely believed that
territories were under the control of local gods who might be angered by intrusions. Blood
sacrifice at border crossings (often marked by rivers) and within buildings were thought to
be prudent offerings. Sacrificial victims were also interred beneath city gates.
Children were often selected as the sacrificial offerings. Excavation of the Bridge Gate in
Bremen, Germany, and several ancient fortresses in Wales are among the many examples of
this practice. According to the Book of Kings, when Joshua destroyed Jericho he prophesized
45
that the man who rebuilds Jericho "shall lay the foundation stones thereof upon the body of
his first born and in his youngest son shall he set up the gates thereof." In rebuilding the
city, Hiel later sacrificed his oldest and youngest sons in precisely this manner. The historian
Nigel Davies observes that biblical accounts of foundation sacrifices have been supported by
archaeological investigations: In the sanctuary in Gezer were found two burnt skeletons of
six-year-old children and the skulls of two adolescents that had been sawn in two. At
Meggido a girl of fifteen had been killed and buried in the foundations of a large structure.
Excavations show that the practice of interring children under new buildings was widespread
and some were evidently buried alive. (Davies 1981, p. 61)
Foundation sacrifices dedicated to fertility (as, for example, in storage buildings) often
involved infant and child victims. Captives, slaves, and criminals have also been selected as
sacrificial victims on many occasions. That foundation sacrifices belong only to the remote
past could be an erroneous assumption. In early twentieth-century Borneo an eyewitness
testified that a criminal was buried alive in every posthole for a new building so that he
might become a guardian spirit.
the blood spilled from a victim's body was truly a holy substance,
To ensure the gods received their ration, the blood was sometimes smeared on stone images
of gods, collected on bark paper strips and burnt so the smoke could ascend into the
heavens,
or consumed by the ruler, the
representative of the deities.
Violence has tended to occur at key points of political change,
when the interests of the elites were threatened, but it has also always involved
massive popular participation. Why do ordinary people kill other ordinary people?
Peter Uvin on Ethnicity and Power in Burundi and Rwanda:
Different Paths to Mass Violence.
Who are the Hamites? The state-forming peoples

and who are the 'Ethiopians', the non-state-forming peoples? Who are those
in whose blood it is to own cattle? Who were Shepherd Kings who colonized
AEgypt
in the days when AEgypt was a colony of
AEthiopia?

stocks,
The
Michelle@Change.Org
On Hutu and Tutsi identities. the 1957 Hutu Manifesto.
46
It demands democracy and freedom from the oppressive rule of the Tutsi aristocracy.
It refers to Tutsi rule as colonialism, an idea rooted in the erroneous Hamitic hypothesis
that the Tutsi came from Ethiopia and usurped the Hutu majority.
Of Rwanda and Genocide? The Country of a thousand Hills.
We can see Caucasian skulls and beautiful Greek profiles
side by side with Semitic and even Jewish features, elegant golden-red beauties
in the heart of Rwanda. Father van den Burgt
into 'Hamites' (i.e. state-forming peoples) and 'Ethiopians' (non-state-forming peoples).
On the other side, there are many claims that the Hutus and Tutsis were only different
socioeconomic groups. In an extensive research project by Human Rights Watch, Alison Des
Forges, a historian whose expertise is Rwanda, wrote that the terms Tutsi and Hutu were
based on peoples wealth:
The word Tutsi described the status of an individual a person rich in cattle and referred
to the elite group as a whole, and the word Hutu meaning originally a subordinate or
follower of a more powerful person came to refer to the mass of the ordinary people.9
The first inhabitants of the area were the Twa, hunters and gatherers. Then came the Hutu
with agriculture and loose political organizations in the form of clans and petty kings. Next
came the Tutsi, a superiorly intelligent minority swooping in from Ethiopia and usurping the
majority. Some said by offering the grant of their cattle, others said by their eminence alone.
And finally, the Europeans, the most advantageous minority of them all, established control
over all the others. Subsequently packaged and delivered to the masses as fact, the
perverted past backed by substantial data became the accepted account of the growth of
the nation. By cleverly offering up a history that outlined the supremacy of the Tutsi, both
groups developed a belief that Tutsi were seemingly worthier while the Hutu simply were not
(Michelle, Change.org).
Who are the Hamites? The state-forming peoples

and who are the 'Ethiopians', the non-state-forming peoples? Who are those
in whose blood it is to own cattle? Who were Shepherd Kings who colonized
AEgypt
in the days when AEgypt was a colony of
AEthiopia?
Mahmood Mamdani on Political and market-based identities.

The Role of European Colonialism .... The ethnic divide of Hutu and Tutsi.
A new kind of racism was brought to Rwanda upon the arrival of Europeans in the 20th
47
century. Colonists assumed their own superiority and valued those physically and
geographically close to themselves. From this racism the Hamitic hypothesis was born.
According to the Hamitic hypothesis pastoralists from the north had brought civilization to
the rest of the continent through conquest or infiltration (History and Society: Hamitic
Hypothesis). In other words, the Tutsi (more commonly tall, narrow-featured and elegant)
came in from Ethiopia and brought civilization to the Hutu (The Ungodly Missionary Legacy).
The Tutsi were the ideal Hamites. Additionally, Tutsi even wore togas as a part of their daily
attire. This in itself was confirmation to Europeans of a faint connection with the Roman
colonies of North Africa (Diktter, 1485).
In the initial classification of tribal groups, authorities used cattle ownership as the criterion
for sorting. Those with ten or more cows were branded Tutsi, and those with fewer were
labelled Hutu. This classification process produced profound effects that echoed later in
history. During the Rwandan genocide, these identification cards told Hutu extremists who to
kill and who to reprieve (The Ungodly Missionary Legacy). Thus from the application of the
Hamitic hypothesis to the Hutus and Tutsis not only did a great ethnic chasm emerge but a
hatred of Tutsi by Hutu.
Edith Sanders. Spttel. On the Hamitic hypothesis
Hamites, the theory states, are cattle-breeding nomads who migrated to Africa from the
Caucasus. Thanks to their military superiority, political destiny and technical creativity they
tore the simple-minded Africans from the depths of archaic barbarism. All African
achievements which have been validated by contemporary Europeans as expressions of true
culture are ascribed to Hamitic influence. The Hamitic hypothesis supported the colonial and
racialist ideologies which had come into fashion toward the end of the nineteenth century.
Thus, civilization meant nationalization, the result of the process of ethnic overlapping,
and, as born conquerors overcoming settled rural or municipal populations, the Hamites
formed the ruling aristocracy in the states and kingdoms they created, such as Buganda and
Rwanda.
on the Eucharist and incorporation.

To ensure the gods received their ration,
the blood was consumed by the ruler, the representative
of the deities.
While the actual sacrifice could take several forms, the most common
was to remove the heart of the victim. This act was usually done with an obsidian
blade,
which for the Aztecs represented (if not
actually became) the same obsidian blade which impregnated
their mother of Creation (Aztec Creation).
As the medium between his followers and the deities, the dynastic ruler was invested with
supernatural powers. While there was a hierarchy of priests and nobility, the 'ruler-god'
reined supreme. The outcome of wars, crop harvests, and the weather were all determined
by the whims of the gods, whims which required appeasement on the part of mortal
humans. Sacrifice was incorporated as a way of 'feeding' these ever-hungry gods. Each god
may require his or her own type of sacrifice at a specific point during the year. For instance,
this maize god stands on the chest of his unfortunate meal. Common belief held that blood
possessed an essence, one of the souls of a human, and therefore it contained special
properties (Sharer). It was regarded as a sacred liquid. For instance, the Aztecs held the sun
god, Tezcoptipcoca, in highest regards; from him (and consequently the sun) all life flowed.
48
Sacrifices were performed in order to return this energy to its creator. Most of the time,
sacrificial victims were war captives, marched to the top of the central temple in great
ceremony under the public eye. While the actual sacrifice could take several forms, the most
common was to remove the heart of the victim. This act was usually done with an obsidian
blade, which for the Aztecs represented (if not actually became) the same obsidian blade
which impregnated their mother of Creation (Aztec Creation).
With these underlying beliefs, the blood spilled from a victim's body was truly a holy
substance, one that the deities who were presiding over the ceremony required. To ensure
the gods received their ration, the blood was sometimes smeared on stone images of gods,
collected on bark paper strips and burnt so the smoke could ascend into the heavens, or
consumed by the ruler, the representative of the deities. In many accounts the body was
rolled down the temple, where it was prepared and consumed by the high nobility. Today,
among the descendants of these cultures the importance of sacrifice remains strong
although ritual human sacrifice is no longer practiced. Commonly, small animals are
substituted when calling upon the gods for favors (Sharer).
To ensure the gods received their ration,
the blood was consumed by the ruler, the representative
of the deities.
Blood sacrifice and the nation:
Revisiting civil religion*
Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle
Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Winter, 1996
A politics sans sovereignty: is it possible?
Jean Bethke Elshtain. On Sovereignty, Identity, Sacrifice
The nation-state is a phenomenon that cannot be imagined or legislated out of existence.
Needing others to define ourselves, we will remain inside a state/nation-centered discourse
of war and politics, for better and for worse, so long as states remain the best way we have
devised for protecting and sustaining a way of life in common. But we can try to tame and
limit the demands of sovereignty; we can, perhaps, move toward what I am tempted to call
a post-sovereign politics. A politics sans sovereignty: is it possible?
Vaclav Havel He urges us into a post-sovereign political discourse, a move from sacrifice
to responsibility: "It seems to me that if the world is to change for the better it must start
with a change in human consciousness, in the very humanness of modern man."
Identification with a national "imagined community" is a complex, many-sided
construction. It taps particularism and universalism. Indeed, one might argue it
requires such, being composed of normatively vital aspects of both ethnicity and
universal values, organic integration and voluntarism. Human beings require
concrete reference groups in order to attain individuality and identity but too complete
immersion in such groups limits the boundaries of identity and of identification to fixed
familial, tribal, or territorial lines.
Sovereignty, Identity, Sacrifice
Jean Bethke Elshtain
A controversial theory suggests that patriotism, war, and adherence to the flag are
incitements to a disguised form of sacrifice. Generally, the homicide rate decreases when a
nation is involved in a popular war. Although there are other ways to interpret this fact, it is a
49
challenging thought that patriotism might be regarded as "a civil religion of blood sacrifice,
which periodically kills its children to keep the group together"
(Marvin
and Ingle 1999, p. 315). Robert Kastenbaum. On Sacrifice.
Beyond Settler and Native as Political Identities:

Overcoming the Political Legacy of Colonialism
Mahmood Mamdani
War and conquest have always been integral to state-building. This was particularly the case
before the era of the extraordinary mobility of finance capital, and certainly of the
globalization that followed the collapse of the Soviet bloc-a development that gave finance
capital a truly global reach.
The Pan-Africanists believe that state crisis is a crisis of colonial boundaries, because these
boundaries were and are artificial- in the African case more so, since they were drawn up
with a pencil and a ruler on a map at a conference table in Berlin in the 1880s. Well, what
would be genuine boundaries? From this point of view the answer would be that they would
be "natural," meaning they would not cut through ethnic boundaries. In other words, the
political map of Africa should have followed its cultural map. I find two problems with this
kind of argument. All boundaries are artificial; none are natural. War and conquest have
always been integral to state-building. This was particularly the case before the era of the
extraordinary mobility of finance capital, and certainly of the globalization that followed the
collapse of the Soviet bloc-a development that gave finance capital a truly global reach.
On identity, the gift of the gods, the identity quest and misogyny
Of Renan. Quest-ce quune nation? What is a nation?
"A great aggregation of men, with a healthy spirit and warmth of heart, creates a moral
conscience which is
called a nation. When this moral conscience proves its strength by sacrifices that demand
abdication of the
individual for the benefit of the community, it is legitimate, and it has a right to exist"
(Renan 1994:18).
Sovereignty, ownership and sacrifice.

We all know of the Final Solution, but few know of the Final Sacrifice.
On sovereignty, nations and corporations.
Inka and Andean oracular possession for politics.
Sovereignty incorporates both a drive toward freedom from the domination of another
as well as a particular understanding of power. Historically, much of the power of the
concept of sovereignty lay precisely in its encoding of the absolute, perpetual, indivisible
power of a masculinized deity, a deity whose power was absolute and from everlasting to
50
everlasting, as a penultimate political form.
State power, the power
of the legitimate ruler and promulgator of laws, tamed and ordered
domestic politics even as it set the boundary for autonomous self-sovereignty.
The earthly sovereign shared many of the attributes of his divine counterpart.
The constructions of sovereignty allow us to make more sense of

the will-to-sacrifice as it shifts from personal liege loyalty to a feudal lord to an abstract,
juridical, imagined tie that nevertheless calls forth sacrifice in its/his (the sovereign's) name.
on property and sacrifice.
on ownership by artificial, fictitious and non-beings
The nature of property is further complicated by the appearance of the massive
and relatively new form of property, the modern corporation. The corporation is a relatively
new form of property construct. Corporate bodies, like medieval guilds and craftsmen's
unions, have existed historically in many societies in Europe and Asia. The modern
corporation, however, is not merely
an individual or
familial piece of property, or even a craftsmen's union in action.
It is a new development in the growth of analytically conceived
property relations.
the chief purpose of the corporation is property-holding, and that of property is sacrifice.
it is why
we come to own
things by our blood, toil, sweat and tears. property and
51

the person.
Joyotpaul Chaudhuri
political system.
the person.
But epistemologically speaking, these concepts of property involved sensed persons
and/or sensed things in two-termed relations. No epistemologically clear method for relating
distant, unperceived, and hypothetically conceived persons with nontangible property (a
share in a corporation, for instance) was devised.
possessory notions of property have not entirely vanished from Anglo-American
belief systems. Property is conceived as an extension of the person rather than
in relational terms. The "right" of property, .
These possessory notions of property have not entirely vanished from Anglo-American belief
systems. Property is conceived as an extension of the person rather than in relational
terms. The "right" of property, prevalent in Locke's writings, is theoretically superior to rights
created by legislation. Yet the right of property is given its meaning through
measurement of labor, thereby removing it from the realm of any objective
measure. The result is the plethora of categories that developed in labor theories
of value: physical labor, intellectual labor, and even "socialist labor."
Seeing property as a legal construct may help us understand the logical foundations of this
complexity. . In Anglo-American property law there is freedom to make the most ingenious
arrangements. The concept of the corporation with all its impersonal relations is such an
arrangement.
The nature of property is further complicated by the appearance of the massive and
52
relations.
Property sacrifice is why we come to own things by our blood,
toil, sweat and tears. Property is uniquely for sacrifice. in common and
constitutional law, there are entities real or fictitious
which may hold property
The normative premise that the formally conceived individual who is the most basic unit will
be treated as a variable in his legal relations, thereby providing the foundations of dueprocess guarantees against legal personalities being defined on the basis of race, sex, and
other 'naturalistic' criteria. Legally conceived individuals are mutually exclusive,
preserving the individualism of democratic theory. The fourth specifies that only individuals
have logical properties, that is, rights and obligations.
The nature of property is further complicated by the appearance of the massive and
relations.
state formation and the implication for sacrifice

on why they kept on hand herds
of animals for sacrifice.
The central theme of The Golden Bough .
The divine kingship of the Shilluk of the Nilotic Sudan.
The Frazer Lecture, 1948 by E. E. EVANS-PRITCHARD

The dual personality of the king, an individual and an institution,
How cruel are the planets that stay there and conspire evil in their rage
. . . the planets conspire in rage against us.
A Mandaean text.
53
substitution in sacrifice
engenders value creation.
on money,
ARTIFICIAL PERSONS,
the hopeful
Substitution, a common enough interpretation of sacrifice,4 is the central meaning
of the rites - they are a giving or exchange or an expiation in that sense - whatever other
ideas are
mixed up in it or become attached to it. But ultimately it eludes
reason altogether.
The spirits demand attention, and they are not to be satisfied with cucumbers. They demand
bloody offerings. And if they are not given animal sacrifices they seize their devotees and
make them sick. Nuer, therefore, do not hesitate to bargain with these spirits, speaking
through their mediums, in a downright way which astonished me. The sense of the bargain
is always the same: if we give you an ox or a sheep or a goat will you leave the sick man
alone that he may recover, or what do you require of us this year in sacrifice that we may
not be troubled by you?
Fundamentally, however, if we have to sum up the meaning of Nuer piacular sacrifice in a
single word or idea I would say that it is a substitution - a life for a life. If it were not so it
would be difficult to understand at all why offerings to God should be immolated. The life
can only be given by its liberation through death, as Professor E. 0. James (I933, passim)
emphasizes in his Origins of Sacrifice.3
Substitution, a common enough interpretation of sacrifice,4 is the central meaning of the
rites - they are a giving or exchange or an expiation in that sense - whatever other ideas are
mixed up in it or become attached to it. But ultimately it eludes reason altogether. That is
why it is so difficult to write about. But to sum up the meaning of Nuer piacular sacrifices in
a single word scarcely does justice to the very complex set of ideas they express. We have
found it necessary to use a variety of words in speaking of them: communion, gift,
apotropaic rite, bargain, exchange, ransom, elimination, expulsion, purification, expiation,
propitiation, substitution, abnegation, homage, and others. According to situation and
particular purpose, one element in this complex of meaning may be stressed in one rite and
another element in another rite, or there are shifts in emphasis from one part of the
sacrificial rite to another.
value creation through sacrifice, also the negotiation
that goes to craft what is given up or immolated and what is to be expected.
The spirits demand attention, and they are not to be satisfied with cucumbers. They demand
bloody offerings. And if they are not given animal sacrifices they seize their devotees and
make them sick. Nuer, therefore, do not hesitate to bargain with these spirits, speaking
through their mediums, in a downright way which astonished me. The sense of the bargain
is always the same: if we give you an ox or a sheep or a goat will you leave the sick man
alone that he may recover, or what do you require of us this year in sacrifice that we may
54
not be troubled by you? And when the sacrifice is made and the animal twitches in its final
agonies the spirit is said to be tugging at its flesh. In the case of fetish spirits they are said
to cam, to eat, offerings and though the expression is used metaphorically its use
nevertheless implies a more material conception of offerings. It is significant that the lower
in the scale is the conception of spirit, the more it is thought of as taking delight in what is
offered.
Man approaches God through sacrifice and asks for aid. It is man and not God who benefits
by the sacrifice. Man's attitude in these sacrifices contrasts with his attitude in the case of
sacrifices to spirits who have seized people to exact gifts from them or may do so if they are
not satisfied. It is true that men generally have a feeling that the spirits would not have
troubled them if they had been given their due and that their devotees have only
themselves to blame if they have neglected them, and also that men give to the spirits for
the same reason that they often give to God, that they may be left alone. But the
psychology of gifts to spirits is different. Here the substitution is blended with the idea of
propitiation and satisfaction rather than of expiation or solicitation for aid, and the
experience is on a different level of thought. Man does not wrestle with God, but here man
and a spirit are pitted against one another, and the huckstering is conducted through a
human agency - is, in fact, between humans, between the sacrificer and the representative
of a spirit, a prophet and generally a very minor one. God has no such representatives.
Their religion, it is true, is part of their culture but, as such, its role in the regulation of the
social life, its structural role, is subsidiary to its role in the regulation of the individual's
relations with God, its personal role. The two roles are of different orders and have different
functions, and it is the second which has the greater interest for us, for though Nuer religious
activity is part of their social life and takes place within it they conceive it as expressing
essentially a relationship between man and something which lies right outside his society,
and it is, therefore, within the framework of that conception that our study of their religion
has to be made and its central act of sacrifice has to be understood.
on cults, culture and the economy.
on how city-states become nations and
the concept of value-creation engendered from
sacrifice and substitution.
the funding of public cults: euergetism and

pagan priesthoods
Corporations are the new gods and the elites the king priests.
No word, understood to its depth, goes farther to explain the Greco-Roman achievement."47
The gods were among the most conspicuous beneficiaries of philotimia, particularly of the
heavy spending of the priests themselves.
lion shares, cash cows and fat cats
initial public and private offerings, stocks and shares sacrificial.
. The animal is usually bought by subscription from several people, the price always being
made up in seven shares. Over a period of years, by accumulation of shares so contributed,
a person may acquire as it were a complete sacrificial animal for himself and so secure the
appropriate merit (Firth 1943, p. 203). Such collective acts of immolation of an animal may
not necessarily reduce the number of sacrifices performed in a community, but they spread
both the cost and the benefits. They also usually allow people with few resources to take
55
advantage of the relative wealth of others, so that the ideology of charity may be subjoined
to that of sacrifice. Again, the emphasis upon the ritual unity of the sacrificing group may be
a virtue which is closely allied to necessity.
The soul and sacrifice amongst the Sisala
by Eugene l. Mendonsa
The idea then of a whole offering was that the offerer gave the whole victim to the god and
the priests, who might divide it according to the regulations of the law on that point. No
regulation appears at the time of this early code regarding how much of the victim the priest
might eat; it is probable that when the practice of making whole offerings arose, the priests
ate all but the sacred parts.
By thus dividing the victim of the meal offering the ancient notion of sacrifice is emphasized;
it is a common meal at which the people and priests commune with the gods. Along with
animal sacrifices provisions are made for taxing offerings of first fruits, baked food, and oil
offerings.
The similarities among these festivals imperial, agonistic, and divine-were greater
than their differences: they all employed the processions, sacrifices, banquets, distributions,
and contests that had come to be a central feature of Greek culture and sustained a
characteristically Greek style of civic life. These various festivals would continue so long as
civic finances permitted and,
in particular, so long as the "sheer
willingness" (MacMullen's phrase) of the notables
to
fund them held firm.
This seriality of exchanges is transformative in that I lose something in order

to get something in exchange. The articulation of desire is thus truly cosmological.
John Morton. The Effectiveness of Totemism
at the root of urbanist celebration

and pastoral lament is the crime of fratricide, which myth
tells us is the origin of the city and politics. the myth of cain:
fratricide, city building, and politics
george m. shulman
the upkeep of the sanctuary and the funding of festivals.
Thus, it was conventional for cities to allocate part of their own civic funds to
defray part
of the cost of festivals (including the
sacrifices) and to pay temple personnel.
Scott Bradbury. On Julian's Pagan Revival and the Decline of Blood Sacrifice
Blood sacrifice was a not only in the Middle East but in other regions because the billions
being spent on the war must mean less funding for humanitarian and food distribution work
in the poorer parts of the central rite of virtually all religious groups in the pre-Christian
56
Mediterranean, and its gradual disappearance is one of the most significant religious
developments of late antiquity. Sacrifice did not decline according to any uniform pattern,
since there was a wide diversity in local customs and the impact of imperial and episcopal
authority varied from region to region and city to city. Moreover, it is important in
considering these matters to distinguish between public and private sacrifices.
The
Greek city states and public funding of blood sacrifices. The seeding of civic life
and religion, also states and nations
and the
function of democracy and government.
Scott Bradbury, On Julian's Pagan Revival and the Decline of Blood Sacrifice.
III. The funding of public cults: Euergetism and
pagan priesthoods
Every town and city was to have a priest, over whom there stood a provincial high-priest to
be selected from those who were "most distinguished in public life and conspicuous in
performing every kind of public service" (Euseb. HE 8.14.9). Like an imperial governor, the
high-priest was granted a bodyguard of soldiers. Lactantius corroborates Eusebius' account,
while providing us with further details: [Maximin] went on to adopt the novel practice (novo
more) of appointing highpriests (sacerdotes maximos), one for each city from among its
leading citizens.
As Ramsay MacMullen has written of philotimia: "No word, understood to its depth, goes
farther to explain the Greco-Roman achievement."47 The gods were among the most
conspicuous beneficiaries of philotimia, particularly of the heavy spending of the priests
themselves. Traditionally, festivals of the gods in Greek cities had been funded from three
different sources: sacred funds, civic funds, and private benefaction.48 Within the chaotic
finance systems of Greek cities, sacred funds represented an unusually stable and reliable
source of revenue, but revenue whose use was in theory restricted to sacred purposes, such
as the construction and repair of temples, the funding of festivals (including the sacrifices)
and the payment of the temple personnel. Civic magistrates were charged with overseeing
the proper use of the gods' revenues. Rents from temple lands and revenue from the
authorized sale of temple property were insufficient, however, to cover upkeep of the
sanctuary and the funding of festivals. Thus, it was conventional for cities to allocate part of
their own civic funds to defray part of the cost of festivals (including the sacrifices) and to
pay temple personnel.
A. H. M. Jones judged that the majority of sacrifices at the festivals were paid for out of
public funds.49 This combination of civic and sacred funds, however, still fell short of the
sums necessary to stage the elaborate festivals often connected with the most prominent
shrines and cities.
By the Hellenistic and Roman periods, priesthoods in Greek cities, as at Rome, had
become assimilated to civic magistracies.51 Social prestige and an ability to shoulder the
considerable financial burdens were the most important criteria in the selection of pagan
priests, who usually served for a year, sometimes for a fixed number of years. Priesthoods
"for life" were not uncommon, and a few were hereditary, either by ancient custom or
because the same family held the priesthood through successive generations. As we noted
above, among the sources of civic revenue, sacred funds were unusual for their stability and
reliability. In theory these funds were the property of the god, but cities frequently found
creative ways to tap them. No practice reveals more clearly the economic aspects of priestly
appointments than the outright sale of priesthoods, attested in Asia Minor (particularly Ionia)
from the fourth century B.C. to the second century A.D. By selling a priesthood and then
57
awarding the priest's salary from a combination of civic and sacred funds, cities might
effectively tap sacred funds for secular purposes.52 But the sale of priesthoods was merely
the formalization of the well-attested process of "pollicitation," by which a notable's
"promise" of a specific benefaction might, after negotiation, lead to the bestowal of a
prestigious office. Pollicitation preceded the granting of priesthoods as well as secular
offices, as we see in inscriptions in which a notable boasts of having bestowed benefactions
"in accordance with his promise."53
Epigraphical evidence from the Hellenistic period through the third century A.D. records the
wide variety and stupendous scale of benefaction in which priests might engage: the
construction or repair of public and sacred monuments; the funding of festivals, including
grants to the citizens of money, oil, wine, grain, perfumes, and unguents; the funding of
sacrifices by remitting to the city or private worshippers the hides, animal parts, taxes, and
fees rightfully owed to the priest; the feasting of the magistrates or, in some cases,
the whole citizenry; the provision of entertainment, such as singers, actors, horse
races, and gladiatorial combats.54 Priests and priestesses derived conspicuous
benefit from the possession of priesthoods, since lavish expenditure on the gods was
traditional, it built up the religious and social life of the community, and, as Peter Brown has
pointed out, it was well suited to deflect the envy of one's peers.55
-The system of funding public festivals through a combination of sacred funds, civic funds,
and private benefaction lasted well into the third century, despite the rise of serious
competitors for the largesse of civic benefactors, particularly the festivals of the imperial
cult and agonistic festivals. The imperial cult quickly became one of the most dynamic cults
in Asia Minor (and elsewhere), if we measure dynamism by a capacity to attract competitive
zeal and financial resources.60 The similarities among these festivals imperial, agonistic,
and divine-were greater than their differences: they all employed the processions, sacrifices,
banquets, distributions, and contests that had come to be a central feature of Greek culture
and sustained a characteristically Greek style of civic life. These various festivals would
continue so long as civic finances permitted and, in particular, so long as the "sheer
willingness" (MacMullen's phrase) of the notables to fund them held firm. However, the third
century's drastic economic decline, accelerated by military anarchy and barbarian invasions,
dealt a serious blow to this style of civic life. Although the impact of these factors varied
from region to region, it is clear that when prosperity began to return under the Tetrarchs,
resources were much reduced and the scale of public and private.

On Songs by which tribesmen of Ouagadougou greet their king.

'Tu es un excrement, Tu es un tas d'ordures,
Tu viens pour nous tuer, Tu viens pour nous sauver ... '. 203
Were he not excrement, filth, the king would have no saving power.
58
CIS No. 165. - [MARSEILLES INSCRIPTION]
3. Concerning an ox, whether a whole offering or common meal offering
or whole offering, to the priests ten shekels of silver with each animal, and in case of a
whole offering
there shall be to them in addition to this tax, flesh of the
(weight of three hundred pounds),
4. and in case of a common meal offering the short ribs and shoulders,
but the skin and shin-bones and feet and the rest of the flesh to the offerer.
the chief purpose of property is sacrifice. it is why

we come to own things by our blood, toil, sweat and tears. property and
Peter Gose. The American Society for Ethnohistory
Oracles, Divine Kingship, and Political Representation in the Inka State.
how oracles and their priests
came to play a central role in Inka court politics and explores the distinctive
genre of political representation that they created in Andean society.
As the medium between his followers and the deities, the dynastic ruler was invested with
supernatural powers. While there was a hierarchy of priests and nobility, the 'ruler-god'
reined supreme. The outcome of wars, crop harvests, and the weather were all determined
by the whims of the gods, whims which required appeasement on the part of mortal
humans. Sacrifice was incorporated as a way of 'feeding' these ever-hungry gods. Each god
may require his or her own type of sacrifice at a specific point during the year. For instance,
this maize god stands on the chest of his unfortunate meal. Common belief held that blood
possessed an essence, one of the souls of a human, and therefore it contained special
properties (Sharer). It was regarded as a sacred liquid. For instance, the Aztecs held the sun
god, Tezcoptipcoca, in highest regards; from him (and consequently the sun) all life flowed.
Sacrifices were performed in order to return this energy to its creator. Most of the time,
sacrificial victims were war captives, marched to the top of the central temple in great
ceremony under the public eye. While the actual sacrifice could take several forms, the most
common was to remove the heart of the victim. This act was usually done with an obsidian
blade, which for the Aztecs represented (if not actually became) the same obsidian blade
which impregnated their mother of Creation (Aztec Creation).
Jay Spaulding
59
Beidelman described the Swazi king as an intermediary, analogous in many ways to the
sacrificial bulls that bridge the sacred and the profane domains, in the sense that Hubert and
Mauss employed these terms in their essay on sacrifice: "The king, the bull of his nation,
serves as the link between the supernatural world and the world of the living". Hierarchy and
the Haya Divine Kingship: A Structural and Symbolic Reformulation of Frazer's Thesis. Robert G. Carlson
From this perspective, which I believe is consistent with Frazer's thesis, the underlying
cosmology of divine kingship is clearly composed of three hierarchically related terms, not
just a binary opposition between the king and the kingdom: the sacred, supernatural, or
transcendent domain of the ancestors; the king as a symbolic mediator; and the profane,
natural, or normative domain-the kingdom. A hierarchical model that incorporates the king's
role as a mediator, then, is the appropriate starting point for an analysis of divine kingship.
The development of African kingships, according to Kopytoff (1987:62-63), can be explained
in part as an elaboration of this hierarchical ethic, which he implies is ultimately rooted in
the corporate kin group. Thus, the kingship is portrayed metaphorically as an extension of
the king's homestead, thereby giving birth to the opposition between the king and the
kingdom.
the chief purpose of the corporation is property-holding, and that of property is

sacrifice. it is why
we come to own things by our blood, toil, sweat and tears. property and


how oracles and their priests

came to play a central role in Inka court politics and explores the distinctive
genre of political representation that they created in Andean society.
Under the Inkas, oracles were an important form of political representation. They spoke as
deified dead rulers for social groups removed from the current power center, allowing the
living sovereign to govern while receiving advice and information from subordinate groups.
Consultation had to be indirect because of the extreme social distance separating Inka
divine kings from their subjects. Inka rulers also delegated power to living substitutes and
statues, who governed in an oracular manner for the sovereign. In these ways the
commemorative cult of divine kings shaped the workings of Inka government.
60
From the perspective of Western individualism, oracular possession is doomed to appear as
either pathological or exotic (see Lambek i98i; Boddy i989). We find it difficult to see
oracular possession as a practical way to get things done because it undermines our very
notion of human agency as something personal, bounded, and coherent. Under the Inkas,
however, Andean people had different working assumptions about the expansive agency of
divine kings, which made oracular possession not only "believable" but a uniquely
"realistic" method of everyday political decision making and maneuver.
How Inka politics took an oracular Ethnohistory form. The answer may lie in the broader institutional
and ideological realities of Andean divine kingship, in which the subjectivity of the sovereign tended to
engulf and obliterate that of his subjects. Under such conditions, those outside the current ruling
clique found an effective way to represent their sectional interests by attaching themselves
to the oracular cult of a previous divine king. The voices that spoke through oracular shrines
and priests were held to be those of dead ruler-ancestors, particularly those who founded or
expanded political units. Oracular performances centered
on the mummified body or a statue of this ruler-ancestor. As illustrious and unimpeachable
ex-rulers, oracular deities spoke with an authority that might constrain, decenter, and
fragment the power of the living sovereign, whose relation to his predecessors was always at
least potentially ambivalent.
Mummified sovereigns also spoke as representatives of the living descent groups or
corporations (ayllus, panaqas) that each founded during his reign. Oracles thus became an
important channel for these groups to
influence and even challenge the living ruler's agenda.
Oracular possession provided the cultural model for this delegation of power and thus
became one of the few quasibureaucratic idioms available in an otherwise weakly
institutionalized and excessively personalistic political regime.
Oracles and Politics: Background
The outcome of wars, crop harvests, and the weather were all determined
by the whims of the gods, whims which required appeasement on the part of
mortal humans. Sacrifice was incorporated as a way of 'feeding' these everhungry gods.
These exemplary deeds mythically constituted political
authority.4 Their authors were expected to turn into stone on death and
to continue providing their subjects with life, agrarian fertility, and advice
about the affairs of state that was passed on to the living through oracles
and their mediums. The Inkas were committed to this image of life-giving rulership and
expected all their sovereigns to earn their deified status as "sons of the Sun"
through conquest.
Thus an Andean divine king began his career as a living
warrior and matured into a dead deity. The body of a dead Inka sovereign
was mummified, and statues of him
were made of gold and cloth.
the origin of sovereignty,
. The Word might become Flesh, so to speak;
but the Flesh might also become the Word. J. Roy.
61
THE dimensions of the oracular phenomenon AND Oracular Representation
How did oracles represent the social groups to which they were connected? Like electoral
democracy, Andean oracles were a form of political ventriloquism, in which a few people
spoke for many more. By their very nature, these systems of political representation
confound any hard distinction between appropriation and articulation of the group's voice.
the imperial hierarchy of deities and its system of sacrificial rewards. These outlays
in goods and services were considerable and would not have occurred if the motives behind
oracular consultation were entirely cynical. In short, we must assume that the Inkas and
their subjects believed in oracles and gave them a certain degree of political autonomy.
the principles of Andean divine kingship. Here
the goal of the ruler was to aggrandize himself in a manner that knew
of no distinction between the spiritual and the worldly. Rather, his goal was to constitute
his own divinity through an irresistible display of imperialist might. He wanted to know
whether his plans would succeed, not whether they were right or wrong. Oracular advice
was given privately to the elite because it concerned their plans, and they were the ones
considered strong enough to
speak directly to the deity.
These detached, omniscient deities predicted
the future because they were the creators and animators of their
peoples; they knew the latter's destinies because they lay at the very source
of their being.12
You must know that while these lords were alive they were held in awe and
reverenced as sons of the Sun and once dead their mummies were held in awe
and reverenced like gods and thus they made sacrifices in front of them
just as was done for the image of the Sun"
As a form of political representation, oracles allow us to understand how the realities of

consultation and negotiation in a weakly organized state were coordinated with the
theoretical absolutism of Andean divine
kingship. On the one hand, oracles simply followed the ideology of divine kingship to its
logical conclusion: the king is a deity who continues to speak and dispense life even in
death. On the other hand, the very perpetuity of divine kings ensured a plurality of
authoritative voices, each one speaking for the corporate descent group it founded. Through
the voice of their mummified ancestor, these groups could assert their own perspective and
interests without questioning the nominally absolute power of the current sovereign. For in
speaking through the voice of their founding ancestor, they ceased to be the authors of their
own words. Any conflicts that arosewere no longer between the king and his subjects but
between the king and his predecessors. Although oracles had an influence potentially equal
to that of the living sovereign, the fact that they issued from his dead predecessors meant
that they could not challenge his hold on power. Oracles made the king listen, without
having to listen to a rival. Conversely, oracles gave those without power a voice, but not a
voice of their own. It was only through a medium, penetrated by the voice of a more
powerful animating and commanding being, that subaltern groups could make themselves
heard. This form of empowerment implied and reproduced subordination, but it also allowed
the current divine king to govern effectively without appearing to heed his conquered
subjects.
Oracles and the Bureaucratic Delegation of Power
The accumulation of illustrious predecessors was not the only reason the theoretically
monolithic power of the Inka was in fact quite fragmented. Apart from any backseat driving
62
by his dead predecessors, the ruler faced a tremendous task in governing the empire, one
that absolutely required a bureaucratic delegation of powers. Although the Inka was
theoretically in charge of war, administration, and religion, in practice he undertook each
activity sequentially. He periodically delegated his military duties to various "generals," his
religious duties to the high priest of the Sun, and his administrative duties to a figure called
the Inkap rantin, or "Inka's substitute." 13
Descriptions of an Inka's exploits frequently included everything done by these delegates in
the Inka's name. Thus the Inka became something of an umbrella figure or corporate
persona who hierarchically subsumed under his identity an entire supporting cast of
lesser individuals. The same process also characterized Andean deities, where segmentary
identity was even more clearly developed.'4 The ability to work through multiple
embodiments was a sign of the ruler's power, but it necessarily involved some risk.
The high priest of the Sun, an extremely powerful man who always came from the highest
nobility of Cuzco, was second in rank only to the Inka himself. He appointed and discharged
priests below him and had charge of all the oracles and shrines in the empire (ibid.; Ramos
GavilainI 976 [i62I]: 44). There is every reason to assume that it was through his office that
the track records of the imperial oracles were kept and their sacrificial rewards doled out.
But the high priest of the Sun was not the Inka, even if he was almost as powerful. One
account describes him as the "retainer of the Sun," as opposed to the Inka, who was "son of
the Sun," and further specifies that he was the Inka's "replacement" (Segovia i968 [I553]:
75-76). On so doing, he would have faced the impossible task of actually living up to the
myth of Andean divine kingship in which the sovereign, by the sheer force of his exemplary
personality, encompasses and even expands his entire realm. To be sure, the sovereign
remained at the center, but it was a center that extended back in time through descent from
previous rulers and, finally, the Sun. As the empire expanded outward in space and time
through ever larger
concentric circles, the living sovereign necessarily became an increasingly junior and
peripheral character in relation to those who went before him.
Twinned Beings:
Kings and Effigies in Southern Sudan, East India and Renaissance France.
by Burkhard Schnepel Review by: Declan Quigley
All of this comparative material is juxtaposed with the central thesis of
The king's two bodies, the celebrated (1957) study of medieval political theology by
E.H. Kantorowicz who finds the king to be 'a twinned being, human and divine ... [who]
becomes a twin personality through his anointment and consecration' (quoted at p. 6), and
who, as Christ's representative on earth, 'never dies'. Following this line of thought, the
author examines the diverse ways in which royal effigies express the union of two bodies,
one natural and mortal, the other representing
an
immortal being or a transcendent principle.
The author has himself conducted fieldwork in two of his chosen sites, jungle kingdoms in
Orissa, India, and among the Shilluk of the southern Sudan; he draws on historical studies of
Renaissance France for his third case. By looking at the representation of kings by effigies
during funerary rituals, Schnepel examines the respective character of the legitimacy
63
enjoyed by kings in these different polities, and the underlying problem of how the
continuity of kingship can be maintained given the mortality of kings.
A number of interesting contrasts emerge. In France, for example, the effigy represents the
deceased king as if he were still splendidly alive, indicating that the body natural of the
deceased king continues to be conjoined with the body politic up to the moment of burial
when the symbols of kingship are transferred to his suc- cessor. Among the Shilluk, however,
there is an interregnum during which the god moves to the effigy. Schnepel summarizes the
contrast by saying that the common principle of continuity captured in the maxim 'the
kingship never dies' is expressed in the former case by the idea that 'the king (as body
natural) never dies', while in the latter 'Nyikang or the body mystical never dies'. The French
case illustrates the legitima- tion of dynastic succession; the Shilluk example illustrates a
stress on transferring charismatic authority and on privileging this over dynastic claims. The
contrasts presented are suggestive not merely for understanding rituals of kingship, but also
for understanding the nature of priesthood and the ways in which priesthood is af- fected
by the employment of effigies. In Hindu Orissa, because the god Jagannath is in the effigy
rather than in the person of the king, the latter is properly a high priest or servant; here a
number of other, professional priests are also indispensable. Among the Shilluk, however,
there is no professional class of ritual expert at all, and since the king is divine he cannot be
both the god Nyikang and Nyikang's priest. In Renaissance France, because of the distinction
between the ecclesiastical and civil elements of the funeral ceremony, priests, while
prominent in the funerary obsequies, were not so with respect to the centrality of the effigy
and the fiction of the king's two bodies.
the mystical values associated with the kingship and centred in the person of the king he
must keep himself in a state of ritual purity, by performing certain actions and
observing certain prescriptions, and in a state of physical perfection. Our authorities say that
the Shilluk believe that should the king become physically weak the whole people might
suffer, and, further, that if a king becomes sick or senile he should be killed to avoid some
grave national misfortune, such as defeat in war, epidemic, or famine. The king must be
killed to save the kingship and with it the whole Shilluk people.
Moreover, the priest as sacrificer had a conspicuous role in the religious life of the early
empire.
Numerous reliefs of the period depict the Roman emperor engaged in a conventional
sacrificial ritual. As Richard Gordon has argued, the focus of the reliefs is not the act of
sacrificial killing, but the emperor himself dressed as a priest and engaged in the ceremony
of sacrifice. The focus is thus on the emperor in a ceremonial role as sacrificer and
benefactor. The sacrifices depicted on these reliefs, argues Gordon, become "paradigms or
exemplars of public sacrifice throughout the empire .... 56 In this ideology of benefaction,
the emperor's act of sacrifice is the act of benefaction par excellence, in imitation of which
provincial elites make their own sacrifices and benefactions.
If social prestige had been the only benefit to accrue to civic notables, priesthoods might
nonetheless have been less attractive since they could involve huge expenditures.
Accordingly, cities made considerable efforts to make these posts desirable by providing
them with an income to help defray costs. Priests were often awarded stipends from civic
funds and/or sacred funds. They received exemption from a variety of other liturgies and
were awarded fees and taxes from sacrifices or mystery initiations.57 They also had rights to
parts of the sacrificial animals and a portion of other kinds of sacrifice such as fruit or
vegetable offerings. It appears that of the various forms of income available, the most
significant and most reliable was that derived from the public sacrifices funded by the city.58
The parts of the sacrificial victims awarded to priests would normally be sold to retail
64
butchers. Hence, it was important that the city itself faithfully meet its obligations. Sacred
laws carefully spelled out who was required to offer what sacrifices, imposing fines on those
who were derelict.59 The city also put pressure on private cult associations and private
citizens to offer sacrifices.
From this perspective, which I believe is consistent with Frazer's thesis, the underlying
cosmology of divine kingship is clearly composed of three hierarchically related terms, not
just a binary opposition between the king and the kingdom: the sacred, supernatural, or
transcendent domain of the ancestors; the king as a symbolic mediator; and the profane,
natural, or normative domain-the kingdom. A hierarchical model that incorporates the king's
role as a mediator, then, is the appropriate starting point for an analysis of divine kingship.
incorporating the victim or the god. sacrifice in contemporary institutions.

the theory of Sacrifice which underpins that of incorporation.
Idowu, for such killings. 'Human sacrifice' could then be more loosely defined as the killing of
people in order to secure the favour of supernatural beings. A practice which, however, it
seems necessary to distinguish from human sacrifice is that of ritual cannibalist, that is, the
killing and eating of people for magical or ritual rather than merely for food purposes. In
central America, it appears that the bodies of people sacrificed to the gods were normally
eaten, and an attempt has been made to interpret the exceptional scale of human sacrifice
in Mexico as a system for the distribution of human meat, in societies lacking abundant
supplies of animal protein.23
Fat cats and cash cows.
The first codes and the tax laws of sacrifice.
The priests are also to receive a large portion of the flesh of oxen and calves offered as
whole offerings. It is probable that the rest of the flesh of the whole offering was to be
burned along with the sacred parts. I conjecture that the early code which does not take up
this point about giving part of the flesh to the priests took it for granted that all of the flesh
was to be eaten by them. This accounts for the absence of any tax with the offerings of oxen
and larger animals in the early code.
In the Hebrew system the vow offering corresponds in importance to the sin offering of
the Hebrews. Moreover the taxes are altered and greatly increased in favor of the priests. It
is here stipulated that a considerable sum of money should be paid to the temple with each
animal sacrifice, the tax decreasing
with the size of the animal. The priests are also to receive a large portion of the flesh of oxen
and calves offered as whole offerings. It is probable that the rest of the flesh of the whole
offering was to be burned along with the sacred parts. I conjecture that the early code which
does not take up this point about giving part of the flesh to the priests took it for granted
that all of the flesh was to be eaten by them. This accounts for the absence of any tax with
the offerings of oxen and larger animals in the early code. However, the idea soon grew up
that in case of a whole offering at least part of the flesh should be burned. The law
therefore came into force that of an ox the priests should eat only 300 pounds
and of a young bull only 150 pounds. However, the tax paid in with each of these whole
offerings in some way recompensed the priests for the loss of the burned portions.
It is most probable that the flesh of all of the smaller animals, such as the sheep, deer, and
65
goat, which were offered as whole offerings, was to be eaten entirely by the priests. But here
the skin is in every case retained by the worshipper. Accordingly money fees are substituted
for the skin.
CIS No. 165. - [MARSEILLES INSCRIPTION]
3. Concerning an ox, whether a whole offering or common meal offering
or whole offering, to the priests ten shekels of silver with each animal, and in case of a
whole offering
there shall be to them in addition to this tax, flesh of the
(weight of three hundred pounds),
4. and in case of a common meal offering the short ribs and shoulders,
but the skin and shin-bones and feet and the rest of the flesh to the offerer.
lionshares, cash cows and fat cats
initial public and private offerings, stocks and shares sacrificial.
The dual personality of the king, an individual and an institution,
This point of view, according to Fortes, represents a reformulation and
misinterpretation of Maine's model of corporation theory (ibid.: 293, 297).
For Maine (1888), as Fortes points out, the leading attribute of corporations is their
perpetuity, which itself is assured by laws of intestate succession. Maine's maxim that
'corporations never die' puts the emphasis on the preservation and devolution of the
collectively held universitasjuris, the bundle of rights and duties (Fortes, 1970: 292). 'The
important point in his view,' Fortes holds, 'is that rights and duties, office and property, are
not the forces that generate corporations but the vehicle and media through the agency of
which corporations express their intrinsic perpetuity' (ibid.: 293). By contrast with Goody,
then, Maine and Fortes hold that the corporation is the independent and autonomous
variable, property the dependent one (ibid.: 300); or, in other words; 'particular forms of
property relations are contingent upon, not constitutive of, corporate group
structure' (ibid.: 302).
In this context Fortes makes use of the findings put forward in Ernst H. Kantorowicz's study
of medieval political theology. In The King's Two Bodies (1957) Kantorowicz succeeds in
showing how the controversies about the king's two bodies, his body natural and his body
mystical or body politic, in fact camouflage, or are expressions of and attempts to solve, the
problem of the continuity of corporations: namely, the doctrine of their 'identity despite
change', where change arises either through the death of their members (in the case of
corporations aggregate) or through the death of a corporation sole's individual and single
representative.
Fortes writes about The King's Two Bodies: The point here is that it is not their co-existence
as 'a plurality of persons collected in one body' that makes a group corporate, but their
'plurality in succession', their perpetuity in time. Summing up these ideas, Kantorowicz sayst
hat 'the most significantf eatureo f the personifiedc ollectivitiesa nd corporate bodies was
that they projected into past and future, that they preserved their identity despite changes,
and that therefore they were legally immortal' (1957: 310-311). [Fortes, 1970: 303] The
various ways in which the problem can be met of creating and maintaining a doctrine of the
royal office (as a paradigmatic type of corporation sole) as immortal and of reconciling this
doctrine with the inevitable death of its incumbents have probably been illustrated best by
studies of European kingship.
If we are to understand the place of the kingship in Shilluk society we must,
I think, beware of attempts to define it in terms of judicial and administrative functions
66
and view it rather as a ritual office and in a wider political context.
The divine kingship of the Shilluk of the Nilotic Sudan. The Frazer Lecture. 1948.
Toward a Democratic Theory of Property and the Modern Socialism in NationMaking.
Such collective acts of immolation of an animal may not necessarily reduce the number of
sacrifices performed in a community, but they spread both the cost and the benefits. They
also usually allow people with few resources to take advantage of the relative wealth of
others, so that the ideology of charity may be subjoined to that of sacrifice.
immortality of corporations, the new kings, god-status and immortality,
liminality, artificial persons, invisibility and limited liability. the corporation is the
new god.
To understand how a dead man can reign we have to go back to our principles of ritual.
Among the Shilluk of southern Sudan the notion of the perpetuity of the royal office is
expressed as a belief in the immortality of Nyikang, their first king and mythical hero. Shilluk
strongly refute any suggestion that Nyikang died. Tradition has it that he disappeared in a
whirlwind during a feast held in Akurwa. It is said that Nyikang 'went like a wind' or that 'he
became wind'. The animal is usually bought by subscription from several people, the price
always being made up in seven shares. Over a period of years, by accumulation of shares so
contributed, a person may acquire as it were a complete sacrificial animal for himself and so
secure the appropriate merit (Firth 1943, p. 203). Such collective acts of immolation of an
animal may not necessarily reduce the number of sacrifices performed in a community, but
they spread both the cost and the benefits. They also usually allow people with few
resources to take advantage of the relative wealth of others, so that the ideology of charity
may be subjoined to that of sacrifice. Again, the emphasis upon the ritual unity of the
sacrificing group may be a virtue which is closely allied to necessity.
incorporating the victim or the god.

the theory of Sacrifice underpinning incorporation.
of pygmies, hunter gatherers. of the husbandmen, the shepherd kings.

On the bantu, the bahima and the batwa.
Nancy is perhaps suggesting that the fictitiousness of origins, on the one hand,
combined with the historical collapse of sacrifice (in the name of Western "progress" and the
end[ing]
of the political) .
We are not fortunate enough to possess a complete ethnographic account of any one
imperial sacrifice. Thus in no case do we know the full details of the slaughtering of the
animal and the division of the parts between emperor, priest and others, an aspect of the
process which could have been crucial evidence for ideas about the sacrifices.
67

Between Man and God: Sacrifice in the Roman Imperial Cult. S. R. F. Price
If the imperial cult is treated as an aspect of a decadent religion or as a counter in
an
elaborate game of politics there is naturally no incentive to study the ritual itself.
My aim is to demonstrate that sacrifices were a way of articulating a large body of
unformulated thought
concerning the emperor by means of subtle modifications of the
practices of divine ritual. In other words the sacrifices formed an important part of a
cognitive system, which should be seen as hovering on the border between preconscious
and conscious.
12 Similarly Taylor wrote that Augustus, in succession to the 'divine kings of the Hellenistic
monarchies', in the Asiatic provinces and the Greek lands was 'frankly worshipped by cities
and leagues of cities as a deity incarnate '.
Imperial sacrifices were made on a variety of occasions, public and private, by individuals or
by representatives of city or province. Sometimes libationsl4 or ritual cakes'6 were offered
but the burning of incense, perhaps on special altars,'6 or the killing of an animal, normally a
bull, were the standard offerings at public festivals.17 We are fortunate to possess some
representations of these scenes of sacrifice, both of libations 18 and of the sacrifice of a bull
before an imperial statue or temple.19
On sacrifices to and sacrifices on behalf of emperor Gauis.
and the continuities between ruler cult and the traditional cult of the gods.
Philo, who went on an embassy of Alexandrian Jews to the emperor Gaius, says that when
they finally succeeded in gaining an audience with Gaius in connection with the troubles in
Alexandria, they were greeted by an emperor who accused the Jews of being godhaters who
refuse'd to acknowledge his divinity.22 The opposing embassy of Alexandrian Greeks then
accused the Jews of not having offered sacrifices of thanksgiving for Gaius. The Jews denied
this vehemently, pointing out that they had done so three times. 'All right', Gaius replied,
'that's as may be, you have sacrificed, but to another, even if it was on my behalf. What
good is that if you have not sacrificed to me?
In the sphere of sacrifice there is an amount of
direct sacrifice to specific, living Hellenistic kings which is
very striking in comparison to the Roman material.
My account of imperial sacrifices shows how the system was modified to accommodate the
ambiguous figure of the emperor within the traditional division between god and man.
68
Politics obviously lies at the root of ruler cult, but to impose a distinction between politics
and religion, as is conventionally done, is to make it impossible to see how ruler cult
consisted in the accommodation of power in traditional religious terms. A similar case has
been brilliantly argued by Burridge as regards the so-called cargo cults, and if power is built
into one's definition of religion, as Burridge suggests, it is easier to see the continuities
rather than the discontinuities between ruler cult and the traditional cult of the gods.'"


of the Americas and of the inka.
invisbility, immortality and oracular possessions
Burkhard Schnepel
This article is dedicated to a discussion of one aspect of corporations, aggregate and sole,
namely the frequently found doctrine of their perpetuity or immortality. Whilst I start with a
brief look at anthropological corporation theories, the main discussion in sections 2 and 3
focuses on ethnographical data concerning the kingship of the Shilluk of southern Sudan. I
concentrate on two distinct, though in several ways interrelated, topics: regicide and royal
shrines.
In his Kinship and the Social Order (1970), which will guide me throughout this section,
Meyer Fortes uses his knowledge of medieval corporation doctrines (as investigated by
modern legal historians such as Maine, Maitland and Kantorowicz) for a fundamental critique
and revision of anthropological theories.' Medieval corporation theories, we learn, revolve
around the concept of corporations aggregate as single 'juristic persons'
The various ways in which the problem can be met of creating and maintaining a doctrine of
the royal office (as a paradigmatic type of corporation sole) as immortal and of reconciling
this doctrine with the inevitable death of its incumbents have probably been illustrated best
by studies of European kingship. These studies, such as Kantorowicz's (1957) and Giesey's
(1960), have shown in detail that behind a phrase like Le roi est mort, vive le roi! there
exists a complex and varied body of politico-jural and ritual actions and beliefs, which are a
response to the camouflaged problem of the fictional perpetuity of the royal office despite
death and change. Fortes has to be credited for bringing Kantorowicz's study to the attention
of social anthropologists, who continue to be inspired by and make use of the great
historian's work (for an excellent recent example see Galey, 1989).
If it is true, as I argued above, that every body politic faces the need to account for and
symbolically represent the fictional immortality of its corporations in spite of the mortality
and transitoriness of their members, then this need increases when the corporation in
question is represented, at a given time, by one person only, that is, when the perpetuity of
69
a corporation sole is at stake. Death and installation ceremonies conducted for an officeholder then have a very important function with regard to the fiction of the perpetuity of the
office. In fact, an important ideological feature of the kingship of the Shilluk is the belief that
during the rites of installation the immortal Nyikang takes possession of each of his mortal
successors, who thereby become his human incarnations and representatives.


His contention is that what makes a unilineal descent group into a corporate group is
the possession, vested in and shared by all its members, of an estate which
consists not merely of a bundle of rights in general, but of rights, specifically, in a
definable good or array of goods, namely property-above all, that which has productive or
reproductive value. But if I follow him correctly, the fundamental reason why property
generates corporation is that it is evaluated as a good or goods that must not be dissipated
but must be preserved for the benefit of succeeding generations. [Fortes, 1970: 296-7]
Capitalism and Individuation. the Sociology
70

on money,
ARTIFICIAL PERSONS,
the hopeful


Artificial Persons, The New King-Priests.

Transféré par

Informations du document

Titre original

Copyright

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Artificial Persons, The New King-Priests.

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

1

on the cattle herders and the shepherd kings.

l'tat, c'est moi. louis xvi

on the cattle herders and the shepherd kings.

the chief purpose of the corporation is property-holding, and that of property

If we are to understand the place of the kingship in Shilluk society we must,

On Seligman. The Hamite thesis. Races of Africa, 1930.

The Hamitic hypothesis born conquerors overcoming settled rural

All centralized government and cultural advances in sub-Saharan Africa

Charles Seligman. 1930. The Races of Africa.

While the Hamites were in turn viewed as inferior to,

1907. Donald Mackenzie. AEgyptian Myth and Legend.

The modern corporation, however,

"Nation Building Is a Quagmire" "Nation Building Is a Recent Idea"

At the apex of this hierarchy was

on city-states and their incorporation by Napoleon

nations are corporations.

the chief purpose of the corporation is property-holding,

The 'property theory' of corporations.

The modern corporation, however,

Hartmann points out, the end of slavery in the U.S. suspiciously

and those with fewer were labelled Hutu. This

Edith Sanders. Spttel. On the Hamitic hypothesis.

The modern corporation, however,

Hartmann points out, the end of slavery in the U.S. suspiciously

Edith Sanders. Spttel. On the Hamitic hypothesis.

Jean Bethke Elshtain.

On national sovereignty and the charters from which they spring.

the regnum as patria, as an object of

At the root of urban(ist) celebration and pastoral lament

on city-states and their incorporation by Napoleon

nations are corporations.

the chief purpose of the corporation is property-holding,

The nature and function of corporate property in a democratic political system.

Toward a Democratic Theory of Property and the Modern Corporation

the chief purpose of property is sacrifice.

on the cattle herders and the shepherd kings.

Jean Bethke Elshtain.

On national sovereignty and the charters from which they spring.

At the root of urban(ist) celebration and pastoral lament

nations are corporations.

the chief purpose of the corporation is property-holding,

The nature and function of corporate property in a democratic political system.

Toward a Democratic Theory of Property and the Modern Corporation

the chief purpose of property is sacrifice.

on the cattle herders and the shepherd kings.

the shepherd kings and the cattle herders.

apples and covenants in eden,

Professor W. Robertson Smith. Substances in Semitic sacrifices.

Gordon M. Freeman. The Process of Covenant.

Mahmood Mamdani on Political and market-based identities.

Jean Bethke Elshtain.

The Hamitic hypothesis born conquerors overcoming settled rural

How can a man be born when he is old?

1907. Donald Mackenzie. AEgyptian Myth and Legend.

1907. Donald Mackenzie. AEgyptian Myth and Legend.

on blood sacrifice, the shepherd kings and the cattle herders.

we can try to tame and limit the demands of sovereignty.

On the bantu, the bahima and the batwa.

Who are the Bantu?

In the initial classification of tribal groups, authorities used

The modern corporation, however,

The German geographer and ethnologist Friedrich Ratzel developed the

On national sovereignty and the charters from which they spring.

the chief purpose of property is sacrifice.

on the cattle herders and the shepherd kings.