Is Killing Wrong?: A Study in Pure Sociology

Notes

1 THE MORALITY OF HOMICIDE 1. I define homicide as the lethal assault of a human being. This definition includes killing by beating, shooting, choking, stabbing, suffocating, poisoning, drowning , hanging, burying, and dismembering. It excludes killing through supernatural means, such as witchcraft, or as a by-product of another activity, such as manufacturing . The restriction to intrasocietal homicide confines the analysis to cases with a high expectation of equal treatment. It does not mean, however, that killings between members of different societies are forever beyond the scope of the theory discussed in this book. 2. Throughout this book, I use the “ethnographic present tense” to refer to societies studied by anthropologists. This usage has the drawback of perhaps giving the impression that even at the time they were studied these societies were eternal and unchanging, that they had no history (rosaldo 1980; Ferguson 1995). It has the virtue, however, of strongly conveying to the reader the immediacy and reality of how people in these societies lived and acted, at least at one time. It should be noted that virtually all these societies have since changed greatly, some beyond recognition (see, e.g., Hutchinson 1996; knauft 2002). 3. See, for example, http://www.finnvalley.ie/history/lordlifford/index.html. retrieved august 24, 2008. 4. There is no universally agreed-upon term for communal or nongovernmental social control: “informal social control,” “other social control,” “law-like processes,” and even “law” are among the designations that have been used. 5. Measurement of popular severity is still in its infancy, and the ranking of severity used here may require revision in the future. For example, in at least some cases, shunning may be more severe than compensation: a victim’s group might opt to pay mild compensation over being permanently exiled from its home. on average, though, compensation is more severe: compensation payments in preindustrial societies are typically too onerous to be made by a single individual but require contributions from an entire group, and often do not entirely negate the risk of vengeance, while shunning is more typically temporary than permanent, and visited on an individual or the immediate nuclear family than the group as a whole. Hence, until a more fine-grained measure of severity is developed that can rank particular cases of compensation and particular acts of shunning, the more global strategy of ranking all compensation ahead of all shunning will be used here. NOTES 204 notes to chapter 1 6. Modes of popular justice that have died out may sometimes make a comeback . In albania, for example, feuding had become rare under the Communist regime (1944–91) but resurfaced following its demise (see, e.g., Blumenfeld 2003: 75–86; Waters 2007: 59–61). 7. Severity is an intuitive concept, but it can be measured more precisely by the degree to which social actors avoid the outcome: the more severe the sanction, the more people and groups shy away from it (see Black 1979a). In law, the death penalty is more severe than life imprisonment—people fight lengthy legal battles to turn death sentences into sentences of life behind bars (see, e.g., McFeely 2000). Likewise, a long prison sentence is more severe than a short one, a conviction is more severe than an acquittal, and an arrest is more severe than no arrest. Indeed, as will be seen in chapter 2, each stage of the criminal justice system can be seen as an incremental increase in severity (Black 1976). Popular justice does not typically have a system of well-defined stages, but its sanctions too can be ranked in terms of their repulsivity. Self-help is more severe than shunning—people take greater steps to avoid it. Praise is the least severe sanction because it attracts rather than repels individuals and groups. 8. For a thorough discussion of the legal process involved in a fairly typical homicide case, see Pohlman (1999). 9. In the United States, about half of the population is served by a coroner, the other half by a medical examiner. a coroner is an elected or appointed public official, who may or may not have medical training, empowered to hold inquests before juries to determine the manner and cause of death. a medical examiner is a physician who makes a determination based on death-scene investigation, medical files, autopsies, and laboratory tests (Timmermans 2006: 4–6). 10. In Philadelphia, 1948–52, 2 percent of those convicted of homicide were sentenced to death; 18 percent to life imprisonment...