by Christian Blake Pye
Strathern, Alan. Unearthly Powers: Religious and Political Change in World History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Whereas the majority of contemporary scholarship in the humanities and social sciences has been moving toward the local for decades, Alan Strathern embraces broad comparison and theoretical generalization in this study of kingship and its relationship to religion.
Central to the book, Strathern divides his definition of religion into two categories that will be familiar to anyone who has studied Robert Bellah: immanentism (religion merged with culture, which considers divinity to be integral to the natural world) and transcendentalism (religion distinct from other cultural elements, which considers divinity to be supramundane).
These parenthetical definitions are but truncated cores of the two categories, the various aspects of which Strathern describes at length. He emphasizes that no religion or faith tradition is fully immanentist or transcendentalist; a transcendentalist religion (e.g. Christianity) can very well have immanentist features (e.g. the cult of the saints).
The immanentist/transcendentalist distinction informs Strathern’s exposition on the nature of sacred kingship. Sovereigns modulate their approach to rule based on whether they operate in an immanentist or transcendentalist framework. Both have their own variety of sacred kingship. In immanentisms, kings are divinized through either “heroic” acts (battlefield accomplishments or transgressive violence) or through becoming a “cosmic” linchpin, upon whom the health of both the natural and social order depend. Conversely, kings in transcendentalisms are made righteous by either “zealous” acts of religious violence (done in the name of supreme and exclusive religious truth) or by “doctrinal” subservience to and enforcement of God’s law, through which society attains salvation.
Strathern writes that kings in immanentist societies act within the “economy of ritual efficacy.” This economy is defined by the empirical gauging of whether a ritual act has been affective. When transcendentalisms, in hopes of proselytization, enter cultures where the economy of ritual efficacy is active, they must compete within it. Likewise, kings must take that economy into consideration if presented with the choice to convert to a transcendentalism. For instance, kings tend to treat the god of their new transcendentalist religion as a new patron deity who can bring conquest and prosperity to their realm. The religion and king are then judged by how well the new god can perform for the realm.
A study based in generalization, even when highly theoretical, requires historical evidence. Thankfully, then, Strathern consistently refers to historical examples. In fact, to ensure that the macro perspective of the study does not suffer from a lack of application, he is producing a companion volume, Converting Kings, to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. Some readers will still find jarring the book’s rapid switching between diverse cultures, but perhaps this is inevitable given the book’s scope, inspired as it is by Victor Lieberman’s monumental Strange Parallels. Unlike Strange Parallels, however, Unearthly Powers clocks in at a relatively concise 326 pages. While Unearthly Powers is sure to chafe some academic sensibilities, it is also bound to incite discussions and open research avenues for those who duly consider it.
Christian Blake Pye is a PhD Candidate in the Religion in History track at UT Austin’s Department of Religious Studies. His research is concerned with the intersection of Sufism and sainthood with the politics and culture of premodern Islamic societies
