On Kings
Distributed for HAU
556 pages
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6 x 9
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© 2017
Review Quotes
Philippe Descola (Collège de France), author of Beyond Nature and Culture
"If you deem that anthropology is neither a form of pompous navelgazing, nor an exercise in making preposterous generalizations out of sketchy personal experiences, this book is for you. With impeccable scholarship, conceptual imagination, and wit, David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins think anew, and within a broad comparative scope, an ancient and illustrious question: why and how can a single man come to rule over the many as the embodiment or the delegate of a god? Such a question, they show, can only be answered by shifting towards an analysis where human, non-human, and meta-human persons are treated on the same ontological level as parts of a hierarchical cosmic polity. A golden spike in the coffin of eurocentrism, sociocentrism and anthropocentrism!"
Aparecida Vilaça (Museu Nacional/Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro), author of Praying and preying: Christianity in indigenous Amazonia
"The wealth and volume of the ethnographic data analyzed in this book is dizzying. The authors allow us to venture along a variety of paths, ranging from the well-established kingdoms of Africa and Asia to the apparently egalitarian societies of Papua New Guinea and the Americas, revealing the astonishing dispersal of the 'stranger king' model. The authors’ decisive step was to reject, on a strictly ethnographic basis, the commonplace analytic division made between cosmology and politics. It is in the ritual sphere, where spirits of diverse kinds meet with humans, that the diverse forms of state originate. A relationship that shows spiritual life, even in societies marked by egalitarianism, to be a domain impregnated with the same relations of hierarchy, control and subjection that characterize the kingdoms of this world. A work that will make history for sure."
Sheldon Pollock (Columbia University), author of The language of the gods in the world of men
"Two of the world’s leading anthropologists combine their 'complementary observations' to offer the most productively disruptive work on kingship since Hocart. The lost world they exhume is a continual affront to contemporary theory: a world where superstructure determines base and sociology recapitulates cosmology (kings are gods imitating men, not the reverse); where connection, competition, and imitation (of galactic hegemons, for example) are the reality and the monadic society a fiction. At the same time, their paleohistory of sovereignty points the way toward a deeper understanding of our contemporary moment, where sovereignty has become 'popular' and we are ruled by kleptocrats and buffoon kings."
Gillian Feeley-Harnik (University of Michigan), author of The Lord’s Table: The Meaning of Food in Early Judaism and Christianity
"Graeber and Sahlins’ On Kings—a dialogue, not a union—takes Divine Kingship from its burial ground in the classics and puts it deep into enduring concerns about the brutality of political processes over the long haul of human history, ancient and current in ever new forms. In case studies of sovereign rulers conceived as gods, demons, nurslings, ancestral guests, and populist heroes—ultimate strangers—Graeber and Sahlins invite us to reconsider the nature of tyranny from inside the tiger’s many mouths and to ask how we might, for once, refuse the king his long customary seat at the table."
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Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology
Political Science: Political and Social Theory
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