 Rhaid o'r gweithio, ydych chi. Rhyw fyddwch chi'n gyffredin, y dweud y cyfrifwyng ar gyfer cyfrwyng. Felly, i fynd i ymuno i'r eu ffordd o'r cefnod o'r Llyfrgell Cyfrwyngol, i fynd i'r llwydd am y Llyfrgell Eymol, oeddi'r cyfrwyng i fynd i'r Llyfrgell Marysol. Mae'n gweithio i fynd i ddod y flwyddyn a'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i fynd i'r fawr i'r ffawr yma sydd ymddangos, Ie, mae'n gwybod o'i bod yn y ffordd. Mae'n edrych, Edward Simpson, a pethau o ddweud o amfodol lleolol ac mae'n amser o'r Cwlaethogol Fyre. Roedd y dyfodol o'r centre yn ymddangos yng Nghymru Fabio Gigi, fel y cyfnod ygylchedd i'r ddweud yma, a ddefnyddio'n amser o'r cyfnod. Felly mae'n ddefnyddio'r dyfodol ar gyfer yr ysbyt ymddangos a'r mhoxie i'r cyfnod yma. Yn ymddangos, mae'n wedi bod argylchedd ar gyfer. Felly, fyddwch i chi'n meddwl ydy'r hyn... ..y'r cymuned i ni i gynnalu'r ac ysgolwch. Rydyn ni'n ystod, yn erbyn. Y dwylltebeth a'r ethnegrafficau'n ei wneud yn gwybod... ..y'r dweud yr ysgolwch cyfan yn ystod... ..yma'r gyfrifol yma hynny. Y dwylltebeth yw'r cyfrifol e'n gilydd... ..yma'r dweud y dweud yw'r ethnegraffi... ..yna'r bobl yn ysgolwch cyfrifol... of social theory. We have a series of exciting occasions planned, including the Gift Love Festival tomorrow, a day on the anthropology of play in amid the blossoms of May. We have infrastructure as the leaves fall later in the year and hospitality in the run up to Christmas. The batting order for this evening will be opened by Giovanni De Coll, who is the editor-in-chief of the journal Howe. He will introduce our speaker, Marshal Sarlinds, who will in turn deliver the first AM hockart lecture. This will be followed by a summary by David Graeber. There will be no questions at the end and conversation will spill into the wine reception upstairs. Arthur Morris Hockart was born in 1883 in Belgium. The Guernsey family, who remain alive today, prefer the pronunciation Ockart, but I think we're going to stick with Hockart. His father was a high church clergyman, but became a Wesleyan Methodist. Hockart's father was a Wesleyan minister, but became a Unitarian. Hockart read what we would now gloss as classics at Oxford, graduating in 1906, and making a conversion of his own to anthropology sometime later. His first ethnographic research was in the Pacific as a member of the Percy Slatton Trust expedition to the Solomons, along with WHR rivers. He spent a number of years in Fiji. He returned to Oxford to study anthropology, and between 1915 and 1919 he served as a light infantryman. After the war he was appointed archaeological commissioner for Ceylon. In 1934 he was elected chair of sociology at Cairo, a seat that had previously been kept warm by Evans Pritchard. In 1935 Hockart was awarded the Rivers Memorial by the Royal Anthropological Institute for field work he had conducted in Melanesia, Polynesia, and Solon. Radcliff Brown and Malinowski overshadowed Hockart during his lifetime. Perhaps this was due to his retiring disposition. Perhaps this was due to his irasable style. Perhaps it was also due to the unorthodoxy of his views, and certainly his premature death in 1939 at the age of 55 cannot have helped his cause. Arguably however his work is now less out of time than his rivals of the past. Hockart's friend and congener Fitzroy Richard IV Baron of Raglan first revived him in the 1950s bringing out five volumes of writing and papers. The Hockart mantle was again taken up in the 1960s by Rodney Needham, who compiled the bibliography of his work and ensured the republication of the life-giving myth and the kings and councillors, as well as a new volume, imagination and proof. Although that title is perhaps more Needham than it is Hockart. Hockart's thought was bold. It was unpredictable and it was challenging. Evans Pritchard notes that Hockart was, I quote, a fine practical linguist with some 14 or 15 languages. Hockart's questions were big and they were bold, focused on the comparative anatomy of human society and the theologies and mythologies of kinship and kingship. Reading Hockart makes you jump, makes you start. He encourages a liberal and fertile style of investigation. He reminds you of the power of curious questions and the allures of adventuring in the mind. Reading Hockart is a challenge. He makes you think differently. On that note and in that spirit, I take great pleasure in launching both the Center for Ethnographic Theory and the first A.M. Hockart lecture. Over to you, Giovanni. Good evening. It's been something. I've been blown away by your talk. In fact, I've been leaving very soon. There are men whose plungent minds call to us like sirens. Their sudden thoughts pierce throughout the press and distractions of ordinary concerns, give a sura sense of direction and turn us into more rapid and exhilarating courses. It is Rodney Needham writing. Ford is called the same man and neglect the pioneer, Biden and neglect the master. The man is, of course, our tumour is Hockart. Now, the one, more than one reads Hockart, the more one realizes that he ranks amongst those mythical precursors and thinkers such as Jean-Baptiste Vico or Frederick Nietzsche. Arguably, he has been there before many. The Foucault before Foucault, the Latour before Latour. So to give you an example, the other day I was chatting with a house manager and editor, Sean Dowdy, so unfortunately this can't be here. When you remind me of the passage in Kings and Councilor, I quote, We, the British, differs only in having lost faith in methods to which most people on earth still look to give them a prosperous existence. It is not that we no longer wish we could make rain, but that we have given up trying. Now, I just return from Rio. I can definitely suggest you don't need more rain falling on this lush and chilly island, but one cannot avoid noticing in this passage the reflection on symmetrical and reverse anthropology and the nature of belief, which have recently concerned a number of thinkers in our discipline, or take this passage, I quote again, Long ago, man ceased merrily to live and began to think how he lived. He ceased merrily to feel life. He conceived it. Once, wonder how anthropologists have accepted Agamben, Cezura, between bear and qualified lies as a Roman invention, or drawn on Foucaultian notion of biopower accepting that the sovereign power concerned with health and fertility of the population is a modernist break. The return and turn to vitalism and animism, or the resurgent interest in ethno theories of life and even well-being and happiness, invite us to return to awkward wisdom again. Out of all the phenomena contributing to life, man formed a concept of like fertility, prosperity, vitality. What matters then is not keeping alive but living well. What counts is abundance of life, well-being or wealther. It is ritual for awkward, the quintessential technique of life given, and both ritual organization and government has the same life promotion purposes. Ocar mains' concern, which we'll explore today, is a theory about the beginning of government, and against those ideas, the man invented government to get away from violence or anarchy. He proposes that government, instead, originates out of ritual. But enough with neglected masters. So there's a man tonight who's not as neglected as Haukart, but one for which Haukart's words was critical to everything he has written since 1977 when he discovered his papers. This man is our divine guest, Professor Marshall Salis, University of Chicago. Before this lecture, Marshall sent me CV, and I was really assailed by this greater sense of vertical, you know. So I could list it, but I want all his endless awards, honor receipts, six total honoris causals, all memorial lectures from Fraser Reckley Brown, Minthe Firth Wolfe, and name it. And even his career as anti-war protester, activist and public intellectual from the Chagnon case to the daring exposure of the ambiguity surrounding the institution of the Confucius Institute. It's inarguably one of the most influential figures in anthropology in the last 50 years. He went to revolutionize ecological and economic anthropology culture to culture change to illustrate the relation between structure event and agency. In his recent years, attention has shifted to larger issues of comparativism and universal structures of kinship and political order. At 83, he steered the anthropological community by proposing what could be considered a Kantian groundwork to a metaphysics of human kinship. In 1972, he wrote an essay which has currently 6,708 citations on Google Scholar. Utility governs the study of culture because it governs the culture that studies. And Sally's essay, The Original Affluent Society, rewrote primitive misconceptions of hunter-gatherers as focused on warding off starvations, believing us to rethink this society was the work week doesn't exceed 19 hours, material wealth is a burden, food is abundant and people are peaceful and happy. That essay changed our established conception of economy and affluence. Today, Marshall invites us to rethink the origin of the political order. For me is the greatest honour of all to inaugurate the center and the awkward lecture with the man who strength and vitality has sustained how from the very first days, the most brilliant yet funnest anthropology. I know, I give you, Marshall Sally's. I would be less than generous if I denied that he's the most brilliant. There at least, I can see at least dozens of anthropologists in this room I would trade brains with, not to mention experience. I guess the best thing I can say about the career is that longevity is a good career move. In any case, it's, as they say, better than the alternative. So let me just launch into the lecture. I'm not going to say much about Hockhart's life, but a lot about Hockhart's anthropology, because as the first sentence says, I am a Cartesian, a Hockartesian. I want to follow Hockhart's lead in freeing oneself from anthropological conventions by adhering to indigenous traditions. How could we make any progress in the understanding of cultures ancient or modern, he asked, if we persist in dividing what the people join and in joining what they keep apart? This paper is an extended commentary on the Hockhartesian meditation encapsulated in kings and councilors by what he called the straightforward equivalents king equal god. I mean to capitalize on the more or less explicit temporality entailed in the anthropological masters exegesis of this equivalence, as when he speaks of the king as the vehicle or the abode, the substitute, the repository or the representation of the god. The clear implication is that gods precede the kings who effectively replicate them, which is not exactly the common social science tradition of cosmology as a reflex of sociology. Kings are human imitations of gods rather than gods of kings. That was the dominant view in Christendom for a long time before the modern celestialization of sovereignty as an ideological expression of the real political order. From Augustine's notion of the earthly city as an imperfect form of the heavenly city to Karl Schmidt's assertion that the significant concepts of the modern state are quote secularized theological concepts, human government was commonly considered to be modeled on the kingdom of God. Based on his own view of the ritual character of kingship, which Giovanni mentioned, however, Hockhart's thesis was more far reaching culturally and historically. Namely that human societies were engaged in cosmic systems of governmentality even before they instituted anything like a political state of their own. I read from the preface of kings and counselors. The machinery of government was blocked out in society long before the appearance of government as we now understand it. In other words, the functions now discharged by king, prime minister, treasury, public works, etc. Were originally part, not of a system of government, but of an organization to promote life, fertility, prosperity by transferring life from objects of bounding in it to objects dependent on it. In effect, Hockhart speaks here of a cosmic polity, a hierarchically encompassing human society since the life-giving means of people's existence were supplied by supernatural, I'm giving that in quotes, supernatural beings of extraordinary powers, a polity thus governed by so-called spirits, though they had human dispositions, often took human bodily forms and were present within human experience. This paper is a follow-up. The project is to take the Cartesian thesis beyond kingship to its logical and anthropological extreme. Even the so-called egalitarian or asephalous societies, including hunters such as the Inuit or Australian Aboriginals, are in structure and practice cosmic polities ordered and governed by divinities, ancestors, species masters and other such metapersons endowed with life and death powers over the human population. There are kingly beings in heaven where there are no chiefs on earth. For Hobbes notwithstanding, the state of nature is already something of a political state. Indeed, it follows that taken in its social totality and cultural reality, something like the state is the general condition of humankind. It is usually called religion. For example, is the next section, the next section is called for example, Chewong and Inuit. Is there any water? Thank you. It was easier than a bathroom plate. Let me begin with a problem, an ethnographic perspective that typically leads to a cultural mismatch between the ancestral legacy of the anthropologist and her indigenous interlocutors. I know this is a problem since for a long time I lived with the same contradictions I now see in Signee Howell's excellent study of the Chewong of the Malaysian Interior. Although Chewong society is described as classically egalitarian, it is in practice coercively ruled by a host of cosmic authorities themselves of human character and metahuman powers. The Chewong are a few hundred people organized largely by kinship and subsisting largely by hunting, but they are hardly on their own. They are set within and dependent upon a greater animistic universe comprised of the persons of animals, plants and natural features complemented by a great variety of demonic figures and presided over by several inclusive deities. Though we conventionally call such creatures spirits, Chewong respectfully regard them as people, indeed called people like us or our people. The obvious problem of perspective consists in the venerable anthropological disposition to banish the so-called supernatural to the epiphenomenal limbo of the ideological, the imaginary, or some such background of discursive insignificance, that is by comparison to the hard realities of social action. Thus dividing what the people join, we are unable to make the conceptual leap implied in Howell's own observation that I quote, the human social world is intrinsically part of a wider world in which boundaries between society and cosmos are non-existent, end quote. So while on the one hand Howell characterizes the Chewong as having no social or political hierarchy or leaders of any kind, on the other she describes a human community encompassed and dominated by potent meta-persons with powers to impose rules and render justice that would be the envy of kings. Cosmic rules, Howell calls them. I reckon both for their scope and for their origins. The meta-human persons who mandate these rules visit illness or other misfortune, not excluding the penalty of death on Chewong who transgressed them. I quote, I can think of no act that is rule neutral, Howell writes, taken together they refer not just to selected social domains or activities, but to the performance of regular living itself, end quote. Yet though they live by these rules, Chewong have no part in their enforcement, which is the exclusive function of whatever spirit or non-human personage is activated by the disregard of a particular rule, end quote. In other words, something like a rule of law sustained by a monopoly of force among hunters. When Sydney Howell first visited the Chewong in 1977, she found them obsessively concerned with a tragedy that happened not long before. Three people had been killed and two injured for violating a weighty taboo on laughing at animals, a prohibition that applied to all forest creatures, the breach of which would potentially implicate all Chewong people. The victims had ridiculed some millipedes that entered their lean to that night, and a terrific thunderstorm followed which uprooted a large tree that fell upon them. Here it deserves notice that while the Chewong profess to abhor cannibalism, like animist hunters generally they nevertheless subsist on people like us, their animal prey. Likewise similar to other hunters, they manage the contradiction by the ritual respects they accord wild animals, in this case by the prohibition on ridiculing forest creatures. Excuse me, thereby positioning these creatures outside of familiar human relations and apparently then erasing the cannibal implications from overt consciousness. If the punishment for laughing at millipedes seems disproportionate to the crime, it is clearly less so with regard to the generic taboo which in effect interdicts the consumption of people like us. Since the forest animals are not really like us, we can beat the cannibal rap. Anyhow, death for laughing at millipedes should not seem strange to us. For 2,000 years Christians have suffered deeply because Adam broke a taboo on eating apples. For one apple they got a life sentence at hard labor, with time off only in the form of a mandatory death penalty. The severe punishments for disrespecting forest creatures among Chewong originated with certain immortals of the above and below, the male thunder god Toncho and the female original snake whose abode is in the primordial sea under the earth and who is most responsible for maintaining rules of this type. There were never any humans the like of Toncho and the original snake among Chewong themselves, no such human powers, whatever the conventional wisdom says about divinity as the mirror image of society. Toncho lives in the sky, whence the thunder he unleashes on taboo violators is aptly said to be the sound of him laughing at the human predicament. His thunderbolts are also known to punish incest causing severe joint pain and if the behavior persists death. On his frequent visits to earth he indulges in contrasting sexual behavior, relations with distantly rather than closely related women and with beneficial rather than fatal results. For without his sexual exploits there could be no Chewong people. Toncho descends to have intercourse with all human and animal females, which is what makes them fertile. Menstrual blood represents the birth of children he has sired, children unseen and unknown to their mothers as they ascend to the heavens to live with their father. The semen of human males however is unable to procreate children until Toncho has copulated with the women concerned, which is to say until they have menstruated. From which it follows empirically that the God was indeed the condition of the possibility of human reproduction. Without replicating the extraordinary catalog of so-called spirits compiled by Howell, suffice it for present purposes to indicate the range from female familiars who marry the human individuals for whom they serve as spirit guides through various kinds of ghosts, especially dangerous to swallow children, to the 27 subtypes of harmful beings who are once human and of whom Chewong say they want to eat us. It is not exactly what one would call a simple society, let alone an egalitarian one. I hastened to reply to the obvious objection that the potent deities of the Chewong represent the effects of a long history of relationships with coastal Malay states by noting that similar cosmologies are found among basically similar societies situated far from such influences. For an initial example, the central Inuit. Of Inuit in general it is said that a person should never push himself ahead of others or show the slightest ambition to control other people. And in particular of the Netsalic of the central A Canadian Arctic that quote, there were no lineages or clans, no institutionalized chiefs or formal government. On the other hand of the same Netsalic, Newd Rasmussen writes, the powers that rule the earth and all the animals and the lives of mankind are the great spirits who live in the sea on land and out in space and in the land of the sky. There are many and many kinds of spirits, but there are only three really great and really independent ones. And they are Nuliojuk, Narsuk and Tachek. These three were looked upon as directly practicing spirits and the most powerful of them all is Nuliojuk, also known as Sedna, the mother of animals and mistress both of the sea and land. At all times she makes mankind feel how vigilantly and mercilessly she takes care that all souls, both animals and humankind are shown the respect that the ancient rules of life demand. Ruling their respective domains, Nuliojuk or Sedna, who rules the sea and the land, Tachek or Moonman who rules the sky, and Narsuk or Sila who rules the meteorological forces of the air. These three great spirits were widely known under various names from East Greenland to the Siberian Arctic which afford some confidence in their antiquity and their indigeneity. While complementary in territorial scope, they varied in salience in different regions. Amongst central Inuit who will be the focus here, Sedna was quote the supreme deity as Franz Bo has reported in his first field work. Mother of the major sea animals, Sedna at times dominated Sila and Moonman, deputing them to unleash their powers on Inuit who violated one or another of their Herctonist taboos. As in some traditions she is also the creator mother of all humanity, she effectively rules the lives of mankind as Rasmussen observed. Now scholars perennially agonize over whether to consider the likes of Sedna as gods. Too often some promising candidate is rejected for failing to closely match our own ideas of the deity. An act of religious intolerance with the effect of promulgating the Judeo-Christian dogma that there is only one true god. But as Hockart said, why not call them gods? For it happens that Hockart thus posed a question in regard to a close analog to Sedna who happened to be among Winnebago people, namely as he pointed out an immaterial being in control of animal species. More than just a species master, however, Sedna, Sila and Moonman had the divine attributes of immortality and universality. All three were erstwhile humans who achieved their high stations by breaking with their earthly kinship relations in the event setting themselves apart and over the population in general. Various versions of Sedna's origin depicted her as an orphan, as mutilated and sacrificed by her father, and or as responsible for his death. The Moonman's divine career featured matricide and incest with his sister. Sila left the earth when his parents were giants, were killed by humans. Much of this is what Luke Doaish identified as the exploit in traditions of stranger kinship. The crimes of the dynastic founder against the people's kinship order by which he had once surpasses it and acquires the solitude necessary to rule the society as a whole free from any partisan affiliation. And while on this matter of kinship, there is this, as the ruling powers of earth, sea, air and sky, all of the Inuit deities in breaking from kinship thereby become territorial overlords. Transcending kinship, they achieve a kind of territorial sovereignty. The passage from kinship to territory was an accomplished fact long before it was recognized as the classic formula of state formation. It is what the gods did. Like Chewang, the Inuit could pass for a model of a so-called simple society where they not actually and practically integrated in a conflict society of cosmic proportions. In the territories of the gods dwelt a numerous population of metahumans subjects, both of the animistic persons indwelling in places, objects and animals and disembodied free souls as of ghosts or demons. Bohes wrote of the animistic persons that the invisible rulers of every object are the most remarkable beings next to Sedna. Everything has its Inuit, I-N-U-A, parenthesis owner. All across the Arctic from Greenland to Siberia, people know and contend with these Inuit. A term that means the person of, the noun that precedes it. So Sila Inuit would be the person of the air, for example. Or its man, as Bogarus translates the Chukchi cognate, explaining that a human life spirit is supposed to live within the object. Could Plato have imagined the perspectival response of Chukchi to the allegory of the shadows on the wall of the cave? Because, I'm quoting, even the shadows on the wall, they say, constitute definite tribes and have their own country where they live in huts and subsist by haunting. Note the repeated report of Dominion over the thing by its person. Everything has its owner. Just so the gods themselves, as indwelling masters of their own domain, like Sila Inuit, the person of the air, had something akin to proprietary rights over its natural inhabitants. As the anthropologist Usin observed, quote, an Inuit was an anthropomorphic spirit that was usually connected to an object, place, or animal as its spiritual owner or double. The Inuit, that's the plural of the sea, the moon, and the air, could be considered spiritual owners of their respective territories. Here, then, is a preliminary implication that will be worth further exploration. Socially and categorically, divinity is a higher form of animus. That's how it works in Boaz's description of Sedna's reaction to the violation of her taboos on hunting sea animals. By a well-known tradition, the sea animals originated from Sedna's severed fingers, hence a certain mutuality of being connected her to her animal children. For its part, the hunted seal in Boaz's account is endowed with greater powers than ordinary humans. It consents that the hunter has had contact with the corpse by the vapor of blood or death he emits. Breaking a taboo on hunting while in such condition. The revulsion of the animal is there upon communicated to Sedna when the normal course would withdraw the seals to her house under the sea, or perhaps dispatch seal on punishing blizzards, thus making hunting impossible and exposing the entire human community to starvation. Note that in many anthropological treatments of animism, in as much as they are reduced to individualistic or phenomenological reflections on the relations between humans and animals, these interactions are characterized as reciprocal, egalitarian or horizontal. Whereas in social practice, they are often three-part relations involving also the master person of the species concern, in which case they are hierarchical with the people in the client position. Or rather, the entire Inuit community is thereby put in a subordinate position since sanction also falls on the fellows of the transgressor. And as the effect is likewise generalized to all seals, the event thus engages a large and diverse social totality presided over by the ruling goddess. In the same vein, the many and intricate taboos shaping Inuit's social life entail a submission to the metaperson others who mandate them, whether they are systematically honored or for whatever reason they are violated. Of course submission to a greater power is evident in the punishment for transgressions of these taboos. But the same is implied even when the rule is followed. For more than an act of respect to honor of taboo is effectively a form of sacrifice involving the renunciation of some material or social good in favor of the higher power who authorized it. Unlike Chewong, the Inuit were apparently not totally covered by so-called cosmic rules. But as Rasmussen said, they had their rules of life. And these were pervasive enough, especially the numerous prohibitions attending the hunt and disposition of the game and those concerning menstruation, childbirth, and the dead. The taboos were mainly attributed to Sedna as were the sanctions that range from sickness and accident to starvation and death. It is sometimes said that because Sedna is the mother of humankind, she is especially dangerous to women in connection with menstruation and childbirth. But as she is not everywhere the human ancestors, the more fundamental motivation would be that she is the mother of animals and the principle involved in her animosity to women is an eye for an eye in response to the murder of her children. Again, everything follows from the animist predicament, the animist predicament that people survive by killing others like themselves. When her taboos are respected, Sedna is the source of human welfare providing animals to the hunters. But because people are constantly killing her children, she is generally dreaded. The stern goddess of fate among the Eskimos, Rasmussen says. Nor is she the only one to fear. I'm the present and likewise seeking revenge are the ghosts of people and animals whose deaths were not accorded the proper ritual respects. All the countless spirits of evil, wrote Poes, are all around striving to bring sickness and death, dead weather and failure and hunting. Now, Hav spoke of the state of nature as all that time in which I'm quoting, men lived without a common power to keep them all in awe. Yet in Rasmussen's account of the Inuit who could be said to approximate that natural state, I quote, mankind is held in awe. That is, by the fear of hunger and sickness inflicted by the powers governing them. A word on terminology. Hereafter, I use the Inuit term Inua as a general technical term for all animistic forms of indwelling persons, whether of creatures or things, and whether the references singular or plural. I use met a person preferably and met a human alternately for all those beings usually called spirits, including gods, ghosts, ancestors, demons, Inuit and so forth. Aside from direct quotations, spirit will appear only as a last resort of style or legibility and then always in quotation marks for reasons to which I now turn. Next section is called Why Call Them Spirits. Sometime before Hockart was asking why not call them gods, Andrew Lang in effect asked of gods why call them spirits. Just because we have been taught that our God is a spirit, he argued, that is no reason to believe that what he called the earliest men thought of their gods that way. Of course, I cannot speak here of the earliest men, although suggestive allusions to the state of nature are notwithstanding, but only to some modern peoples off the beaten track of state systems and their religions. For the Inuit, the Chewong and similar others, Lang would have a point. Our own native oppositions between the spiritual and the material and between spirit and human for them do not apply. Neither do they radically differentiate another world from this world. And let me say here, and try to demonstrate for the rest of the paper, the implications are world historical. For if these metaperson others are in the same reality with humans, exerting life and death powers over them, then they are the dominant figures in what we habitually call politics and economics. In all the societies that are so ontologically constituted. Just so, in the New Guinea Highlands, surrounded and outnumbered, above, below and on earth, by ghosts, clan ancestors, demons, earthquake people, sky people and the many in you of the wild, the people of Mount Hagen called Mboham spend their lives, I'm quoting, completely under the spell and in the company of spirits. The spirits rule the life of men. There is simply no profane field of life where they don't find themselves surrounded by a supernatural force. That's from Vice-Themen Tichner, early missionaries in the area. Yet if the other world is thus omnipresent around Mount Hagen, it is not then an other world. These people we are told, quote, do not distinguish between the purely material and purely spiritual aspects of life. The metapersonal powers are palpably present in what is actually happening to people. They're fortunes good or bad. Hence, Frederick Barth's own experience among the Bactamon in the Western Highlands of New Guinea, I'm quoting him. The striking feature is how empirical, underlined, italicized, how empirical the spirits are. How they appear as very concrete, observable objects in the world, rather than ways of talking about the world. End quote. Mewtadus metandus in the Amazon forest, Edwardo Viveros de Castro, comes to the same perception of the gods and dead as imminently present for the Aruete people. Listening to the nocturnal songs of shamans summoning these metapersonal others to the village, the ethnographer writes, I came to perceive the presence of the gods as the reality or source of example in every minute routine action. Most important was through these that I could describe the participation of the dead and the world of the living. The presence of gods, my, in daily life is astonishing. For each and every purpose they are cited as models of action, paradigms of body ornamentation, standards for interpreting events and sources of news, end quote. The general condition of the cohabitation of humans and their metapersonal altars in one real world is their psychic unity, their mutual and reciprocal status as subjects. As Viveros de Castro says, there is no way to distinguish between humans and what we call spirits. Rather, the so-called spirits are so many heterogeneous species of the genus homo. Quote, human beings proper are a species within a multiplicity of other species of human beings who form their own societies. Their own societies, this reference to the perspectivism that Viveros de Castro has made normal anthropological science is an important clue to the mutual participation of humans, gods, goats, animal persons and others in the same cosmic society. Going back to New Guinea for a moment, consider the minimalist perspective of the Kaluli people for whom spirits and humans of common human origins are thereby mutually perceived as reflections are to the things reflected. There is no substantial difference between them from which follows Edward Chiflin's report that I'm quoting, this is not a supernatural world. For the Kaluli, it is perfectly natural. Neither is it a sacred world for it is virtually co-extensive with and exactly like the world in which Kaluli inhabit, subject to the same forces of mortality. They do not regard it with particular awe. In the unseen, everyone has a reflection in the form of a wild pig that roams invisibly on the slopes of Mount Busavi. The man in his wild pig reflection lives separate existences, but if something should happen to the wild pig, the man is also afflicted. If it is caught in a trap, he will be disabled. If it is killed by hunters of the unseen, he dies. So it is in the elaborated perspectivism of many Native Americans, including Inuit. In consequence of differences in their perceptual apparatus, both people and animals live unseen to each other in their own communities as fully human beings, bodily and culturally, even as each appears to the other as their animal form. As matters of perception, the differences between people and animals are not as such ontological. In Locke in terms, the differences are only secondary qualities, due rather to perception than to the thing thus perceived. The common ethnographic observation that because the non-human persons are generally invisible, they must inhabit a different, quote, spiritual reality, is a cultural non-sequitur for clywli and other perspectivists. One should not separate what the people join if you want to understand how they manage in a world where their own humanity is likewise unseen by subjects of other kinds. Siberian shamans know that the evil spirits they battle are shamans who attack themselves for being evil spirits. From perspectivism, it also follows that the societies of Aruete, Calywli, Chukchi and their similars are even more complex than heretofore supposed. For the socios then includes all those other communities, not only of the animal Inua, but also the villages of the gods and the dead, all of which are likewise cultural replicas of human communities. A lot of social intercourse goes on between humans and the metahuman persons with whom they share the earth, as well as with those people, those who people the heavens and the underworld. Apart from shamans, even ordinary humans may travel to lands of the metaperson others, as conversely the latter may appear among people in human form. Human and non-human persons are often known to intermarry or negotiate the exchange of wealth when they are not eating one another. That section is called social relations of people and metaperson others. A woman sits in the corner of her house whispering to a dead relative, a man addresses a clump of trees. When an illness or misfortune occurs, a father or neighbor will break knotted strips of cordlin relief, talking to the spirits to find out which one is causing trouble and why. This passage is one of many that exemplify how Roger Keasing makes good on the introductory premise of his fine monograph on the Quio people of Malayte, namely, quote, to describe Quio religion in a way that captures the phenomenological reality of a world where one's group includes the living and the dead, where conversations with spirits and signs of their presence and acts are part of everyday life. This lecture takes about ten minutes longer than an hour. Anybody want to leave? Please leave. Don't dribble out. Beyond conversations with metaperson others from Malayte and elsewhere come reports of humans entering into customary social relations with them. Inuit know of many people who visited villages of animal persons, even married and lived among them. Some only later and by accident discovering that their hosts were animal Inuit rather than Inuit humans. A personal favorite of mine is the caribou man of the North and the Algonquins. In one of many similar versions, caribou man was a human stranger who was seduced by a caribou doe, went on to live with and have sons by her and became the ruler of the herd. French-Canadian trappers were not off the mark in doubling caribou man le roi de caribou. As the story rehearses, the archetypal stranger king traditions of dynastic origin down to the mediating role played by the native woman and her foundational marriage to the youthful outsider. Beside the hierogamic experiences of Chewang women and the marriage of the gods with dead Aroete women, there are many permutations of such interspecies unions. Some petrolocal, some metrolocal, some enduring and some ended by divorce due to homesickness. Then there was the Mian man, man from New Guinea, who beside his human wife formed a polygenous arrangement with a dead woman from a different descent group. The dead wife lived in a nearby mountain but she gardened on her husband's land and bore him a son. Don Gardner, who tells this story, also relates of the time that the Ulap clan of the Mian men saved themselves from the Yvech enemies by virtue of a marital alliance with their own dead. The Yvech people were bent on revenge for the death of many of their kinsmen at Ulap hands. Sometime before the big man of the Ulap and his counterpart among their dead who lived inside the mountain on which Ulap were settled, these two exchanged sisters in marriage. When the big man of the dead heard that the Yvech were threatening his living brother-in-law, he proposed that the two Ulap groups living and dead to exchange the pigs they had been raising for each other and hold a joint feast. In the course of the festivities, the ancestral people became visible to the Ulap villagers who were in turn rendered invisible to the Yvech. So when the Yvech enemies came, they could not find the Ulap, although three times they attacked the places where they distinctly heard them singing. This is not a myth. Throughout the western Ymian area, this account Don Gardner assures us as the status of a historical narrative. We need not conclude that relations between humans and their metaperson counterparts are everywhere and normally so sympathetic. On the contrary, they are often hostile and to the people's disadvantage in as much as the predicament noted earlier of the Inuit is broadly applicable. The animals and plants on which humans subsist are essentially human themselves. Although some anthropologists have been known to debate whether cannibalism even existed, it is hardly a rare condition. The religion of many societies known to anthropology, especially those where hunting is valued, is a system of mutual cannibalism. For even as the people kill and consume people like us, these metaperson others retaliate more or less in kind, eating away human flesh by disease or starvation. All over the Siberian forest, for instance, I'm quoting, humans eat the meat of game animals in the same way that animals feed on human flesh and blood. This is the reason why sickness experiences a loss of vitality and death in the human community as a whole, as a whole are understood as a just payment for the successful hunting both in the past and the future of the animals. As already noted, their own vulnerability helps explain why many hunting peoples take efforts to evade a reputation of cannibalism, which they might explicitly profess to or is by the taboos which enjoin respect for the animals and or distance the people from the animals from the sociability prevailing among people. The next section is called Metaperson Powers That Be. As already noted, humans often interact socially with a hierarchy of metaphuman others, including species masters or gods such as Sedna, who encompass and protect the individual Inua in their purview. These hierarchies are organized on two principles which in the end come down to the same thing. One principle is the proprietary notion of the higher being as the owner of his or her lesser persons. And secondly, the platonic or classicatory notion of the one over many, whereby the owner is the personified form of the class of which the lesser persons are particular instances. One can find both concepts in Viveiros de Castro's discussion of the Aruete term for metahuman masters. The term Na connotes ideas such as leadership, control, responsibility and ownership of some resource or domain. The Na is always a human or anthropomorphic being, but other ideas are involved as well. The Na of something is someone who has this substance in abundance. Above all, the Na is defined by something of which it is the master. In this last connotation, he is at the same time the representative of and represented by that something. Although in a spasm of relativism, Pascal famously said that a shift of few degrees of latitude will bring about a total change in juridical principles, you can go from the Amazon forests or the New Guinea highlands to the Arctic Circle and Tiero del Fuego and find the same ethnographic descriptions of greater metahpersons as the owners of lesser ones. Europment of the western highlands of New Guinea say that people get into trouble because everything has a father using father in the sense of owner, encoding Joel Robbins. In dealing with nature then, the Europment are constantly faced with the fact that the spirits hold competing claims to many of the resources that people use. Parenthetically, this is not the first indication we have that the spirits own the means of production, an issue to which we will return. Among Haganers, the Strutherns relate, all wild objects and creatures are owned by spirits and can be referred to as their pigs, just as people hold domestic pigs. Similarly, in the Siberian Arctic, large natural domains such as forests, rivers and lakes had their special owners, as Bogaras called them. The forestmaster familiar to Russell Ugegar had what he called absolute power over the animals. He could give them away as presents, lose them at cards or round them up and cause them to depart the country. Not unusual either is the compounded hierarchy of human owners composed of several levels of animistic figures, as among the Tupi Guarani peoples, where species masters are included in the domains of forest masters, who in turn belong to the godly owners of the entire social territory. The chain of command is not necessarily respected in punishing human offenders, but it is quite a bureaucracy. But as I say, and so have others, this sense of belonging to a more inclusive power can be read as membership in the class of which the owner is the personified representative. That is, is a logical and theological modality of the Platonic one over many. The ordering principle is philosophical realism with an anthropomorphic twist, where a named metaperson owner is the type of which the several lesser beings are tokens. Anthropologists will recognize classic studies to this effect. Jeffrey Lienhart on the totems or divinities who have assumed the forms of their own kind among Dinka, and Evans Pritchard on the newer god Quath manifested in a diminishing series of avatars. Parenthetically, as species masters are more widely distributed in the world than totems proper, the latter may be understood as a development of the former. Totems are species masters under the special influence of descent groups or segmentary formations. E.B. Tyler, in his own well-known wandering minstrel tour of animism, rather like the present paper composed of ethnographic shreds and patches. E.B. Tyler similarly conceived a passage from species deities to higher deities by way of Auguste Comte on abstraction, the abstraction thus entailed, and a child of us on the species archetype as a platonist. That divinity is a kind of taxonomic animism is not a bad platonic idea. For the aboriginal peoples of northwest Australia, the cult of their great rainbow spirit, Ungud, could be epitomized as Inua all the way down. A bisexual snake identified with the Milky Way, the Atachlanus Ungud made the world. Less Hyatt summarized the process this way. Natural species came into existence when Ungud dreamed itself into various shapes. In the same way, Ungud created clones of itself as Wanjana, local versions of dream-time ancestors, and dispatched them in various places, particularly waterholes. The Wanjana in turn generated the human spirits that enter women and become babies. Ungud is thus an archetype of life itself. In its informative account of the local people, Helmut Petri specifies that the numerous Wanjana were transformed into individual Ungud serpents, such that Ungud appeared in the aborigines view at one time as an individual entity, at another time as a multiplicity of individual beings, the one over many down to the individual human beings for each person had an Ungud part that came from the Wanjana in their waterhole. It only needs to be added from Nancy Munn's revelatory study of analogous phenomena among Walbury that in participating intersubjectively in an object world created by and out of the dream-time ancestors, human beings experiencing intimations of themselves are always already experiencing intimations of others. Those dream-time heroes who quote are subordinate to them, subordinate to them and precede them in time, end quote. While clearly different from other societies considered here, these no less egalitarian Australian aborigines are also no less hierarchical. It's not our idea, Pintubi people told Fred Myers, in regard to the customs and morality established in perpetuity by the dream-time ancestors. It's a big law. We have to sit down beside that law like all the dead people who went before us. Next section is called Determination by the Religious Spaces. Since, as a general rule, the peoples under discussion have only secondary or use of fructary rights to the resources owned by metaperson others, it follows that the relations of production entail submission to these other people like us. In conventional terms that could justifiably be said that the spirits own the means of production, were it not that the spirits, so called, are real-life metapersons who are the means of production. Not only are such metapersons and sold in primary resources, they thereby become the primary agents of the process. Subjects in their own right, they are the arbiters of the successor failure of human efforts. For theirs are the forces, which may be hypothesized as mana, hasidah, wakan, semengot, orenda or the like, the forces that make peoples' gardens grow, their pigs flourish and game become visible and available to them. Of course I am speaking of peoples own notions of what there is and how it comes to be, a reality they share with metaperson others, from which culturally follows a certain material praxis. Just so when faced with the assurance of coio people that their prosperity is, quote, a result of ancestral support, Roger Keasing refrains from the temptation, I'm quoting, to say that the sacred ancestral processes are a mystification of the real physical world. For in a world where the ancestors are participants in and controlling forces of life, this conveys insights only at the cost of subjective realities, end quote. But why then call them subjective realities if the ancestors participate in and control the peoples' everyday existence? If they are empirical, as Frederick Barth might say, the demystification would short-change the objective realities. Not to worry, however, in due course with a few pertinent ethnographic notices in hand, I consider what scholarly harm or good would come from crediting such determination by the religious basis. Indeed, it is not as if the producing people had no responsibility for the economic outcome even apart from their own knowledge and skill. The Inuit shaman explains that no bears have come in their season because there is no ice, and there is no ice because there is too much wind. There's too much wind, those are all the technical knowledge. There's too much wind because we immortals must have offended the powers. Even so, something can be done. Around the world, the common recourse to this dependence on the owners or agents of peoples' prosperity is to pay them an appropriate tribute as a sacrifice. Since, quote, spirits are the true proprietors of things, as Marcel Most already observed, it is with them that exchanges most necessary. Sacrifice becomes a fundamental relation of production even as it is a fundamental relation of subordination. These peoples know how to secure benefits from the metaperson powers that be by rendering them their due. A tyfalmon man tells how it works. Notice that this is really how the economy is organized, where goods get distributed and so on. When we bring secretly hunted marsupial species into the Anuwag, the men's cult house during ceremonies, we tell the ancestral relics and the pig bones of feasts going by, you must take care of us and make our pigs grow fat and plentiful and our taro immense. As soon as we told them this, shortly afterwards, we see the results in our gardens. They do just what we petitioned, end quote. For all the hubris, however, the tyfalmon are really not in control. Edmund Leach notably remarked of such sacrifices that the appearance of gift and reciprocity notwithstanding, the gods don't need gifts from the people. They could easily kill the animals themselves. What the gods required, said Leach, are signs of submission. What the gods and the ancestors have, and people such as tyfalmon seek, is the life force that makes gardens, animals and people grow. The metahuman powers must therefore be propitiated, solicited, compensated, or otherwise respected and negotiated as the necessary condition of human economic practice. Whereas Hockhart had it, based on his own ethnographic experience, there is no religion in Fiji. Only a system that in Europe has been split into religion and business. Hockhart knew that in Fijian, the same word, dakadaka, refers indiscriminately to work as in the gardens or to ritual as in the gardens. So why call it production? How can we thus credit human agency if it is the ancestors according to their own inclinations who make the taro grow, or if it is Sila Inua, the air person, and the bears themselves who make hunting successful? In a few golden pages of his recent work, Beyond Nature and Culture, Philippe de Skola argues persuasively that her own common average native notion of production fails to adequately describe human praxis in a metahuman cosmos. Where even animals and plants are thinking things, rest cauditons, the appropriate anthropology should rather be ho-kartesian than de-kartesian. Rather than a subject-object relation in which a heroic individual imposes form on an inert matter making it come to be according to his own plan, at issue here are inter-subjective relations between humans and the metaperson others whose intentions will be decisive for the material result. Deskola can conclude from his Amazonian experience that it is quote meaningless to talk of agricultural production in a society where the process is enacted as inter-species kinship. My quote, Asuar women do not produce the plants they cultivate. They have a personal relationship with them, speaking to each one so as to touch its soul and thereby win it over, and they nurture its growth and help to survive the perils of life just as a mother helps her children. Not to forget either the mistress and mother of cultivated plants, Nankui described by Deskola elsewhere, the goddess whose presence at the garden is the source of its abundance unless she is offended and causes some catastrophic destruction. The way Simon Harrison describes the process from anambu of the Middle Sepic in New Guinea, people do not create the crops. They receive them from their ancestral sources. What could pass for production, he puts it in quotes, he writes, are the spells by which the totemic ancestors are called from their villages by clan magicians to make yams abundant, fish increase and crocodiles available for hunting. For he writes, yams are not created by gardening, but like all cultivated and wild foods, they came into the phenomenal world by being released from the mythical villages by means of rituals. Note that this is a political economy, this is the important point, or exactly a cosmopolitical economy, and as much as the human credit for the harvest goes to those who gained access to the ancestors by means of their sacred knowledge, the garden magicians, rather than those who knew the right soil for the yams. Further ethnographic notices of the spiritual nature of the material basis are easy to come by. I close with a final one that has the added advantage of developing the notice of human power and a cosmic polity that is raised in Harrison's work. The site will be Melpa and the neighbors of the Hagan region. Here are a variety of metaperson beings, sky people deities, great spirits of the major cults, the human dead, both recently deceased kin and clan ancestors, and the numerous nature spirits so called, or any owners of the wild, are the agents of human welfare. I quote another missionary, Herman Strauss. In trade and economic affairs, in campaigns of war or at great festivals, any success is seen to be the result of the help of benevolent spirits. Benevolent spirits are said to plant our fields for us and to make our pigs big and fat. They are said to raise the pigs. The functions of these metaperson kinds are largely redundant. Many are competent to promote or endanger the material well-being of the people. It will be sufficient to focus on a few critical modes of life and death from the metapersons, with a view also to the constitution of human big man power. Whereas the sky people originally sent down humans and their means of existence, it is the recent dead and clan ancestors who are most intimately and continuously responsible for the health and welfare of their descendants. Though for punishing people, they usually enlist the ill-intentioned innuwa of the wild. As recipients of frequent sacrifices, the recent dead protect their kin from accidents, illness, and ill fortune. Quote, they will make the fields and vegetable gardens for us, raise pigs for us, go ahead of us on journeys and trading trips, grant us large numbers of children, stay on our side at every way. So, likewise on a larger scale, as when a meeting house is built for them, the clan spirits make our fields bring forth, our pigs multiply, protect our wives' children from plagues and illness, keep sorcery and evil spirits at bay. But if the gardens are planted without proper sacrifices, the owner spirit digs up the fruits and eats them. By contrast to the constant attention, this constant attention, the great spirits of the collective cults are ceremonially celebrated only at intervals of years. On these occasions, the large number of pigs sacrificed testifies to the deity's exceptional ability to multiply things themselves by protecting the people's growth fertility and promoting the people's growth fertility and wealth. In such respects, both the dead and the cult deities are particularly useful to big men and would-be big men, that is, as the critical sources of their human power. We rich people, or big men, these quoting, live and sacrifice to the great female spirit. This enables us to make many pig exchange festivals mocha. Through this spirit, we become rich, create many children who remain healthy and alive, and stay ourselves healthy. Our gardens bear much fruit. All this the female spirit does, and that is why we sacrifice to it. The strytherns relate that when a big man goes on a journey to so less valuables, he asks his clan ancestors to come sit on his eyelids and induce his trading partner to part with his valuables. Big men are also helped by the ghosts of close relatives, who may be enlisted by partaking of the pig backbone, especially cooked for them. The same ancestors and ghosts are with the big man on the ceremonial ground when he makes the prestations that underwrite his fame and his status. In another text, Andrew Strythern notes that traditional Hagen big men had, quote, a multitude of sacred and magical appartenances, which played an important part for the people's own perspective and giving them the very access to wealth on which their power depended, end quote. Strythern here addresses a range of leadership forms in a variety of Highland New Guinea societies, including Baruia, Dunia, Symbarianga, Cuscusman and Maring, as well as Melpa, to show that, I quote, the ritual sources of power amount to a Melanesian reol politic, the condition of possibility of human authority, as regards both the practices by which it is achieved and the reason it is believed. All the same, we need not completely abandon historical materialism and put Hegel right side up again. In many cases, one can still speak of economic determinism, provided only that the determinism is not economic. To conclude, we need something like a Copernican revolution in the sciences of society and culture. I mean a shift in perspective from human society as the center of a universe, onto which it projects its own forms. That is to say from the received Marxist, Durkheimian and structural functionalist conventions, to the ethnographic realities of people's dependence on the encompassing person others who rule earthly order, welfare and existence. I suggested earlier the state of nature has the nature of a state. It is anything but society against the state, unless you're talking about events like the Hawaiian overthrow of the taboos or the raptman overnight conversions to Christianity. I often wondered about class thesis about society against the state. How could these people be against something they never experienced? Now I know. They do experience it. For Durkheim, God was an expression of the power of society. People knew that they were constrained by some power, but they knew not whence it came, so they invented God. But if what has been said here has any cogency, it is better said that God is an expression of the lack of power of society. Finitude is the universal human predicament. People do not control the essential conditions of their existence. I have made this unoriginal and banal argument too many times, but if I can just say it once more, if people really control their own lives, they would not die or fall sick. Nor do they govern the weather and the other external forces on which their welfare depends. The life force that makes plants and animals grow, or women bear children, is not their doing. And if they reify it as mana, or semen, God, or the like, and attribute it to external authorities otherwise like themselves, this is not altogether a false consciousness, though it may be an unhappy one. Vitality and mortality do come from elsewhere, from forces beyond human society, even as they evidently take some interest in our existence. It must be people like us. But so far as the relation between cosmic authorities and the human social order goes, in both morphology and potency there is no equivalence between them. As I have tried to show, especially by egalitarian and chiefless societies, either in structure nor in practice, do they match the powers above and around them. What Viveros de Castro says in this regard, of the Tupigorani peoples generally, can be widely duplicated among classically asephalous societies. How to account, he asks, how to account for the coexistence of, on one hand, a loosely structured organization with few social categories, absence of global segmentation, weak institutionalization of interpersonal relations, lack of differentiation between public and domestic spheres. How to account for that, on one hand, with on the other hand an extensive taxonomy of the spirit world, an active presence of that world in daily life, and a thoroughly vertical gothic orientation of thought. Societies such as the Aeroete reveal how utterly trivial any attempts are to establish functional consistencies or forced correspondences between morphology and cosmology or between institution and representation. Even, I end of quote, even apart from the numerous malevolent, shape-shifting beings with superhuman powers of afflicting people with all kinds of suffering, Viveros de Castro describes a society of immortal gods in heaven without equal on earth, who make people's foods and devour their souls, who are capable of elevating the sky and resurrecting the dead, gods who are, quote, extraordinary, splendid, but also dreadful, weird, weird in a word, awesome, end quote. But they do have shamans, the Aeroete, precisely of similar powers, as do many other societies, even where there are no chiefs, there are often some human authorities, big men, great men, garden magicians, warriors, elders, shamans. Given the basis of their authority, however, these personages are so many exceptions that prove the rule of domination by metaperson powers. For like the Hagan big men, their own ability to command others is conveyed by their service to or enlistment and just such metaperson others, which brings us back finally to the issue of mystification. Earlier I warned against too quickly writing off the human dependence on God's ancestors, ghosts, or even seal persons as so much mistaken fantasy. Well, nobody nowadays is going to attribute these notions to a primitive mentality. And from all that has been said here, it cannot be claimed that these beliefs and spirits amount to an ideological chimera perpetrated by the ruling class in the interest of maintaining their power. That is on the Voltarian principle that there is no God, but don't tell the servants. Here we do have gods, but no ruling class. And what we also distinctly find in these societies is the coexistence in the same social reality of humans with metahumans who have life giving and death dealing powers over them. The implications, as I say, look to be world historical. As is true of big men or shamans, access to the metaperson authorities on behalf of others is the fundamental political value in all human societies so organized. Access on one's own behalf is usually sorcery, but to bestow the life powers of the God on others is to be a God among men. This is to say that claims to define power is manifest in ways varying from the successful hunter sharing food or the shaman curing illness to the African king bringing rain have been the basis of political power throughout the greater part of human history. Alor Shaluk Lovadu, there is more than one African king who reigns but does not govern our AINS, but does not govern. You will have noticed I have come back full circle to a Hockarts kings and counselors. Government in general and kingship in particular develop as the organization of ritual. Of course we scholars of a more skeptical or positive as bent are at liberty to demystify the apparent illusions of the others. We can divide up their reality in order to make society autonomous, expose the God's fantasy and reduce nature to things, which is what we do when we deny their coexistence in the same reality. To put it in Chicago East, we may say we know better than them, but if we do it becomes much harder to know them better. For myself, I am a Hockartesian, not to divide what the people join. Thank you very much. This was a real Hockartesian circulation of vitality, Marshall. Thank you so much. It shows that anthropology is still alive and kicking and also that you from Stranger King you became tonight our Inua. From the master now to the students, both at Chicago, both economic anthropologists with one made us rethink the cost of affluence, the other made us rethink our notion of debt, where both activists, one in Vietnam anti-war, the other in Occupal War Street movement and both, inargubly, some of the most influential figure in anthropology today. So I give you Professor David Graeber, London School of Economics. Well, the essay we've just heard is, what's a foray? It's meant to rile people. I mean you could say it's like a provocation for the centuries in a sense. And what do we address it as such? The title sort of gives away what it's about. It's the original political society is obviously an echo of the original affluence society, which was probably the essay which first made Marshall famous, especially outside the anthropology and outside, even outside the academy. Well, it's a work of evolutionist anthropology that upended virtually all of the then familiar evolutionist assumptions about what people then called primitive living in, of primitives living in precarious fear of natural forces locked in a desperate struggle for existence. Actually he argued 100 gatherers tend to lead lives of equality and leisure. Their material needs are few, therefore so are their wants and worries. From their own perspectives they live in a world of material abundance. And this theme, let's call it the denaturalisation of need, has actually endured throughout one of the great themes that's endured throughout every twist and turn of a brilliant career. Most brilliant I think in the sustained critique of the theological assumptions behind economic theory is all based on a notion of scarcity that's ultimately based on just the kind of assumptions he was laying bare in the original affluence society. But if you actually take that critique of economy as theology, of political economy as an ideology, rather than a simple reality seriously, ultimately you have to come to the conclusion that you can't see these same hunter-gatherers or simple agriculturals living in some kind of carefree, idenic state after all because from their own perspective they don't. They are indeed living in a precarious state of sorts under the power of arbitrary forces beyond their control. They're just not the forces we would imagine. So, the way this essay is asking us to take seriously our commitments as anthropologists, and I think that really means rethinking almost everything. I mean, there's a whole series of real challenges being thrown out here to re-conceptualise the world in caucardian or caucartesian terms. So I'm just going to throw out three where I think this might lead us if we really take this seriously, as indeed I think we should. First is an argument about states. The essay is remarkable for throwing out our concepts into complete disarray by noting that the cosmos among so many of these ostensibly egalitarian societies seem to operate just like we think a state should operate with laws, punishments, property right, chains of command, a monopoly over at least certain forms of force, and ultimately arbitrary sovereign power on top of the whole arrangement in spiti in terms. But is what's being described here really a state, or is our concept of a state itself that's in dire need of revision? I think that's something we should really talk about. It seems to me that we should have been doing this a long time ago when we first, the concept of the chieftim, for example, where you can have elaborate kingdoms which don't have a state, has already thrown the gauntlas down in that regard and we didn't pick it up. We keep falling back on these very gracingly frayed and shopworn concepts like state, which no one seems to consider what it would really mean to say that some of these principles are really old and have nothing to do with what we consider states. Second of all, that leads to an historical question, and the historical question is how much are particularly institutional structures, dispositions or arrangements that we do consider characteristics of states and kingdoms and similar hierarchical political arrangements, or even constituted of them, actually do derive, as Hockart said, from ritual. There's actually really good historical evidence that would suggest Hockart was a lot more right than we've been willing to give him credit for in this regard. Going back to the Paleolithic, I've been doing a little research on this myself recently. There's actually evidence for what really looks like dramatic forms of hierarchy as long as 25,000 years ago in the Pleistocene that never, however seemed to amount to any cumulative growth of classes or state-like entities. Things pop up with these dramatic people in these very elaborate costumes that took thousands of hours to create and elaborate rich burials. It seems to be this flash of theatrical sovereignty which never leads to anything, almost as if theatrical royalty comes before the real thing, which is exactly what you would imagine if what Marshall is arguing is in fact the case. But I think what we, most of all, I think we really need to think harder about what we mean by an egalitarian society, and here I think the gauntlet is well thrown. And also why the desire for such an arrangement even exists in the first place. Egalitarianism, of course, isn't the same as equality, to say people are equal is simply to say they're the same in some way. Obviously, whenever you have a society where everybody's the same in all ways, nor would one want to, egalitarianism is a principle that people should be the same in some way or more likely several ways that are considered particularly significant. And when everybody feels everyone should be equal in the ways they consider the most valuable and important, one can perhaps then speak of an egalitarian society. The question raised by this presentation, I think, is why we so frequently have societies such as the Inuit, the Trey Wong and so forth, where those who we would be inclined to identify as humans, persons, members of society, all feel they should be equal. These ethnographers are accurate in observing that's how people feel about each other, other Inuit, other Trey Wong, but at the same time insist they live in a cosmos full of powerful beings whose relations with them and with each other does not conform to these principles at all. The overall cosmic polity in which they live in is not like that. You have to understand both. Why is it that they think of themselves as living in this larger structure and take that seriously, but also say why they think relations with other Inuit, other Trey Wong, should nonetheless be based on a principle of equality? No, because if there was no distinction whatsoever between meta-persons and people who you consider Trey Wong or Inuit, that would be unlikely to be the case. That all turns on the question, which I think is very well highlighted in the paper, what is the difference here? I think we've been getting it wrong. I think Marshall is quite right to say that spirits is kind of a dumb word, and it blinds us to what's really happening. The core of the distinction here, and I'm not counting the animals, because from a perspective, they're just people, so they kind of have the same social structure as we do. But the meta-persons, what is the distinction between meta-persons and other Inuit, other Trey Wong, and so forth? The core of the distinction does not, I think, as Marshall points out, does not lie in the fact that they are invisible or mostly invisible, more powerful, that they defy the laws of logic or physics or anything like that. The main distinction is that they don't die, or at least that they have a different relation to the cycle of biological reproduction and death that characterizes humanity. For instance, some are ghosts, so they're already dead, but it doesn't seem to stop them. There is a certain sense of abstractions, such as the platonic masters of the animals, who are precisely that principle of abstraction that makes a species what they are and allows them to physically reproduce it and do or even if animals normally meet them precisely when they're dying because you just killed them. Hence, the conclusion that any society or cultural order lacks the power to maintain or reproduce itself, but has to somehow import that vital power from outside. And I think this leads to another question, which is about the, what is it about the condition of mortality, the fact that we all know we're going to die? That brings about a desire for equality, because it's mortal specifically want to be equal with each other. Why is that? Why are humans so uniformly dissatisfied with their own mortality to begin with? What's the problem? Everybody else seems to have it bother them very much. Animals don't seem to really care. Why is it that we instead generate abstract of eternal forms of mortal beings that we feel bad about killing? Does an awareness of the limits and finitude of our existence which lie behind both the sort of stranger king logic that allows for the emergence of autocracy, but also paradoxically the desire to transcend our tradition and create a model of eternity by becoming all the same? I think this is the kind of question that's raised, and this essay is really a shot across the boats. So I think the appropriate response is to say the discipline, let's see if we as a discipline are really capable of raising ourselves to the challenge. Finally, a health warning. Please look out for the metahumans on the way home. Before you go home I'd like to invite you all upstairs for a drink on behalf of the Centre for Ethnographic Theory and the Department of Anthropology at SOAS. Thank you all very much for coming. It's been a wonderful series of discussions. I'd like to thank Divani, David, and last but not least, Marshall for giving such wonderful talks. So thank you all very much.