Introduction

The social geography of the Highlands is a patchwork of clans – landholding groups of kin – linked to one another in political alliances or separated by enmity. In precolonial times, enduring antagonisms between particular groups, erupting into violence on occasion, were dominant facts of life (see, e.g., Meggitt 1977). Warfare inhibited travel, restricting the geographical elaboration of both personal and clan relationships and wealth exchanges. The endemic state of war – more accurately “Warre” in Sahlins's (1968, 1972: Chapter 4) sense – might have been both a means and a result of a political system in which access to force was decentralized. Still, if it was the reflection of a self-help attitude critical to the reproduction of egalitarian social relations, the readiness of tribesmen to take up arms in defense of their interests was not the only means of sustaining such a social order, nor were its modalities entirely egalitarian, as we shall see.