The Peace in the Feud: History and Anthropology, 1955-2005
An interdisciplinary colloquium celebrating the 50th anniversary of Max Gluckman's Custom & Conflict in Africa , held at the University of Manchester , Centre for Late Antiquity, 28-29 October 2005.
Negotiation is currently underway with Blackwell's for publication of conference proceedings to include contributions from Philippe Buc, Stuart Carroll, Kate Cooper, Mary Douglas, Maya Green, Guy Halsall, John Hudson, Conrad Leyser, RI Moore, JD Peel, David Pratten, Terence Ranger, Richard Rathbone, Karen Sykes, Stephen D White and Ian Wood.
Conference Description:
In the spring of 1955, Max Gluckman, Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, delivered a series of lectures on the Third Programme entitled Custom & Conflict in Africa; his book of that name came out later in the year. The main theme of Gluckman's lectures was the constraint of conflict by custom. He showed how the tensions endemic in African tribal society were, in fact, contained by the power of tradition. There was a paradoxical 'peace in the feud', Gluckman argued--centripetal forces pulling against the centrifugal effects of vengeance and violence.
Gluckman explicitly sought to attract the attention of historians of medieval Europe, and his challenge was met with a ready response from his Manchester colleague, Michael Wallace-Hadrill. In 1959, the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library carried an article from Wallace-Hadrill, 'The Blood-Feud of the Franks', which suggested a re-interpretation of violence in Merovingian Gaul, precisely along the lines suggested by Gluckman. This functionalist approach to feud became the dominant paradigm for early medievalists for the next generation; only within the past decade has it come into serious question. In other words, the Gluckman/Wallace-Hadrill encounter at Manchester can be seen as one of the more influential moments in late twentieth-century intellectual history.
The 2005 Manchester colloquium reviewed the conversation between historians and anthropologists as it has developed in the past two generations. Did Wallace-Hadrill's uptake of Gluckman depend on their shared adherence to functionalist premises? Is such an exchange still possible in the era of (post)cultural history and (post-)processual anthropology? Fanning out from the question of feud, the colloquium considered other topics such as conversion, exchange, and the idea of Europe.