"Kingly things" (term coined by Max Gluckman, 1983) are examples of institutionalized enclaved commodities that are diverted by royalty in order to "maintain sumptuary exclusivity, commercial advantage, and display of rank.""Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value." In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by A. Appadurai, (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, 1986), pp. 22. Examples of this may be landed and movable property, or the "exclusive rights to things" that aid in the "evolution and materialization of social institutions and political relationships."Earle, Timothy "Archaeology, Property, and Prehistory." Annual Review of Anthropology 29(2000): 39-40 According to Kopytoff, "kingly things" often make up the "symbolic inventory of a society: public lands, monuments, state art collections, the paraphernalia of political power, royal residences, chiefly insignia, ritual objects, and so on."Kopytoff, Igor "The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as a Process." In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by A. Appadurai, (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, 1986) pp. 73. Some African chiefs, for example, have been known to claim rights over tangible animal and human body parts such as teeth, bones, skulls, pelts, and feathers, which are believed to connect humans to their ancestral origins. Anthropologist Mary Helms argues that by controlling "kingly things" chiefs control access to ancestors and origins, ultimately legitimizing whatever power this cosmological access affords them.Helms, Mary W. "Tangible Durability." In Access to Origins: Affines, Ancestors, and Aristocrats, by M. W. Helms (University of Texas Press: Austin, 1998), pp. 164–173.
