Terms for cowboy vary with the region. Zilberg, Elana. [35] His gang of bandits eventually grew into a rebel army and Deng conducted attacks on the government in Fujian. However, in some cases it proves difficult to distinguish between ordinary bandits and politically minded heroic outlaws, fighting against the oppressor. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia.com cannot guarantee each citation it generates. That peasants were often misguided and ultimately shifted their loyalties only serves to demonstrate that they are incapable by nature of taking legitimate mass political actionunless, as Rousseau intimated, they are under the leadership of the more enlightened urban elites. Recent research has revealed that bandits cannot be generally identified with the itinerant population. The group called on the state government and security agencies to evacuate migrant herdsmen "to where they came from, as was done with Almajiris", to stop the attacks. Local responses were mixed but increasingly hostile to such collective negative stereotypes. Insects, bugs, those many-legged creatures theyre all around us. The Colombian Violencia offers another example of banditry, which even Hobsbawm acknowledges to be "in essence more political than social." See also the sectionRural Life (volume 2);Peasants and Rural Laborers and the sectionSocial Protest (in this volume); and other articles in this section. Consequently, it is difficult at the local level to distinguish those acts that can be called personal (such as a vendetta over a matter of honor) from those that can be labeled political (such as protecting the political interests of the elite). Conversely, there are "contemporary bandits" involved in protection rackets, common robberies, murder, and other crimes. See also Crime and Punishment ; Vagrants and Beggars . https://www.encyclopedia.com/international/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/banditry, "Banditry In central and eastern Europe and in the Balkans, it was found in the countryside, in specific conditions (such as following wars and massive dislocations) and in specific periods, especially in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the modern nation-state was emerging. Marco Sciarra, the famous Neapolitan brigand chief of the 1590s, declared himself a "scourge of God and envoy of God against usurers and the possessors of unproductive wealth" (quoted in Hobsbawm, p. 98). Often all these features coexist in particular examples of banditry, although one may be more dominant than the others. Where there was no (state) law, Rousseau discerned justice; where the people were oppressed, Rousseau anticipated freedom; where the ancien rgime recognized anarchic, bloodthirsty bandits, he discerned exemplary citizens capable of discipline. German authorities suppressed partisan opposition with maximum force[4] In their typical form, most stories about bandits can be reduced to the following pattern: The triggering incident is a slight to personal or family honor by another family or individual of equal or superior status. [38], Similarly, small groups of local bandits could also end up joining larger groups of rebels. The term corsair is tied to the Mediterranean Sea, where, from roughly the late 14th century to the early 19th century, the Ottoman Empire dueled with the Christian states of Europe for maritime supremacy. Basingstoke, U.K., 1988. In Puglia few legal or illegal opportunities were available for social mobility, and the social relations of production encouraged the emergence of collective solidarity and of anarchosyndicalism (a doctrine advocating that workers seize control of the economy and government). Dreams and Realities: Selected Fiction of Juana Manuela Gorriti. Morelia, Mexico: Instituto Michoacano de Cultura; Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. Jos Mara Lus Mora, 1999. They exhibited little loyalty and switched sides according to their assessment of the best potential profit. Modern research has tried to debunk this myth, but largely to no avail. In Greece banditry was intimately grounded in pastoralism and even had a seasonal cycle based on movements from the plains to the mountains. For animals with multiple potential group names, weve bolded the most common that you might encounter. The Cuban independence period illustrates both political banditry and the interpretive debates going on in the study of banditry. Some people, possibly to prove they paid attention in history class, also throw around privateer. . Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientficas, 2003. Passive complicity consisted of a series of unconnected individual acceptances of the status quo and served to conceal illegal violent acts. . Whats interesting: Despite being a memorable term of venery, its not actually used much. In the beginning he is portrayed as an ordinary criminal robbing from everyone in sight. Encyclopedia.com. Violent retribution was "justice," a private affair not to be reported to the state. In both cases, there was a political consciousness and agenda at work, a situation not typical of the pre-political social bandit. Privateering could be shady business, and this accounts for some of the lexical overlap with the word pirate. As with mammals, birds come in all forms, leading to a delightfully poetic sampling of collective nouns, from convocations to murders. Many bandit groups plagued rural areas, but towns and cities could also be the haunt of the medieval gangster. For many people, the term pirate conjures up images of the so-called golden age of piracy, in the 17th and 18th centuries, along with legendary pirates such as Blackbeard or Captain Kidd or their fictional equivalents such as Long John Silver or Captain Jack Sparrow. In Anglo-American folklore Dick Turpin (17051739) is the English counterpart of Cartouche. During the Ming Dynasty, military and civil jurisdictions were separated. London, 1971. Pirates, Privateers, Corsairs, Buccaneers: What's the Difference? Christon I. Archer, "Banditry and Revolution in New Spain, 17901821," in Biblioteca Americana 1, no. The political ideology of local elites and their relationship to the state is also important because bandits may either be co-opted by local elites as a means to resist the state (as occurred in Sicily in the immediate postWorld War II period) or, reluctantly, by the state, as in nineteenth-century Greece, where they were used for irredentist adventures and to threaten the supporters of rival politicians. These charismatic leaders were not only skilled in fighting and riding but also possessed material and social capital. Like the contemporary "Bandit Queen" in India, Guiliano became the subject of novels and films. A full understanding takes into account not just the various ways in which strongmen were co-opted by the powerful but also how such men were portrayed by various strata of society. Lsebrink, Hans-Jrgen, ed. Each Redbrand wore a simple, dirty scarlet cloak. Argentina's rural poor identified with the persecution suffered by legendary gauchos like Juan Moreira and Martn Fierro. When caught and juridically processed, their bodies became the subject of a publicly demonstrated spectacle of state power. Bandits in Peru, Mexico, and Argentina operated in a similar fashion. In other cases, such as in Corsica, mules' ears were cut off as a ritual death threat. In Corsica, for example, many bandits were obliged to rely on the support of family and kin and thus soon found themselves further enmeshed in family feuds. School here comes from schle, the Dutch word referring to a group, troop, or band. Thats also where you get the word shoal, an alternate collective noun for fish. Bandit - Definition, Meaning & Synonyms | Vocabulary.com Hobsbawm, E. J. Bandits. Davis, John, A. Family feuds, endemic to the Brazilian backlands, moved Lampio to take up the outlaw life. and Local codes of behavior such as omert (Sicilian for "silence") obliged individuals to maintain a solidarity of silence and noncooperation with the authorities or risk extreme ostracism and revenge. Banditry, Chivalry, and Terror in German Fiction, 17901830. [37] The rebellion took the Ming almost two years to crush. Most animal studies emphas, Paramilitary Groups. kangaroos, lemurs, lions and whales illustrations with animal group names, Guzaliia Filimonova / iStock / Getty Images Plus / via Getty created by YourDictionary, geese, owls, parrots and swans illustrations with animal group names, ants, bees, flies and spiders illustration with animal group names, SENRYU / iStock / Getty Images Plus / via Getty created by YourDictionary. Hart, David. Revenge in kind is threatened by the family who made the initial slight. Bracewell, Catherine Wendy. He was born in 1706 in rural Essex, the son of John Turpin, a small farmer. The slighted family causes the death of the original offender. 2d ed. Much like the rest of human language, these terms of venery come from literature, culture, and (in some cases) random happenstance. If you see some of them in a group, they might be referred to as a gang or a pack. One example was Gao Yingxiang, who started as a mounted bandit in Shaanxi and later became an important rebel leader in late Ming. Social Memory. Rosalie Schwartz, Lawless Liberators: Political Banditry and Cuban Independence (1989). Privacy Policy. Ithaca, N.Y., 1994. The packaging of the myth of banditry in nationalist political rhetoric cannot be disregarded as unrelated to historical and anthropological analysis. Banditry employed a set of moral codes drawn and indistinguishable from kinship-based ideas of justice and retribution; hence a reaction against banditry was often impossible because it conflicted with the moral codes that regulated traditional society. Michel Foucault noted that the greater the spectacle of state punishment (and most glorifications of banditry by the peasantry date from the period immediately after the establishment of nation-states), the greater the risk that it would be rejected by the very people to whom such spectacles were addressed. Two famous Italian politicians, Luigi Franchetti and Sidney Sonnino, who conducted a wide-ranging investigation in Sicily in the late nineteenth century, noted that, unless one introduced the notion of complicity, it was difficult to understand why there was such widespread peasant submission to the activities of bandits. This term is also used when informally referring to a young rabbit. These elite-bandit alliances helped keep local oligarchies in power and gave a degree of legitimacy to the outlaws. Carrington, Dora. From the perspective of the state, the Mafia and brigantaggio became part of the wider questione meridionale (the southern question): Why is the South backward, crime ridden, and state resistant? [20] Robinson points out that "dire economic straits" forced soldiers to use illegal means to make a living. [28], Bandits often operated in groups under one or more leaders. In Brazil, Silvino and Lampio cooperated with elites, not the peasant masses. Gttingen, 1976. Bandits. 2 (1982): 58-89. If bandits are the backward, bloodthirsty, unthinking, "barbarians" the state (and army) portray them as, then it is the state's duty to suppress them in order to protect "civilized" values. While banditry as an outcome of social instability has declined in most of Europe, thanks to firmer policing and changes in military recruitment and policies toward veterans, echoes persist, for example in the formation of criminal groups in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. . An earlier Sicilian novelist, Luigi Capuana (18391915), denied the Sicilianness of the Mafia and brigandage, claiming that, though the Mafia existed in Sicily, it was no different from criminality found elsewhere. Fully to realize themselves and the future, they had further to recover their bucolic pleasures and the simplicity and equality of the rustic life. Other Italian bandits never reached his fame as they lacked popular support. They used their prepotency and violence to protect their kins' interests and thus ensure the support of family against betrayal to the state. Also known as the Bandit Queen, Phoolan Devi was born in 1963 in the north of India into a poor low-caste family. Blok asserted that analysis must encompass the wider society within which bandits operated. Paris, 1984. Richard Slatta, Gilbert Joseph, and others have begun placing Latin American banditry in a broader, more comparative perspective. J "Banditry Encyclopedia.com. Such definitions and redefinitions have created a vocabulary of justification, traces of which remained even at the end of the twentieth century. Terms of venery is the more official phrase for what we know as collective nouns, nouns of assembly, or names for groups of animals. Stories about bandits are therefore an intrinsic part of the phenomenon. Exploring food, architecture in Costa Rica. Bandits Kill 518 in Zangon Kataf in Five Years, Says ACDA It was not the traveling life that led some persons to banditry. New York, 1979. Where banditry has persisted, it can clearly be linked to the inability of the state to control the countryside. [26], The career nor the identity of a bandit was permanent. Such profiteers formed whatever alliances they deemed useful. Bande armate, banditi, banditismo e repressione di giustizia negli stati europei di antico regime. In the Balkans, the recorded history of haiduks goes back to the fifteenth century, but popular ballads about their lives and deeds did not flourish before the middle of the eighteenth century. Richard W. Slatta, "Banditry as Political Participation in Latin America," in Criminal Justice History: An International Annual 11 (1990): 171-187. Banditry, then, can be an expression of mass discontent, a means of achieving a political agenda, or a yearning for economic betterment. This box-office success, which was later reissued under the completely inappropriate title Sword of Blood, is part of the ongoing popularization and romanticization of the premodern underworld. This will put you in Vathume in a new game the next time you launch Skyrim. Encyclopedia of European Social History. C for Cobras A group of cobras is called a quiver. This interpretation is also problematic since violence reinforces the fragmentation of peasant collective consciousness but is not its direct cause. A widespread and effective climate of fear would in any case be difficult to maintain if it were to be reduced to the potential violent actions of a few individuals, unless it were supported by a consent bandits received at the local level. Oxford, 1987. A group of swordsmen are called bandits. When elites denied them access to land or to a living wage, the rural masses struck back using legal and extralegal tactics, including banditry. It operates between the state-imposed system of law and social order on one hand and the local system of vengeance and grassroots conceptions of justice on the other. 3 (1990): 7-53. Much the same appears to have happened in Andalusia, where absentee landlords were separated from a mass of largely landless laborers and where rural discontent increasingly took class forms. Conflict and Control: Law and Order in Nineteenth-Century Italy. Rabbits can be called colonies, fluffles, herds, warrens, or nests when in a group, depending on the context. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. In contrast, Rosalie Schwartz argues that western Cuba's banditry reflects neither class conflict nor social banditry. [34] Another example would be Deng Maoqi, a bandit in Fujian who perpetrated robbery on roads and in villages in the late 1440s. Exploring food, architecture in Costa Rica - Trinidad and Tobago Newsday ." From the perspective of the "bandit" himself, the situation may look different. If theres a boat but no water, you need to go back to pirate school. But for them, too, it is clear that the structure of their gangs was decisively shaped by people who had a permanent address. It functions as a warning and a deterrence against further acts of violence. Robinson points out that bandits obviously perceived the benefits of supporting rebel cause but they also could be repelled to join; as a result, the 1510s rebels attracted a lot of local bandits and outlaws as they moved from one place to another. The word "thug" traces its roots to the Hindi and Urdu word thag, which means thief or swindler, and which itself is derived from the Sanskrit verb sthagati (to conceal).. Richard W. Slatta, ed., Bandidos: The Varieties of Latin American Banditry (1987).