PREFACE xix
community is indeterminate. Thus amongst the Australian aborigines the independent, autonomous, or, if you will, the sovereign, group is a local horde or clan which rarely includes more than roo members and often as few as thirty. Within this group, order is maintained by the authority of the old men. But for the celebration of religious rites a number of such hordes come together in one camp. In the community so assembled there is some sort of recognized machinery for dealing with injuries inflicted by one person or group on another. To give an example: if a man has had his wife stolen from him and the thief, from another horde, is present in the assembled camp, the injured man will make known his wrong by raising a clamour in the recognized, appropriate way. The public sentiment of the whole assembly, being appealed to, may compel the offender to submit to having a spear thrust into his thigh by the injured husband.
The point to be noted is that such assemblies for religious or ceremonial purposes consist on different occasions of different collections of hordes. Each assembly constitutes for the time being a political society. If there is a feud between two of the constituent hordes, it must either be settled and peace made or it must be kept in abeyance during the meeting, to break out again later on. Thus on different occasions a horde belongs temporarily to different larger temporary political groups. But there is no definite permanent group of this kind of which a horde can be said to be a part. Conditions similar to this are found in some parts of Africa—for example, among the Tallensi.1
There are exceedingly few human societies known to us in which there is not some form of warfare, and at least a good half of the history of political development is in one way or another a history of wars. The comparative study of war as a social institution has not yet been undertaken. Amongst the various different kinds of warfare that can be distinguished, what we may call wars of conquest have been important in Africa, as they have been in Europe. When such a war is successful it establishes one people as conquerors over another who are thus incorporated into a larger political society, sometimes in an inferior position as a subject people.
But the institution of war may take a different form in which
1 Infra, p. 239jjf. Where a political structure of this kind exists, it is generally either ignored or completely misunderstood by colonial administrators.