For animals with multiple potential group names, weve bolded the most common that you might encounter. In the Mediterranean and elsewhere the circulation of popular accounts of bandits was particularly significant, sometimes interacting in complex ways with the creation of the nation-state's history. [18] In 1449, Mongolian soldiers in the service of Ming attacked and plundered Beijing area. Violence and indiscriminate robberies alienated them from the peasantry. Rome, 1986. Through the destruction of animals or other property of the offender, or even the killing of some other person, a surrogate victim is created. [13] They had posed such serious threat that special police attention was given to them and failure to arrest them on time incurred severer punishment (further information on Ming justice system can be found in History of criminal justice). Europe, 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World, Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture, The term violence is used to describe animal and human behavior that threatens to cause or causes severe harm to a target. [13] Whistling arrow bandits had troubled the Capital Region throughout the first three decades of the sixteenth century. The bandit is thus not so much an expression of peasant reaction to oppression or a form of wish fulfillment as a transfiguration of peasant suffering, transformed from individual execution to the collective personification of sacrifice. By the mid-nineteenth century the countryside of Europe's periphery became a theatrical topos where the vicarious fantasies and terrors of an emergent national literate bourgeoisie could be collectivized and enacted in literature. Bandits Kill 518 in Zangon Kataf in Five Years, Says ACDA Social banditry is a widespread phenomenon that has occurred in many societies throughout recorded history, and forms of social banditry still exist, as evidenced by piracy and organized crime syndicates. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. How to Watch Disney's "Peter Pan & Wendy" Live-Action Movie As Ren Girard noted in Violence and the Sacred (1988), by killing not the murderer himself but someone close to him, an act of perfect reciprocity is avoided and the necessity for further revenge is bypassed. One exemplary leader was Zhang Mao of Wenan. Contemporaries regarded bandits as archenemies of the state and a threat to divine order, denying the state monopoly over the possession of arms and sinning against God's eighth commandment. Yet through that act the bandit embarked on his final transformation. In Archivio Storico per la Calabria e la Lucania 42, Rome, 1975. It was rather that, by being betrayed and killed or publicly executed, they achieved sacrificial status. Brigands with a Cause. (They mainly protect the surrounding villages from a group of bandits.) In modern usage the word has become a synonym for "thief", hence the term "one-armed bandit" for gambling machines that can leave the gambler with no money.[1]. 10 Notorious Medieval Gangsters - Listverse Gttingen, 1976. Oxford, 1987. Also known as the Bandit Queen, Phoolan Devi was born in 1963 in the north of India into a poor low-caste family. Modern research has tried to debunk this myth, but largely to no avail. Thus activities by bandits that had political implications (such as violence that kept the peasants cowed and docile) were often perceived as personal at the grass roots and hence of only limited concern, except to the participants. J "Banditry see also one-armed bandit banditry / bndtri/ noun [noncount] They were charged with banditry and smuggling. Thats a lot of legs and thoraxes! In casual conversation the words pirate, buccaneer, and corsair tend to be used more or less interchangeably.