From an article about the Maya city of El Zotz by anthropologist Stephen Houston, MacArthur winner and professor at Brown, these two paragraphs say a lot about what kingship was and why it endured:
Cross-cultural comparison suggests that only five elements were required for a Maya court:
- a monad (a human pivot to which others defer);
- others that seek contact with, and control over, the monad (courtiers and servitors);
- the resources, symbolic and real, to make this striving worthwhile and to support such extravagance;
- an acute understanding of hierarchy—of how to behave in socially asymmetrical encounters that characterize courts; and
- a physical setting for such encounters.
A vast literature documents these elements, allowing the possibility of broad generalizations about courtly behavior and its recurrent patterns (e.g., Adamson 1999; Brown and Elliott 1980; Costa Gomes 2003; Elias 1983; Geertz 1977, 1980; Howes 2003; Ladurie 2001; Steane 1993, including models from Mesoamerica, Inomata and Houston 2001). For example, as a concept, “court” blurs the distinction, rarely evident in most societies, between bureaucrats and courtiers, administrative duties and the person and spiritual role of the ruler (Inomata 2001:31; Vale 2001:298-299). And it makes clear that, without the monad—the ruler—the system must wither until another monad is found. Against this is a demonstrable predisposition: the physical mass of the court and the many needs it serves create an impetus to maintain the court system and its many practices (Webster 2001:131-132). Logically, a system sustains itself if participants “buy into” its predicates. A firm blow must occur, as it did during the so-called Maya “collapse,” to neutralize such a node of joint self-interest.
The “human pivot” of Maya courts is the “holy lord,” k’uhul ajaw or, rarely, the “lady holy lord,” ix k’uhul ajaw (Houston and Stuart 2001:59-61). Around that pivot operate: family members, near, far, even fictive; courtiers, including “favorites”; servants and those generally in attendance; slaves and purveyors of goods and services; allies of varying fidelity; and, in replications across the landscape, the smaller courts of magnates and lesser nobility (Miller and Martin 2004:23-27, passim; see Waterfield 2003:10-12; Woolgar 1999:8-29). Whatever its scale, the court contains many features of a household, a place of procreation, production, pleasure, and consumption (Fowden 2004:64-84). Among the Classic Maya, scholars now know, some goods and services came from tribute (Houston et al. 2006:244-248), but other economic underpinnings remain unclear: did rulers rely on personal estates for their foodstuffs or on plantations of exportable plants such as cacao and tobacco? The answer to this question is not easily resolved, but courts did at least embody the good life, indulging whim yet allowing displays of exemplary piety (Brown and Elliot 1980:193-199).
3 comments:
I think it would be fruitful to expand this analysis to how far it would apply to other centralized structures of power, such as companies, government agencies, the Catholic Church, hospitals, and universities. My intuition is that monarchy would come to seem as one of a set of very similar forms.
Is there such a thing as a NON-centralized structure of power? Perhaps one could suggest phenomena like consumerism generally, or consumer supply networks taken as a whole, or perhaps popularized movements (MAGA, for example, has an obvious center of attention, but it's not an organization) as avenues to examine non-centralized power structures.
Back on the centralized structures, I note that mission or function finds no place in Houston's five-point list. I wonder how much the presence of a perceived mission would affect such organizations, and whether there's always a perceived mission, or whether one could have such a social form without one.
Obviously a hostile analysis might suggest that such structures only exist to serve themselves. But in terms of their inner workings, which would entail the subjective perception of the participants, as well as both internal-interactive and public rhetoric, perceived mission can be important. And I suspect governments, including many monarchies, are affected by having too many missions, which often work against each other, leading to characteristic muddle. (And even overtly-seeming self-serving motives, like profit or "burying this for the sake of the Bureau"-type episodes, can start to sound like invocations of "mission," for which sacrifices are made.)
It might also be interesting to compare/contrast larger centralized power structures with smaller ones, such as small boats with small crews, airplanes, small military or quasi-military units, rock bands, or criminal cells. There the leader seems less like a monad with satellites and more like a small-group alpha. I wonder at what point a crew becomes large enough that a court-like structure starts to evolve around the captain, with a special "captain's table," etc.
Part of what's going on here is that modern anthropology is full of anarchists who want to talk about non-governmental structures and the power vested in other groups, away from the court. There are also Marxists who want to talk about competing economic interests, say small farmers vs craftsmen vs merchants. Houston is saying that the court is a thing with its own existence, a partially separate world that can by analyzed on its own terms.
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