Multi-disciplinary scientist and big-picture virtuoso JARED DIAMOND offers some reflections on retributive violence in an essay titled ‘Vengeance Is Ours’, published in The New Yorker on 21 April 2008. At the core of the study is an episode in a bloody, protracted war between two Highland clans in Papua New Guinea, the Handas and the Ombals. So drawn-out was the conflict in question that by the time one of the protagonists, Daniel Wemp, was relating the events to Diamond, the cause of it all had been obscured; Wemp assumed that the initial spark was a dispute involving a pig. Battlefield tactics, psychological warfare, fluid alliances, game-theoretical quandaries, all lend a simmering intensity to the narrative. A broad ethnographic sketch, which includes an examination of the ways in which violence is woven into the fabric of Highland society, provides context. Peppered throughout the text are comparisons between the cultural-institutional frameworks of tribal and mass societies, with special attention paid to the conventions related to governance. Diamond highlights the role played by state government in helping humanity break the vicious cycle of zero-sum tribal opposition. The state accomplishes this by being the agent to which dispute resolution and punishment for crimes are outsourced — and, a corollary, the holder of a monopoly on legitimate violence. The social peace achieved through such institutional arrangements, however, comes at a great human cost. This point is poignantly illustrated by the experiences of one of Diamond’s own family members during the Second World War.
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