An Eye for an Eye, A Tooth for a Tooth: A Cross-Cultural Study of Feuding'

BLOOD revenge or feuding has occupied a prominent place in anthropological theory since the days of the evolutionists. Scholars interested in ethnological jurisprudence, such as Richard Cherry (1890), argued that law had evolved through a series of stages: feuding without compensation was followed by a stage in which blood money could be paid in lieu of retaliation; eventually a stage was reached in which tribal assemblies intervened to decide disputes. Such an approach has contained within it the hypothesis that the higher the level of political complexity in a society, the less frequently feuding is found. More recently, anthropologists, such as Hoebel (1954), have taken what is essentially a functional approach: what factors produce feuding and in what manner does a vengence system regulate behavior? Using this approach, two Dutch anthropologists, van Velzen and van Wetering (1960) have found support for the hypothesis that societies with fraternal interest groups are more likely to have feuding than societies without fraternal interest groups. Another hypothesis which can be used to explain the presence or absence of feuding derives from the approach that inter-societal relations influence the internal structure of a society. In particular, societies that frequently engage in war have more internal cohesion, and hence a lower likelihood of feuding, than societies which have peaceful external relations. This paper reports a cross-cultural study of feuding in which the above three hypotheses were tested using a sample of 50 societies drawn from the Human Relations Area Files. METHODOLOGY