ENDNOTES
1 Carleton S. Coon, The Hunting Peoples, Little, Brown And Company, Boston, 1971, pages 372-73. 2
The Forest People, and Wayward Servants. 3 John D. Hunter, Manners and Customs of Several Indian Tribes Located West of the Mississippi, Ross and Haines, Minneapolis, 1957, pages 52, 319-320. The authenticity of Hunter’s account has been questioned, but has been persuasively defended by Richard K. Drinnon, White Savage: The Case of John Dunn Hunter, Schocken Books, 1972. There are in any event plenty of other sources that refer to the freedom of primitive and barbarian peoples, e.g., E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer, Oxford University Press, 1972, pages 5-6, 181-83. 4 Here I’m relying on my memory of something I read many years ago. I can’t cite the source, and my memory is not infallible. 5 “Only with difficulty could Mbuti mothers remember the number of their deceased children.” Paul Schebesta, Die Bambuti-Pygmäen vom ituri, I. Band, Institut Royal Colonial Belge, Brussels, 1938, page 112. This suggests that the loss of a child was less than a devastating experience for Mbuti women. 6
Mean was an obscure magazine (now no longer published) for which J. N. was a writer. 7 I think W. I. Thomas and F. Znaniecki, in the one-volume, abridged edition of The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, make this point in regard to the paterfamilias of Polish peasant families, but I’m relying on memory and can’t cite the page. 8 It may have been commonplace for slaves and medieval peasants to escape their servitude by running away. See Richard C. Hoffmann, Land, Liberties, and Lordship in a Late Medieval Countryside, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1989, pages 51-52; William H. TeBrake, A Plague of Insurrection, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1993, page 8; Andreas Dorpalen, German History in Marxist Perspective, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1988, pages 90, 158; Encyclopædia Britannica, 15th edition, 2003, Volume 18, article “European History and Culture,” pages 618, 629; Volume 20, article “Germany,” pages 75-76, 81; Volume 27, article “Slavery,” pages 298-99. 9 For these forms of resistance by slaves and serfs generally (not just Russian ones), see, e.g., Wayne S. Vucinich (editor), The Peasant in Nineteenth Century Russia, Stanford, California, 1968; Hoffmann, op.cit., pages 144, 305, 356, 358; TeBrake, op.cit., pages 8-9; Dorpalen, op.cit., pages 90, 92, 123, 129, 158-59; Geir Kjetsaa, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A Writer’s Life, translated by Siri Hustvedt and David McDuff, Fawcett Columbine, New York, 1989, pages 32, 33; Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror, Ballantine Books, New York, 1978, page 41; Encycl. Brit., 2003, Volume 27, article “Slavery,” pages 298-99. Landlords or slave-owners who abused peasant or slave women sexually may have run a grave risk of being killed by the women themselves or by their menfolk. See Ibid., page 299. My recollection is that sexual abuse of their women was the most common reason for which Russian peasants killed their landlords, according to Mosse, Alexander II and the Modernization of Russia. (Since I’m relying on memory, I can’t give the page number or the author’s full name.) Some time around the end of the 19th century an adolescent Mexican peon named Doroteo Arango killed one of the owners of the estate where he worked, in revenge for an assault on his sister. He fled to the mountains, where he lived for some years as a fugitive. Subsequently he acquired a certain notoriety as a revolutionary under the nom de guerre of Pancho Villa. Encycl. Brit., 2003, Volume 12, article “Villa, Pancho,” page 369.