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Alternative Spirituality and Religion Review
Volume 16, Issue 1, 2025
Carole M. Cusack
Pages 153-155

This large book by two titans of anthropology, now both deceased, contains seven sole-author chapters, two of which have been previously published. The co-written “Introduction: Theses on Kingship” lays out some basic assumptions; kinship, once established, is hard to get rid of; “royal power has been derivative of and dependent on divine power” (p. 3); secular authority does not exist per se, and being male kingship excludes the female half of the population; kingdoms are formed in tension between the local people and external powers (strangers who become king, often through marriage); the phenomenon of sinking status raises problems in disposing of royal dead; courts are sort-of Platonic models of the universe; and centre and periphery links involve complex economic activities. Graeber and Sahlins note the influence of Christianity on seemingly secular concepts (like production, which derives from creation ex nihilo). They also insist that human and divine societies do not mirror each other and the idea that the divine realm is “a discursive ideological reflex of the people’s sociopolitical order, being designed to functionally support it whether by mystification or replication, is a theoretical practice as seriously flawed as it is habitually repeated” (p. 21).