The reluctant sovereign

Magnus Fiskesj
Magnus Fiskesjo teaches anthropology and Asian studies at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York State, and from 2000 to 2005 was director of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, Sweden. He has conducted field research in the Wa country in the ChinaBurma borderlands and published on many aspects of ethnic relations and ethnopolitics in East and Southeast Asia, and on museums and global heritage issues. His email is nf42@cornell.edu

New adventures of the US presidential Thanksgiving turkey

Fig. 1. President Obamas first turkey pardon, 25 November 2009.

1. For documentation of all these presidential matters, see the official White House website, whitehouse.gov; the 2009 Presidential Proclamation of the Thanksgiving Day, is at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/ the-press-office/presidentialproclamation-thanksgivingday; the 2009 turkey pardoning is at http://www. whitehouse.gov/photos-andvideo/video/president-obamapardons-white-house-turkey (accessed 7 June 2010). 2. See Free bird: Thanksgiving turkey pardons, http://www. mnn.com/family/raisinga-family/photos/free-birdthanksgiving-turkey-pardons/ poultry-in-motion#image; photo #9 of 13 (accessed 7 June 2010). 3. This unashamed boasting about amusement parks as earthly paradise is at times promulgated in direct opposition to (and in denigration of) American Indians and their culture. In 1999, Californias (then Paramounts) Great America in Northern California ran outragous television ads that

Several recent developments in the annual US presidents ritual pardoning of a Thanksgiving turkey give us food for thought, as President Obama gets ready to perform the pardoning ritual for his second time, exempting one more turkey from the certain death that awaits millions of others eaten in the US every autumn. On or around the penultimate Tuesday of November (which this year falls on 23 November), Obama will again stand with the selected turkey on the White House lawn and, as commanderin-chief, declare it pardoned (fig. 1), as a prelude to the national turkey feast starting on the Thursday of the same week the uniquely American Thanksgiving holiday, formulated in the 19th century to provide a fresh cohesive narrative for a nation torn apart by its Civil War over slavery. The pardoning ritual itself was added only in the 1980s. As in any first-fruits sacrifice so familiar to anthropologists since the beginnings of the discipline the symbolic gesture of refraining from consumption of a token sample opens the way for mass consumption of that same desired good from which the token sacrifice is derived, but now with solemn recognition of the suprahuman forces that are imagined to provide it. The US president officiates over the setting aside of one token turkey, a move that recognizes the Almighty God referred to in the formal proclamation that his fellow Americans should celebrate a National Thanksgiving Day, which he will have issued in the preceding days,1 and thus he opens the way for them all to consume tens of millions of pre-packaged supermarket turkeys at their Thanksgiving dinners. This ritual of national commensality also effectively recreates and reaffirms the people as members of their tribe, and the chief as their chief, charged with channelling divine forces. As is traditional, Obamas 2009 proclamation deployed the privileged account of a particular cohort of English settlers guarded by Providence, who gave thanks for what today is called New England. This time, though, Obama also signalled inclusiveness by making more explicit mention of the

Native Americans, the original owners of the land, as having contributed to the nation. This belated affirmation of them and their continued existence seems an improvement on ignoring them, or humiliating them in their defeat, as was so often done in the past. Still, they clearly remain cast in a subordinate and supporting role in the Thanksgiving drama in which they supposedly welcome and help the settlers (fig. 5 represents one of the most influential of the artistic dramatizations that have helped set and consolidate the stage), and where typically no mention is made of the ethnic cleansing that ensued after this purported welcome. Thus Obamas limited gesture makes but for a slightly revised new version of the main founding myth that today continues to define, in one stroke, both America and its divinely derived sovereignty. I discussed the profound political-anthropological implications of this momentous and highly significant set of rituals in my 2003 pamphlet. That text was based in large part on observations of the spectacles performed during the Clinton presidency and in the early years of George W. Bush. Here, I wish to explore these issues further, in the light of several new developments. The happiest turkey on earth The most striking and also the most perplexing new development in the US national Thanksgiving rituals has doubtless been the second President Bushs abandonment of the established post-ceremony treatment of the pardoned presidential turkey, officially known as the National Turkey (a treatment also accorded to the back-up or vice-presidential turkey kept in an undisclosed location in case anything should happen to the first). The two consecrated turkeys obviously cannot go back to the factory farm where they were raised and selected for impressive appearance and docile manners. Instead, from the beginnings of the presidential turkey pardon in the 1980s until 2004, they were ritually received in a special retirement home at the Frying Pan petting zoo in Virginia,
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Fig. 2. President George W. Bush pardons a turkey, 20 November 2007. (Photo: Joyce N. Boghosian, courtesy George W. Bush Presidential Library.) Fig. 3. President George H.W. Bush Senior with pardoned turkey, 1991. (Photo courtesy George H.W. Bush Presidential Library.) promoted the joy of their park by contrasting footage from a synchronized Indian pow-wow drum dance, intended to suggest utter and incomprehensible boredom, with that of select happy roller-coaster revellers at their easy-going park. For images, see http://www.10news.com/ news/5402133/detail.html, or http://www.disneydreaming. com/2009/11/27/couragethe-turkey-in-the-disneylandthanksgiving-day-paradevideo/ (accessed 7 June 2010). 4. Her hope was that Thanksgiving Day would be used for collecting money in churches, for this very purpose (Kaplan 1998). 5. The reappropriation of the image of the Indian included fantasies of a gentler, kinder, Americanstyled imperialism, such as that immortalized in the huge tripartite statue at the main gate of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, depicting its main patron, President Theodore Roosevelt, on horseback leading an African and an Indian man on foot, one on each side. 6. Unsurprisingly, vegetarian campaigns initiated for health reasons by governors like Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, who declared 20 March 2010 Michigan Meatout Day, or Tennessee governor Lamar Alexander, who once proclaimed a World Vegetarian Day, have been hard fought, and defeated, by the meat industry lobby. See photos of Ford, Nixon and others at: http://georgewbushwhitehouse.archives.gov/ holiday/thanksgiving/ photoessay/index.html 7. Fig.1; for the official video, see note 1.

near Washington DC. They were later quietly killed there, as their under-engineered legs would soon succumb to the weight of their bloated bodies. But from 2005 George W. Bush started instead to send the birds to Disneyland in Florida by first-class domestic flight.2 There, the National Turkey was placed on top of a special parade float moving through cheering Thanksgiving crowds, preceded by a procession holding banners declaring him the happiest turkey on earth. A Disney company press release unabashedly presented the turkey event as Following presidential pardon, the happiest turkey on earth heads west to the happiest place on earth!3 (This was in 2006, when the turkeys were flown to the California Disneyland in order to spread the grace). In his first turkey pardon in November 2009, Obama simply went along with this novelty, and apparently also with the alternation between the East and West coast Disneylands, where the spectacle is rounded off with the retirement of the twin turkeys to a Disney animal ranch on which they meet their ultimate fate. The audacious remake of the last leg of the national pardoning ritual under George W. Bush (fig. 2) must have something to do with the way in which Disneyland epitomizes the pursuit of happiness believed to drive the American nation, already so happy that it even hosts the happiest place on earth. The idea of reanchoring the turkey ritual in the unassailably all-American setting of Disneyland may have been, in part, an attempt by White House spin doctors to outwit and overcome the previous years nagging criticism from PETA, the animal rights activist organization, of both the unfortunately named Frying Pan arrangements and the associated slaughter of millions of turkeys. But there is more. The Disneyland dream world figures in the American self-imaginary as a fountain of happiness, almost a this-wordly paradise. Victorious sportsmen are often awarded a highly publicized trip there, as a bonus prize. This notion of reward for good service is now, morbidly, assigned to the already dying National turkeys, extending presidential benevolence all the way to Disneyland and squeezing out the last possible drop of spectacular exhibition-value (Agamben 2007: 90) from these avian heroes of the Thanksgiving sacrifice. This means that the Thanksgiving ritual is further woven into the fabric of the American exceptionalist imaginary of manifest destiny of victorious happiness. Note too that the public display has its complementary moral mirror image in the domestic home setting in which the turkeys are cooked and consumed. Much as in the European homecoming ritual of Christmas, the American Thanksgiving is a fraught site for the rehearsal of, and challenges to, perceived traditional roles in the home and here these roles are tied up with the dutiful performance of a specifically American ritual.

In her article on the manifest domesticity which the ritual is used to orchestrate, Amy Kaplan (1998; see also Kaplan 2002) showed how the original 19th-century invention of Thanksgiving cast home-making American mothers and families in a crucial supporting role for the nation, just as the US began to assume its imperial project. Founding mother Sarah Josepha Hale designed the Thanksgiving ritual as a nationwide contemporaneous celebration that would consolidate the nation and its continental conquests (up to the Rio Grande, and all the way to the Pacific [quoted in Kaplan 1998: 592]), encourage its mission into the Philippines and beyond, and later, in the tired Cold War phrase, confirm its status as leader of the free world. Kaplan exposed the imperial scope of American domesticity as instituted in the 19th-century fashioning of the Thanksgiving holiday which starts on cue from the acting sovereign (Lincoln, Bush, Obama), and helps constitute him as such. All this is still with us, as American mothers and fathers dutifully continue to cook their turkeys and perform Thanksgiving as a quintessentially American ritual and family feast. Even when they do this privately, without reflecting on its history or its implications for the state, the success of Hales scheme since it was formally adopted by Lincoln in 1863 is fundamental and lasting. Since that time, each president exhorts the citizenry to give thanks and asks for divine blessing for the nation, in his annual Thanksgiving Proclamation, at the ensuing turkey pardon, and also by way of the exemplary, publicized presidential domesticity that often includes publication of dinner menus, and in the 2009 Obama configuration added visits to soup kitchens for the poor. Despite todays multicultural inclusiveness, and Obamas pointed gestures towards the Native Americans and towards the hungry, the Thanksgiving ritual remains fundamentally associated with the mainstream, which means the White Anglo-Americans of the paradigmatic Plymouth Mayflower Pilgrims, and emphatically not the Indians or the descendants of Africans brought to the US as slaves. As Kaplan (1998) notes, Sarah Josepha Hale, the architect of the American Thanksgiving, believed (like many others) that after the end of slavery, African descendants should have been repatriated to Africa (specifically, to Liberia),4 and not allowed to remain alongside the Whites or at least ought to be segregated. The perduring category of mainstream is to be understood as an accommodation of such lingering nostalgia for purity. As Kaplan goes on to point out, the Indians were altogether absent from Hales original construction, as they were from many early settler accounts of Thanksgivings; many such settlers would have been happy with a complete ethnic cleansing, the final solution that was implied in the original conception of an American manifest desANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 26 NO 5, OCTOBER 2010

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Fig. 4. Sarah Palin, script in hand, with her pardoned turkey in Wasilla, Alaska, 20 November 2008. (Photo: Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman.) Fig. 5. The first thanksgiving, by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, from the series The pageant of a nation (c. 191215). Image reproduced from a postcard published by The Foundation Press, Inc., 1932. 8. This is somewhat morbid, of course, but is occasionally also done at the state level when governors pass on frozen turkeys as symbolic gifts to homeless shelters, etc. 9. As was suggested by one of the anonymous reviewers for this article, to whom I am grateful for urging me to consider these aspects. I also thank Pete Richardson for sharing his profound insights on several points, and the Editor for precious help, not least with illustrations. Agamben, Giorgio 2007. In praise of profanation. In Profanations, pp. 73-92. New York: Zone Books. Bergland, Renee 2000. The national uncanny: Indian ghosts and American subjects. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Celtic Diva 2008. I watched Governor Palins turkey pardoning! (with pictures). Update 3, 20 November. http:// divasblueoasis.com/ showDiary.do?diaryId=320 (accessed 7 June 2010). Clifford, James 1988. Identity in Mashpee. In The predicament of culture: Twentieth century ethnography, literature, and art, pp. 277-346. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Covington, Coline 2009. What deniers of climate change are really denying. The First Post, 17 December. Available at: http://www.thefirstpost. co.uk/57532,newscomment,newspolitics,what-the-deniersof-climate-change-arereally-denying; accessed 7 June 2010.

tiny (cf. Fiskesj 2003). Hale must have assumed this solution was safely under way. It appears that it was only in the late 19th-century period of triumphant imperialism that the Indians were painted into the nowadays so familiar and ubiquitous renderings of the first Thanksgiving dinner (see fig. 5),5 and that it is only with the recent introduction of multiculturalism that they have been cast in the express supporting role hailed in Obamas 2009 embrace of the Native Americans contributions. This sympathetic gesture cannot possibly clear up the lingering ambivalence about the genocidal crimes committed against their forebears, and should also be analysed as a new version of the very mystery of state power that is epitomized in the turkey pardon: the awesome power to launch wars and take lives is presented to its subjects as coterminous with a magnanimous and benign care for the weak, the hungry and the marginalized. Sarah Palin pallin around with animals Another closely related new development was Sarah Palins widely reported but woefully under-analysed turkey pardoning fiasco, in late 2008. Palin is a rising political star of the right and clearly a US presidential contender, mainly by virtue of her demagoguery of frontierswoman fantasies, through which she expertly denies the need for serious change in the face of climate change and other problems facing her country, or the world (cf. Covington 2009). She is also closely associated with the growing Tea Party Movement, whose central Take back our country slogan is widely understood to refer to Obama, seen as illegitimate because Black. Shortly after her defeat as vice-presidential candidate in the elections earlier that autumn, in November 2008 Palin was still Alaskas governor but already deeply engaged in crafting her new position as a political leader defined by nativism and oil-guzzling populism. As if seeking to usurp some of the symbolic power about to be handed to Obama as commander-in-chief, Palin arranged a visit to a turkey farm in Alaska. She was filmed by TV news companies as she waded through a sea of turkeys waiting to be slaughtered, picked one out, and then declared it pardoned in a makeshift ceremony (see fig. 4). Like the national ceremony, this was meant to be fun, in all seriousness. The turkey pardoning was institutionalized in the late 1980s as a national presidential ritual, and only very few state governors pardon turkeys: it is done, for example, in Alabama, where the ceremony was first invented in the 1940s as a governors ritual, and from where it was exported to the capital in 1947 (Fiskesj 2003). By stepping into the fray, Palin tries to mock the Washington against which states rights are asserted, using the same vocabulary as that deployed in the defeated South after the Civil War, when former slave-owners sought the right to continue to repress their former slaves. Clearly, the

institution of the pardon is a suitable arena for playing this sort of game: the power of pardon is the supreme sign of sovereign power, deciding over life and death, and just such powers are invested in the offices of both US presidents and (most) US state governors. Both decide, at their respective level, on clemency and the ultimate fate of prisoners under death sentence (cf. Sarat 2005), and presidents decide on war. But, unfortunately for Palin, the cameras kept rolling as she was interviewed on other matters against the backdrop of a spectacle of brutal, mechanized turkey slaughter proceeding just behind her. Clips of this event went viral on the internet but mainly just the slaughter part of the footage and not the preceding pardon (Lester 2008 is a more complete video; see also the eyewitness account by the blogger Celtic Diva, 2008). Instead of helping endear her to voters as down-to-earth, rustic and funny, the incident served to reignite the debate around meat-eating, vegetarianism, tofu turkey alternatives, and the like, rather than around the turkey pardoning itself, which many simply laugh off as a bit of fun. But although the shrewd Palin did not volunteer to pardon another turkey in 2009, she quickly seized on her curious ability to have everything both ways (and get away with it), to overcome the negative publicity of the 2008 incident. She did this by reaffirming her toughness in the face of the necessary and virtuous killing of animals, such as Alaskan wolves, moose, etc., while caring deeply for ordinary Americans. She had established these credentials earlier when she famously bragged about her skills in skinning dead moose, and she often poses with dead animals. This certainly shifted the spotlight back onto Palins virtues including as a folksy inheritor of the longstanding tradition of manipulating hunting lore for the purposes of political power. Such schemes have of course been used since ancient times, as when early kings domesticated their subjects-to-be by asserting a position as hunter-inchief and conqueror of the wild (Fiskesj 2001). Many later reigning or would-be kings and presidents have played this game in the US, not least the paradigmatic turn-of-the-century big game hunter President Franklin Roosevelt (Haraway 1993, Fiskesj 2003), who in his other guise as wildlife preservationist managed to harness the symbolic force of both life-preserving beneficence and martial readiness, as the archetypal American-style benign yet fearsome imperial sovereign who loves his people. Eagles vs turkeys The trend for playing politics with birds has been superbly mocked by US satirical newspaper The Onion (2010), which cleverly enlisted the bellicose US national symbol, the bald eagle, in the anti-war effort. The bird is quoted as reserving for himself the right to a more nuanced opinion
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Fig. 6. Thanksgiving turkey for the President (Herbert Hoover), November 1929. Fig. 7. Thanksgiving turkey for the President, delivered by Minnesota farmers, November 1929. Davis, Kenneth. 2008. A French connection. New York Times, 26 November: A33; http://www. nytimes.com/2008/11/26/ opinion/26davis.html?em (accessed 7 June 2010). Faludi, Susan 2007. Americas guardian myths. New York Times, 7 September. Available at: http://www.nytimes. com/2007/09/07/ opinion/07faludi.html (accessed 7 June 2010). Fiskesj, Magnus 2003. The Thanksgiving turkey pardon, the death of Teddys bear, and the sovereign exception of Guantnamo. Prickly Paradigm Pamphlet no. 11. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm

Fig. 8. Thanksgiving turkey crate in the shape of a warship, made for President Warren Harding (19211923) by the Chamber of Commerce in Cuero, Texas, home of the Turkey Trot (a then-popular ragtime tune).

the litigating Indians, as all the while the mighty US eagle totem watched from the official courtroom wall insignia right above them. The Onion is mocking the symbol of sovereign power, but failed to engage the interesting issue of the eagles presumed gender, as well as the point that (as even Palins speechwriters know) the late 18th-century selection of this fierce-looking eagle as national totem was opposed by Benjamin Franklin, who famously held that the eagle in real life is an opportunistic scavenger and the national bird should really have been the morally upright turkey. Obviously, animals are not just good to think with, but also serve as exemplary materializations of morality used to guide and forge a national citizenry. However, Franklin lost out. The soaring eagle (which cannot be farmed for food) is manifestly much more suitable for projecting the nations outwardly martial and distinctly masculine or macho ambitions. The turkey, whose edibility sustains the citizens on the domesticated home front, is better suited to reaffirming the citizenrys manifest domesticity and its unity, around the kitchen table, in grateful support of the nations lofty endeavours, and its troops. The pardoning ritual as it is pursued today was originally also a commercial gimmick, invented to promote consumption of turkey meat, and accepted into the national celebration in part because it highlights the sovereigns role in facilitating the sustenance of the people. The National Turkey Federation (NTF) and other commercial outfits have long helped promote turkey consumption (and their profits) by donating turkeys to the White House (see Figs 6, 7 and 8). The same logic linking business with state sovereignty seems to propel all the recent attempts to adopt the pardoning ritual formally in Minnesota (said to be the US state that raises the largest number of farm turkeys) as well as in Missouri, Iowa and North Dakota all agricultural states that benefit heavily from increased production and consumption of farm-industry meat,6 and where state governors are also often folksy game hunters. The apparently seamless marrying of the politicalcosmological significance of the pardoning act with the industry-promoted pursuit of profit derived from consumption and the fun that goes with it is striking and for anthropologists, it should recall A.M. Hocarts half-forgotten but highly relevant theories about the co-evolution of economy and governance (see Schnepel 1988). (The NTF for its part must inevitably be worrying about the dangers of any politicizing of the Thanksgiving game, as this might ruin their fun.) Why pardoning pigs wont do It is not just birds that are in play, but other animals too. In the swing state of Virginia, another new movement is afoot demanding that the president should really be pardoning a pig, not a turkey (Suhay 2007). The argument is founded on a claim that not turkey but pork and possibly oysters, too was eaten at Thanksgiving celebrations in Virginia that took place two years earlier than the conventionally mythologized Massachussetts First Thanksgiving event (in 1621, at Plymouth, where, in any case, venison was probably the main course). But regardless of the facts here, the key point is that the Thanksgiving holiday was being invented after the defeat of the separatist Confederate slave states which included Virginia, and this is why the Massachussetts event was singled out for mythologization in Lincolns times. This historical divergence means that the Virginian demands, however strongly pushed by governors, senators and the like, are not getting much traction. This is due not just to Virginias past as a Confederate state, but also to the related fait accompli that the Massachussetts story first
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on the current US wars, because, as he put it, Im not a hawk or a dove [] Im an eagle.
You see, these issues are not so cut and dried, continued the Haliaeetus leucocephalus specimen. And yet, every time I try to explain myself from atop a flag pole or the middle of a baseball field, no one wants to listen. They just cheer and chant U.S.A.! U.S.A! U.S.A.!

This is counter-intuitively funny precisely because the eagle, with its appropriately fierce profile, is a national totem of the USA even if it isnt recognized in the terms of totemism, which are of course reserved for Native Americans and other supposed primitives. James Clifford (1988: 321) once observed and recorded a memorable scene of US court proceedings where American Indians who had sued to get back their lost territories were taken on a curious detour. The Euro-American judges questioned them, almost as if conducting an ethnography, about the strangeness of totemic symbolisms among the forebears of

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Press. (Available for free download at: http://www. prickly-paradigm.com/) 2001. Rising from blood-stained fields: Royal hunting and state formation in Shang China. Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 73: 48-192. Haraway, Donna 1993. Teddy bear patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 19081936. In Kaplan, Amy and Pease, Donald (eds) Cultures of United States imperialism, pp. 237-291. Durham: Duke University Press. Harry S. Truman Library & Museum 2001. Truman trivia: Did Truman pardon a turkey? http://www. trumanlibrary.org/trivia/ turkey.htm (accessed 26 November 2004). Kaplan, Amy 1998. Manifest domesticity. American Literature 70(3): 581-606. 2002. The anarchy of empire in the making of U.S. culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lester, Marc 2008. Palin pardons a turkey: Gov. Sarah Palin pardons a Thanksgiving turkey at Triple D Farm and Hatchery, and answers questions about the holidays. Video from Anchorage Daily News, 20 November, available at http://www.adn.com/ cgi-bin/apps/vmix/player. php?ID=2423675&GID= (accessed 7 June 2010). Loewen, James W. 2007. Lies my teacher told me: Everything your American history textbook got wrong. New York: Simon & Schuster. Onion 2010. Bald eagle tired of everyone just assuming it supports war. 1 February. Available at: http://www. theonion.com/content/ node/100492 (accessed 7 June 2010). Sarat, Austin 2005. Mercy on trial: What it means to stop an execution. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Schnepel, Burkhard 1988. In quest of life: Hocarts scheme of evolution from ritual organization to government. Archives Europennes de Sociologie 29: 165-187. Sherrill, Martha 1989. The gift of gobble. Washington Post 18 November: C1. Suhay, Lisa 2007. Bush should pardon pig, not turkey. Christian Science Monitor 18 November. Virginia Foundation for the Humanities Radio 2008. BackStory: With the American history guys. Radio programme aired 29 November 2008. Available at: http://www. backstoryradio.org.

privileged under Lincoln has become firmly lodged in national mythology. It retains its position despite numerous American Indian Day of Mourning protests at the Plymouth site, and despite claims from other places to have served as the First Thanksgiving, such as the claims from Florida of a 16th-century celebration (Loewen 2007, Davis 2008). Indeed, the very crowdedness of this race to claim a direct Plymouth-style link with the founding origins of this settler nation further ensures that the Virginian claims will not be accepted. Of course, all these events (wherever they took place and whatever the fare) were really conducted by illegal immigrants from Europe in the lands of Native American peoples, who had themselves been celebrating various forms of Thanksgivings for many millennia. However strange it may seem to outsiders, this obvious point about the rich indigenous thanksgiving traditions of first-fruits rites is generally regarded as irrelevant in US discussions. Even in feminist discourse decrying the male chauvinist militarism of the post-9/11 period, the natives are not really Americans, not part of the imaginary we subject of national discourse (see, for example, the prominent feminist writer Faludi [2007], for whom the settlers are the Americans while the original Americans are Indians, and not much more than menacing terrorists). To be sure, Native Americans today are in relative terms a small minority, but the logic of US sovereignty cannot easily accept the ambivalence of the Indian claims to be Natives and Americans at the same time. In the near-hegemonic Hollywood-orchestrated imaginary they are widely believed to have already been killed off completely, and for the most part exist only as ghosts haunting cemeteries, etc., thus as a foil for the real America and its modernity (as Audra Simpson, a Native American herself, has pointed out; see too Bergland 2000). Let me also mention that there are other reasons why pigs would not do. For starters pigs, so often maligned for their habits and table manners (which, unlike those of Bald Eagles, are readily visible and therefore wellknown), cannot achieve the symbolic usefulness of either eagles or turkeys. Sure, there is Christmas ham. But the native turkey has by now become incomparably more symbolically important than any other food, and it lends itself to the sacrificial rite reconstituting and nurturing the American nation precisely because it has become so firmly identified as an American food consumed on that most unique of national holidays, the American Thanksgiving. In Sweden, a country where American fads arrive particularly quickly, the idea of the government executive symbolically pardoning an animal whose flesh is about to be ritually feasted on was picked up in 2006. Turkeys, however, have little symbolic currency in Sweden, and there is of course no American-style Thanksgiving embedded in an imperial history. The direct adoption of such an American holiday would seem strange (among American festive occasions, only the politically more innocent Halloween has been successfully imported and adapted). A Christmas pig was therefore used instead: it was brought onto the stage during a popular live evening TV programme in December 2006, and Prime Minister Reinfeldt arrived in the studio to formally declare it pardoned so that, as in the US presidential pardon, it would not be killed but exempt from the Christmas feasting frenzy which the pardon paved the way for. But the Swedish Christmas pig pardon did not catch on. Reinfeldt soon found himself accused by viewers of succumbing to undue American influence, and the fad faded even though Reinfeldt quickly denied any such influences. Like so many European politicians, he has continued to adopt other aspects of American style (in campaigning, etc.), but the predicament of world sovereign power that

is key to the US ritual and makes it feasible is conspicuously lacking. The discomfort of empire In his first turkey pardoning in 2009, President Obama showed a certain impatience and hinted that he felt this was a silly tradition, and that he was only reluctantly going through the motions of the ritual.7 It was as if the president shared the discomfort of so many American intellectuals, who are typically appalled that the affairs of state in their enlightened republic should be bound by such irrational and profoundly mysterious conventions, and be conducted in such a tribal manner. The same people often also harbour a deep-seated scepticism towards empire, and would prefer their country to be one nation among others, rather than maintaining 700-plus military bases around the world. Such scepticism might seem healthy, especially when compared with the professed gut certainty that the US is, by divine appointment, a force for good that was so openly boasted about by Bush, and now many other nativist-populist politicians, regardless of the facts. But it is a fraught scepticism, since what appears as tribal in the Thanksgiving rituals to some educated Americans is precisely, as I hope to have shown, a device that orchestrates state sovereignty. The turkey pardoning ritual, and the whole of Thanksgiving as configured, represents a re-enactment of the US presidents power over life and death, both in providing bounty and through war, and is inseparable from the countrys place in the world. It is not a gimmick that can be considered separately from that machinery it is its justification. Note here that we still do not know exactly why the presidential turkey pardoning was begun in its present form. Once, I suggested it may have had something to do with Truman atoning for the use of nuclear weapons, but as the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum has pointed out (2001), all indications are that Truman ate all his turkeys, as did all his successors although Gerald Ford, the reluctant successor to the disgraced Richard Nixon, posed with both the frozen corpse of a ready-to-cook bird8 and the usual live bird received as a gift. He may have pardoned this turkey (as he did Nixon?), but its fate is unclear, and the presidential pardoning actually seems to have been formally instituted only in 1989, by George Bush Senior (cf. Sherrill 1989). Indeed, since my 2003 pamphlet appeared, the White House official historiography has been amended to this effect. But the reasons for it remain shrouded in mystery. Perhaps the idea of alluding to the presidents power of pardon was also simply borrowed, on a whim, from the Alabama state-level ritual. But why belatedly in 1989? I suspect that it had to do with the emergence, after the demise of the Soviet Union, of the US as supreme arbiter of war and peace in the world. The symbolic gift to the people of millions of turkeys, which is channelled and blessed by the sovereign-president each year, is a re-enactment of the founding of the divinely protected state, in its position as world leader. The temporal-historical beginnings of these rituals, and any of their parts, must preferably remain mysterious to be truly efficacious. If the state is presented as inaugurated by Providence, it is not an artifice but was already meant to be even before it was instituted by the Founding Fathers, or the Pilgrims or whoever and the ritual is meant to communicate and inculcate that it was meant to be this way, regardless of the historical fact. The sovereign makes himself and his state in the act of the transhistorical exemplification of this persuasive narrative using the Pilgrims, and having a turkey chosen for his spectacle.9 If the turkey was chosen by a priest, like the emperors sacred rice fields in Japan (see Fiskesj 2003), the spectacle might be even more efficacious. l
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