This argument assumes that the feuding situation has been steady for a long period. In fact the great extension of State interference and the recent improvement in police and judicial institutions can hardly have failed to alter the working of the feuds. The hypothesis that feuds such as I have described could not exist unresolved in small communities over long periods could be saved by arguing that in fact some more efficient means of settling village quarrels existed in the past but has disappeared. It would seem improbable that a highly formal machinery would be forgotten, but shifts in power could have some effect as I have myself suggested elsewhere (Stirling (1960) pp. 73, 74).
One fact undoubtedly favours this view. The increased efficiency of the government has greatly decreased the autonomy of the village communities, and has weakened the strength of their indigenous leaders. It is therefore conceivable that, in the past, it was more often possible to forestall serious quarrels, and also to bring more pressure for settlement on feuding lineages. But it is impossible to prove this, because no evidence exists which could provide an accurate measure of violence in the villages in the past, or a detailed analysis of political relations between villagers.
Instead of arguing that the present situation is a priori improbable and cannot therefore represent a stable state, it is also possible to re-examine the a priori argument itself. The argument as presented by Colson (1953), and expanded by Gluckman (1956) Chap. I, is an economic one: the daily supply of food depends on co-operation, and a state of hostility calling for homicide renders this co-operation impossible. In the Turkish village, on the contrary, supplies of staple foods are stored in each household behind stone walls and locked doors, and even animals can be cared for for short periods without co-operation. In any case a feud between two lineages does not prevent the member households on both sides sending their animals to the same village herdsmen. Further, within a state armed with police and a system of justice, however remote from the village, the village is not a political unit in the way Nuer or