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The five most complete royal buildings remaining from the post-Conquest period in Britain have exterior decoration resembling that at churches. It is widely appreciated that the scale of royal buildings demonstrated the earthly power of the Norman kings, but their decoration, largely overlooked, can be shown to proclaim that the power of God was also present there. The sacred power of the king was explicit in the coronation rite at the anointing, and the subsequent investiture with regalia was re-staged by the crown-wearing practised in varying degrees by the Norman kings.

In its emphasis on ritual and sacred kingship, Azfar Moin's The Millennial Sovereign bears the imprint of anthropological theory, but Moin addresses this inheritance only obliquely. This essay seeks to draw out that tradition and to place theories of sovereignty and sacred kingship in their intellectual and historical context. Ultimately, it questions the value of these theories to the study of political authority.

In its emphasis on ritual and sacred kingship, Azfar Moin's The Millennial Sovereign bears the imprint of anthropological theory, but Moin addresses this inheritance only obliquely. This essay seeks to draw out that tradition and to place theories of sovereignty and sacred kingship in their intellectual and historical context. Ultimately, it questions the value of these theories to the study of political authority.

Many city-dwellers from Garoua and Maroua, northern part of Cameroon, identify bodily excretions and discarded intimate items as tools for an instrumental sorcery, based on a continuity seen as irreducible with the body and what is rejected from it. Facing with these sorcery uses of waste, the public authorities’ position inherits from older conceptions of great accumulations of waste, seen as gathering ambivalent and versatile “forces” that can be harnessed by powerful individuals for purposes of domination and increase in wealth. Far from questioning these conceptions, the initiatives taken in 2008 by the authorities to manage garbage collection and street cleaning in both cities, with the help of a private company, induces rather a renewal of this sorcery of refuse.

This article in historical anthropology concerns a traditional kingdom in the Shan States of upper Burma. It discusses the nature of Shan kingship in relation to cultural grammars of political articulation. The problem addressed is how a ruler of foreign extraction who has usurped power can exercise a dominance that is acceptable on moral grounds, an acceptance we refer to as authority. The conciliation between power and authority lay in the writing of a series of political contracts. In Kengtung these contracts have been given the shape of a historical chronicle of early events in the development of the country. In Kengtung, as in so many other polities in the region, the king's ability stems from his superiority of descent, his ancestry being linked with the gods of the higher sphere of existence. What he can do on earth depends on what contracts and agreements he can enter with spiritual forces that emanate from the terrain and underground. Iconic grammars organise instrumental idioms from an array of social relations, which are not givens but need symbolic construction. The ultimate political contract in the Shan States is Buddhism.

La figure anthropologique du roi-prêtre peine à s’accorder avec la réalité de l’institution de la chefferie Grassfields. Plus exactement, nous observons un motif dont l’histoire nous ramène à l’apparition d’une forme particulière, la « religion », et à la présence d’un prophète officiant : le missionnaire. L’analyse proposée revient sur les circonstances coloniales dans lesquelles le concept de « religion » fut introduit, un prisme qui permet de penser le déjà-là et de produire à plusieurs voix un récit biblique des origines de la royauté. L’objet de la religion dont il est question se révèle dans le cadre d’une cohabitation avec les missions, dans les enjeux politiques et rituels que génère la propagation de la doctrine et de la liturgie chrétiennes, amenant le souverain à endosser des habits religieux à même d’investir les lieux-symboles du christianisme. Cet article dévoile un pan méconnu du devenir de la royauté Grassfields durant la période coloniale, où le corps-fétiche du roi se fétichise à nouveaux frais.

In this essay, Emily Griffiths Jones argues for a reevaluation of the critical commonplace that John Milton abandoned romance after 1649 because of the genre's Royalist overtones. Jones reads Paradise Regained against two postwar Royalist romances, Percy Herbert's The Princess Cloria and Margaret Cavendish's Assaulted and Pursued Chastity, to illuminate Milton's commitment to countering a uniquely Restoration-era phenomenon: the Royalist revision of romance into a secular genre in which the hero struggles to navigate the tides of fate. Paradise Regained embodies a struggle between this revisionary model, which forms the basis of Satan's understanding of heroic romance, and Jesus's equally (or more) romantic Puritan alternative, which rejects Satan's innovative thematics in favor of a complex romance of providence. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

This pioneering study examines a pivotal period in the history of Europe and the Near East. Spanning the ancient and medieval worlds, it investigates the shared ideal of sacred kingship that emerged in the late Roman and Persian empires. This shared ideal, while often generating conflict during the four centuries of the empires' coexistence (224-642), also drove exchange, especially the means and methods Roman and Persian sovereigns used to project their notions of universal rule: elaborate systems of ritual and their cultures' visual, architectural, and urban environments. Matthew Canepa explores the artistic, ritual, and ideological interactions between Rome and the Iranian world under the Sasanian dynasty, the last great Persian dynasty before Islam. He analyzes how these two hostile systems of sacred universal sovereignty not only coexisted, but fostered cross-cultural exchange and communication despite their undying rivalry. Bridging the traditional divide between classical and Iranian history, this book brings to life the dazzling courts of two global powers that deeply affected the cultures of medieval Europe, Byzantium, Islam, South Asia, and China.

The prominence of the auditory world for African peoples requires attuning our study of their cultures more directly to the phenomena of sound. Cross-world communication, which establishes and validates the basis for human action, occurs when the normally inaudible otherworld beings reveal themselves in distinct acoustic fashion. This study reviews those otherworld voices, heard through divine kings and divination, and in the auditory arts of musical instruments, masquerades and narratives. Careful listening to African peoples' auditory arts reveals previously unheard dimensions of their cultures, how they acoustically manifest and validate the spirit world. [Africa, masquerades, music, performance, sound and silence, spirit beings, verbal arts.]