Stranger-Kingship and Cosmocracy; or, Sahlins in Southwest China

Abstract

Major works of the ninth to seventeenth centuries have described the kingship of the Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms (652–1254) of Southwest China. I argue that these narratives may be understood in terms of the modes of identifying and assimilating the cosmological alterity proposed by Marshall Sahlins: ‘stranger-kingship’, which depicted the king as a stranger; and ‘cosmocracy’, which depicted him as a universal ruler—a ‘cosmocrator’. While a stranger-king was to some extent an extra-social, guest associated with the wild and untamed, and also partly an affine of the autochthonous people, a cosmocrator was a supra-social, moral host, and envisaged more as a consanguine of the subject people. These two pre-modern ideas of sovereignty are constituent parts of Sahlins's ‘elementary forms of the politics of life’, so that one cannot be reduced to the other.