Art of the Feud

In his Bloodtaking and Peacemaking (180-1), his study of Icelandic society, William Ian Miller distinguishes between feuds and “other types of violence like war, duels, or simple revenge killings that involve no one beyond the killer and his victim.” While he recognizes the difficulties of definition, he lays out seven “features and impressionist observations”:

“1. Feud is a relationship (hostile) between two groups. 

“2. Unlike ad hoc revenge killing that can be an individual matter, feuding involves groups that can be recruited by any number of principles, among which kinship, vicinage, household, or clientage are most usual. 

“3. Unlike war, feud does not involve relatively large mobilizations, but only occasional musterings for limited purposes. Violence is controlled; casualties rarely reach double digits in any single encounter. 

“4. Feud involves collective liability. The target need not be the actual wrongdoer, nor, for that matter, need the vengeance-taker be the person most wronged.

“5. A notion of exchange governs the process, a kind of my-turn/your-turn rhythm, with offensive and defensive positions alternating after each confrontation.

“6. As a corollary to the preceding item, people keep score. 

“7. People who feud tend to believe that honor and affronts to it are the prime motivators of hostilities. Crossculturally, there appears to be a correlation between the existence of feud and a culture of honor. 

“8. Feud is governed by norms that limit the class of possible expiators and the appropriatenesses of responses. For instance, most feuding cultures recognize a rough rule of equivalence in riposte, the lex talionis being but one example.

“9. There are culturally acceptable means for making, temporary or permanent settlements of hostility.”

Feuding isn’t mayhem or uncontrolled violence, but has moral, judicial, and political dimensions: “It is moral in its retributive aspect when it is the means for punishing violations of social norms. It is juridical when, as in Iceland, it provides the sanction behind arbitrated settlements and legal judgments, in effect serving as the executive power of a polity that has no other formally instituted state executive apparatus. And it is political because it is one of the key structures in which the competition for power, the struggle for dominance, is played out.”

All of which makes the feud sound positively civilized, almost a bumptious community dance.