Burkhard Schnepel - The King’s Three Bodies: Essays on Kingship and Ritual

This collection of essays deals with the rituals of kingship and royalty in India, Africa and Europe from the social anthropological and ethnohistorical points of view. It discusses the dialectical entanglements of rituals conducted for and by kings (including, little kings and jungle kings) with the wider social, political, cultural, historical, religious and economic contexts in which they were embedded.

Part I begins with a triangular comparison of kingship among the Shilluks of East Africa, the Gajapatis of eastern India and kings in Renaissance France. The essay entitled the Kings Three Bodies makes use of Ernst H. Kantorowiczs classical study, The Kings Two Bodies in medieval political theology and extends it, not only in terms of the numbers of bodies that are found to be significant, but also theoretically. Another significant essay in this part looks at the unexpected but significant theoretical impact of social anthropological studies of acephalous, segmentary lineage societies in Africa on Indian historiography. The second part of this volume consists of three chapters dealing with the royal patronage of tribal and Hindu goddesses in Eastern India, while the third part presents studies on sleeping (and dreaming) kings and on the power of dead kings, a discussion of A.M. Hocarts dictum that the first kings must have been dead kings.

Burkhard Schnepel is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Martin Luther University in Halle, Germany. His main theoretical and thematic interests are political rituals in India, especially in Orissa, and the history of the Indian Ocean world, especially Mauritius. Among his more recent books are Connectivity in Motion: Small Islands in the Indian Ocean World (Palgrave 2018, co-edited with E.A. Alpers) and Travelling Pasts: The Politics of Cultural Heritage in the Indian Ocean World (Brill 2019, co-edited with Tansen Sen).

Essays on Kingship and Ritual

BURKHARD SCHNEPEL

First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2021 Burkhard Schnepel and Manohar Publishers & Distributors

The right of Burkhard Schnepel to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan or Bhutan)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN: 978-1-032-00053-4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-003-17251-2 (ebk)

Typeset in Cardo 10.5/13
by Ravi Shanker, Delhi 110095

The essays reprinted in this volume were initially published in various academic and intellectual contexts which led me from Berlin to Halle via Oxford, Heidelberg and Frankfurt. The Ariadnean thread that holds them together is my decades-long concern with rituals of royalty and the dialectical entanglements of these rituals with the political, cultural, social, economic and historical contexts in which they were formed and which they themselves formed in turn. Part I starts with a reprint of what was a little book I wrote when enjoying the position of a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology, Gothenburg, in 1995, as the guest of Goran Aijmer. There I had the time and intellectual climate to combine my previous doctoral research, conducted in Oxford under the supervision of Godfrey Lienhardt, on the Shilluk of the southern Sudan, with my then relatively new research agenda on kingship in India, especially Odisha. The main aim of this booklet was to see whether and how the great work of the historian Ernst H. Kantorowicz entitled The Kings Two Bodies could be applied to non-European cases as well as to examples from European history by putting less emphasis on the ideology of this corporeal fiction than on its ritual expressions, especially on the significant role played by royal effigies during death and installation ceremonies hence The Kings Three Bodies. The second chapter in Part One, written in 2018 and published here for the first time, is equally informed by this change in my research agenda: the regional shift from Africa to India, while maintaining a deep concern with rituals of royalty. My earlier studies of theories of segmentary lineage societies in Africa hailing from British social anthropology were seen afresh when I found that some social anthropological models of African polities had found their way into historical debates about the state and state-formation in pre-modern India. Knowing both sides pretty well, and independently, I sought to bring these two fields of knowledge and academic communities into a closer dialogue and show where they can learn from each other or else need to be circumspect in their comparisons and adaptations of models from Africa to India, as well as from social anthropology to history.