{"id":38,"date":"2005-02-17T22:09:42","date_gmt":"2005-02-17T22:09:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/phlogma.com\/?p=38"},"modified":"2006-02-25T14:28:48","modified_gmt":"2006-02-25T22:28:48","slug":"not-even-quite-buckshot-vengeance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aporia.net\/phlogma\/general\/not-even-quite-buckshot-vengeance-38","title":{"rendered":"Not even quite scattershot vengeance"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>This head-hunting that takes place on the Northwest Coast after a death is no matter of blood revenge or of organized violence. There is no effort to tie the subsequent killing with any responsibility on the part of the victim for the death of a person who is being mourned. A chief whose son has died goes visiting wherever his fancy dictates, and he says to his host, \u201cMy prince has died today, and you go with him.\u201d\u009d Then he kills him. In this, according to their interpretation, he acts nobly because he has not been downed. He has thrust back in return. The whole procedure is meaningless without the fundamental paranoid reading of bereavement. Death, like all the other untoward accidents of existence, confounds man\u2019s pride and can only be handled in the category of insults.<\/p>\n<p>[Ruth Benedict, <a href=\"biblog\/?p=53\">&#8220;Anthropology and the Abnormal&#8221;<\/a>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>(Compare, for example, the invasion of Iraq after  September 11th &#8230;)<\/p>\n<p>Benedict goes on to say, when faced with such \u201cmegalomaniacal\u201d\u009d behavior, we either elevate it to noble singularity or decry it as subhuman. Each reaction is still within the scope of human rationality, <em>viz<\/em>, understandable, once certain fundamental non-rational assumptions are held unassailable.<\/p>\n<p>Once that, indeed, the universe is clockwork&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This head-hunting that takes place on the Northwest Coast after a death is no matter of blood revenge or of organized violence. There is no effort to tie the subsequent killing with any responsibility on the part of the victim for the death of a person who is being mourned. A chief whose son has &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/aporia.net\/phlogma\/general\/not-even-quite-buckshot-vengeance-38\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Not even quite scattershot vengeance&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-relativism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aporia.net\/phlogma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aporia.net\/phlogma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aporia.net\/phlogma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aporia.net\/phlogma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aporia.net\/phlogma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aporia.net\/phlogma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aporia.net\/phlogma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aporia.net\/phlogma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aporia.net\/phlogma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}