c b wrote:
>
> Doug H:
>
> "A History of Violence: Testing the ‘Culture of Honor’ in the US South"
>
> -
> -clip-
>
> ^^^^^^^^
>
> Herding: now that's a historical materialist type explanation; Animal
> domestication predominant mode of production determines violent [clip]
It is a historicist explanation, and it runs counter even to the "World-View" Marxism you have been defending.
The explanation given of Irish and Scotch violence may be correct. And if it is (I have no knowledge of this) _then_ it would have been an _available_ cultural practice for settleres in the u.s. South. But a historical materialist explanation has to account for why the tradition was maintained; why did it not die out as many traditions quickly do when the original purpose is no longer operative. Hence a materialist explanation (sas opposed to a historicisist explanation) must focus on material conditions _in_ the South which enabled and or enforced the continuations of the habit.
(Historicism finds the meaning of an instittuion in its origins. This is ahistorical.)
I would myself want to look _first_ at (a) the peculiar institution of slavery and (b) the sharp division of the South into "Aristocraticv" Planers on the one hand and (b) an impoverished class of white susbsistence farmers desperate to maintain the "difference" a white sking made. I'm not asserting this because I don't have the empirical knowledge necessary to develop it, but it would seem to be the best provisional hypothesis, not just some Just-So story about and inherited tradition with no explanation of the material basis of _accepting_ that inheritance.
Carrol