ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 1, January 2015
and forgiveness do not apply. Thus reaching this goal requires a fundamental transformation of the traditions establishing and regulating kinship behavior.
One of the earliest examples of an attempt to prevent blood feuds through the modification of traditions is the aforementioned Code of Hammurabi, which brought together into one geographic area two unrelated categories of people: the Sumerians and the
Semitics (Diamond, 1951). Michael McCullough (2008) describes how a similar process gradually took place in Western Europe, where “the governments…assumed
more and more responsibility for social control, [and] offenders became responsible to
the state, rather than to their victims, for their crimes” (p. 173). Trevor Dean (1997)
describes that, in Italy, this change was a long, gradual, and difficult process:
No law denied the legitimacy of vendetta, it is said. The law sought only to limit it,
to impose truces or to attempt pacifications. The law stopped at the family threshold, and the state conceded personal injury as a private affair. The inability of the
city-states to enforce their laws led them not just to tolerate vendetta, but to recognize and sanction such ‘private justice’. This picture is generally thought to have
been transformed during the fifteenth