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Blood Revenge: The Enactment and Management of Conflict in Montenegro and Other Tribal Societies
"Boehm substantially advances our understanding of the phenomenon of feuding. His book deserves to become a standard reference on that topic."—American Anthropologist
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations and Maps
Preface
Note on the Serbo-Croatian Language
Glossary
1. Introduction
2. Doing Research on European Tribesmen
3. Traditional Montenegro: A Refuge-Area Warrior Adaptation
4. The Meaning of Osveta
5. The Moral Legitimacy of Feuding
6. Trajectory of a Feud
7. The End Game: Management of Conflict
8. The Importance of Decisions
9. Making Further Sense of the Feud
10. Feuding and Ecology: The Question of Costs and Gains
11. Feuding in the Nonliterate World
12. An Ethological Perspective on Feuding
13. A Final Word on the Blood Feud in Montenegro
Notes
Bibliography
Index
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations and Maps
Preface
Note on the Serbo-Croatian Language
Glossary
1. Introduction
2. Doing Research on European Tribesmen
3. Traditional Montenegro: A Refuge-Area Warrior Adaptation
4. The Meaning of Osveta
5. The Moral Legitimacy of Feuding
6. Trajectory of a Feud
7. The End Game: Management of Conflict
8. The Importance of Decisions
9. Making Further Sense of the Feud
10. Feuding and Ecology: The Question of Costs and Gains
11. Feuding in the Nonliterate World
12. An Ethological Perspective on Feuding
13. A Final Word on the Blood Feud in Montenegro
Notes
Bibliography
Index
- GenresAnthropologyNonfiction
284 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1984
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
February 12, 2018
rare study of feuding tribes in the Balkans
Back in graduate school I once wrote a paper on Albanian tribal blood feuds for a course on kinship and family. Though there was a book about the Laws of Lek, which traditionally governed those feuds, there were no anthropology books about the realities of the process in the Balkan mountains. I had to scrape up information from all kinds of sources. Many years later I read "Broken April", a wonderful novel about Albanian blood feuds by Ismail Kadare, but until now, I had never read anything else. BLOOD REVENGE is an excellent study of the feuds and connected customs, beliefs, and expectations among the mountain tribes of Montenegro (formerly independent, then part of Yugoslavia, now independent again). These hardy souls, along with some Catholic tribes of Albania and Kosovo, managed to remain almost continually independent of the Ottoman rule that shrouded the Balkans for centuries.
The author did his work in the mid-1960s and the book came out in 1984, so anthropology becomes social history here. However, when I ventured into the Albanian mountains (not far from Montenegro) in 1996, I met people who were involved in blood feuds, which had returned after the end of "communism".
Why did Montenegrins engage in these destructive activities when surrounded by a powerful enemy? My question is the basic one which Boehm tries, quite successfully, to answer. He argues that in societies without any strong central authority, crimes, injustices, and even insults can lead to murder, but there is no one to enforce a law, nor is there any prison. The resulting system is one of managed or socially-controlled tit for tat killings, involving clan or tribal members. There was a well-known process for such murder and for reconciliation as well. Before the emergence of the Montenegrin state in mid-19th century, the many tribes and their composite clans settled their grievances by feuding. Honor demanded it. A person who did not retaliate was usually ostracized as weak and unfit to be in society. If you had shed another clan's blood you had to either fight or emigrate. Boehm takes examples from several other societies---Inuit, Bedouin, Jivaro, Nuer (South Sudan), and Enga (Papua New Guinea)---to show that various styles of feud existed around the world. Because by the 1960s, feuds had come to an end in Montenegro, Boehm used historical records as well as interviews of villagers (who still identified with their tribes) in which he tried to discover the moral legitimacy of feuding. I respected him for not condemning the feuding tribesmen, but instead trying to find out what they felt about it. He concludes that it probably lessened conflict rather than increased it. In war, the sky was the limit; you killed any enemy you found, but in feuds, killing was tightly controlled.
His stories of life in Montenegro, some excellent black and white pictures, translations of old records of 18th and 19th century feuds, and a very clear exposition without jargon are the positive sides of this interesting book. However, I think he hammered his points home until they became somewhat repetitive, so the last part of the book was not as interesting as the first.
Back in graduate school I once wrote a paper on Albanian tribal blood feuds for a course on kinship and family. Though there was a book about the Laws of Lek, which traditionally governed those feuds, there were no anthropology books about the realities of the process in the Balkan mountains. I had to scrape up information from all kinds of sources. Many years later I read "Broken April", a wonderful novel about Albanian blood feuds by Ismail Kadare, but until now, I had never read anything else. BLOOD REVENGE is an excellent study of the feuds and connected customs, beliefs, and expectations among the mountain tribes of Montenegro (formerly independent, then part of Yugoslavia, now independent again). These hardy souls, along with some Catholic tribes of Albania and Kosovo, managed to remain almost continually independent of the Ottoman rule that shrouded the Balkans for centuries.
The author did his work in the mid-1960s and the book came out in 1984, so anthropology becomes social history here. However, when I ventured into the Albanian mountains (not far from Montenegro) in 1996, I met people who were involved in blood feuds, which had returned after the end of "communism".
Why did Montenegrins engage in these destructive activities when surrounded by a powerful enemy? My question is the basic one which Boehm tries, quite successfully, to answer. He argues that in societies without any strong central authority, crimes, injustices, and even insults can lead to murder, but there is no one to enforce a law, nor is there any prison. The resulting system is one of managed or socially-controlled tit for tat killings, involving clan or tribal members. There was a well-known process for such murder and for reconciliation as well. Before the emergence of the Montenegrin state in mid-19th century, the many tribes and their composite clans settled their grievances by feuding. Honor demanded it. A person who did not retaliate was usually ostracized as weak and unfit to be in society. If you had shed another clan's blood you had to either fight or emigrate. Boehm takes examples from several other societies---Inuit, Bedouin, Jivaro, Nuer (South Sudan), and Enga (Papua New Guinea)---to show that various styles of feud existed around the world. Because by the 1960s, feuds had come to an end in Montenegro, Boehm used historical records as well as interviews of villagers (who still identified with their tribes) in which he tried to discover the moral legitimacy of feuding. I respected him for not condemning the feuding tribesmen, but instead trying to find out what they felt about it. He concludes that it probably lessened conflict rather than increased it. In war, the sky was the limit; you killed any enemy you found, but in feuds, killing was tightly controlled.
His stories of life in Montenegro, some excellent black and white pictures, translations of old records of 18th and 19th century feuds, and a very clear exposition without jargon are the positive sides of this interesting book. However, I think he hammered his points home until they became somewhat repetitive, so the last part of the book was not as interesting as the first.
Displaying 1 of 1 review