ABSTRACT
Just as violence has long been taken to be a sign of the primitive, the savage or the uncivilized, or alternatively of the deviant, the individual and the unsocialized, so anthropology has long been concerned to show that violence obeys rules, is part of culture, and even fulfils certain social functions. Classic *functionalist accounts of institutions such as the feud (e.g. Gluckman 1956), stress that feuds bind people together, through the shared norms and expectations that participants invoke, even as they appear to divide them. But, despite this well-worn interpretive path, violence retains its capacity to unsettle and disturb.
