13. STUART-MICHAEL PIDDOCKE
Information acquired: 2025
STUART-MICHAEL PIDDOCKE is an academic who published a paper in 1960 entitled Wergild among northwest coast Indians. STUART-MICHAEL PIDDOCKE published this work as part of a team: Piddocke, Stuart Michael. Here is a description of this work: The problem that this thesis begins with is: Why did the Kwakiutl and Nootka not have feud-indemnities, whereas the other nations of the Northwest Coast had them? The method chosen is that of proposing a hypothesis and then seeing if the data bear it out. The first chapter of this thesis puts forward the hypothesis in question: that the Kwakiutl and Nootka did not have feud-indemnities because they had instead a high degree of individual geographic, inter-group mobility; such that if a person were not getting along in the group he lived with, he would simply depart to another group before disagreements and resultant tension burst out into open violence and so began a feud. Feud-indemnities, so the hypothesis suggests, act as an honourable way of ending or avoiding a feud, and so render it, by reducing its chances of disrupting the society, a more efficient method of legal enforce.