ABSTRACT

Turton analyzes a post-colonial eruption of “traditional” warfare among the Mursi in Ethiopia. This outbreak in certain ways resembled that described by Rosman and Rubel, because in both instances an isolated “primitive” folk suddenly started massacring itself. Rosman and Rubel accounted for this fighting in terms of nineteenth century, capitalist growth. Turton’s article equally implicates capitalist developments, but in his case these developments are those involving capitalist states’ policies to defeat their opponents politically. Capitalist states throughout most of the twentieth century were opposed by communist states. This confrontation after World War II was called the Cold War. During it, throughout the world, capitalists armed their allies while communists did the same with theirs, so that even the Mursi—in the far southwest of Ethiopia—acquired automatic weapons with which to intensify enormously their “traditional” violences. Cold war provoked hot war.