Hierarchy and the Haya divine kingship: a structural and symbolic reformulation of Frazer's thesis

This article presents a structural and symbolic reformulation of Sir James Frazer's theory of divine kingship. A model of hierarchy derived from formal logic, one that Terence Turner (1977a) applied in his reconceptualization of the structure of rites de passage, is employed to analyze the cosmology of a former Haya kingship of northwest Tanzania. A tripartite model of hierarchy encoded in the ceilings of traditional Haya dwellings is described. Analysis of the model demonstrates how the king's role as a unique mediator symbolically constituted and resolved the problem of the separation and interrelationship between the transcendent and the normative orders. [ Haya, East Africa, kingship, palace architecture, duality, hierarchy ]