The core claim is F. G. Bailey's "civility of indifference": communal violence is neither natural nor primordial, and structural conditions such as poverty, rivalry, or hierarchical inequality are insufficient to produce it, so what must be explained is the restraint — the unspoken, subliminal collective rule that keeps antagonistic groups from crossing the line from civility into incivility. That restraint is theorised as a pragmatic habit of counting the cost: where actors are practised calculators who treat public conflict as ritualised political theatre with limited stakes, moral fervour and true belief cannot take hold, whereas violence becomes possible when the rules of the game change and the operative community is redefined by religious or political chauvinism rather than by mutual survival. The concept belongs to social anthropology's study of social relations, hierarchy, legitimacy, and the ethnography of violence, extending the discipline's premise that invisible relations and unspoken norms explain conduct better than professed values or macro-historical events.
The core claim is F. G. Bailey's "civility of indifference": communal violence is neither natural nor primordial, and structural conditions such as poverty, rivalry, or hierarchical inequality are in…