Mutual Aid: A Factor of EvolutionKropotkin, Petr Alekseevich, kniaz
Science
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
Kropotkin, Petr Alekseevich, kniaz
Cooperation; Social groups; Social institutions
I will terminate my remarks by mentioning another custom which also is a
source of most erroneous conclusions. I mean the practice of
blood-revenge. All savages are under the impression that blood shed must
be revenged by blood. If any one has been killed, the murderer must die;
if any one has been wounded, the aggressor's blood must be shed. There
is no exception to the rule, not even for animals; so the hunter's blood
is shed on his return to the village when he has shed the blood of an
animal. That is the savages' conception of justice--a conception which
yet prevails in Western Europe as regards murder. Now, when both the
offender and the offended belong to the same tribe, the tribe and the
offended person settle the affair.(39) But when the offender belongs to
another tribe, and that tribe, for one reason or another, refuses a
compensation, then the offended tribe decides to take the revenge
itself. Primitive folk so much consider every one's acts as a tribal
affair, dependent upon tribal approval, that they easily think the clan
responsible for every one's acts. Therefore, the due revenge may be
taken upon any member of the offender's clan or relatives.(40) It may
often happen, however, that the retaliation goes further than the
offence. In trying to inflict a wound, they may kill the offender, or
wound him more than they intended to do, and this becomes a cause for a
new feud, so that the primitive legislators were careful in requiring
the retaliation to be limited to an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,
and blood for blood.(41)
It is remarkable, however, that with most primitive folk like feuds are
infinitely rarer than might be expected; though with some of them they
may attain abnormal proportions, especially with mountaineers who have
been driven to the highlands by foreign invaders, such as the
mountaineers of Caucasia, and especially those of Borneo--the Dayaks.
With the Dayaks--we were told lately--the feuds had gone so far that a
young man could neither marry nor be proclaimed of age before he had
secured the head of an enemy. This horrid practice was fully described
in a modern English work.(42) It appears, however, that this affirmation
was a gross exaggeration. Moreover, Dayak "head-hunting" takes quite
another aspect when we learn that the supposed "headhunter" is not
actuated at all by personal passion. He acts under what he considers as
a moral obligation towards his tribe, just as the European judge who, in
obedience to the same, evidently wrong, principle of "blood for blood,"
hands over the condemned murderer to the hangman. Both the Dayak and the
judge would even feel remorse if sympathy moved them to spare the
murderer. That is why the Dayaks, apart from the murders they commit
when actuated by their conception of justice, are depicted, by all those
who know them, as a most sympathetic people. Thus Carl Bock, the same
author who has given such a terrible picture of head-hunting, writes:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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