ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 1, January 2015
By their deterrent force a man’s kin are his security against mistreatment by the
hostile world of nonrelatives. (p. 375; see Given, 1977)
Though Daly and Wilson emphasize the compatibility of the kinship basis of blood
feuds with kin selection, crucially, this passage also highlights aspects of blood feuds
for which kin selection, alone, cannot account: the cultural traditions (“prescriptions…duties…obligation”) and the historical attempts of nation-states (e.g., England
– “English society”) to suppress them – to which we add the ethnographic detail that
blood feuds often involve large numbers of kin far more distantly related than is explainable by kin selection (r = .125; e.g., first cousins).
Although kin selection may have led to the evolution of psychological mechanisms
influencing individuals to support very close kin, an evolutionary analysis must also
incorporate and account for various “cultural forms” of kinship and kinship behavior
(Carroll, 1995, p. 150; Jobling, 2001, p. 29), including rules and practices regarding
blood revenge/feud behavior. That is, conventional evolutionary explanations of blood
revenge might be able to account for aspects of the behavior by positing selection for
the emotions or other psychological mechanisms that blood revenge entails, but are
insufficient to explain other aspects of the behavior, such as the existence of cultural
traditions regulating these mechanisms – the rules prescribing and proscribing blood
revenge/feud and other kinship behaviors that have been handed down from ancestor
to descendant through the generations.
For example, selection for psychological mechanisms engendering nepotism cannot
alone account for Christopher Boehm’s (1984) finding that when a killing occurs the
“retaliatory action is regulated by custom” (p. 196), or that “the motivation to take
blood was…developed primarily through informal means of socialization” (p. 63).
Such mechanisms are insufficient to explain, as another example, the Leopold von
Schrenck (1854) observation that among the Gilyak: “Carrying out blood revenge is in
part made easier and in part more difficult for the individual because it is not restricted
to those who directly participated in the act of bloodshed, but also more or less involves their relatives and imposes certain obligations on them” (p. 1067). The ethnographic record reveals that such obligations often – if not universally – include who is
to revenge whom and against whom. Further, the ethnographic record is many and
widespread with examples of traditions that prescribe kinspersons to protect one another from retaliation – extending blood revenge/feud horizontally and vertically – as
well as traditions that proscribe limitations on blood revenge/feu