The ethnic boundary is a precondition for the ethnic division of labour, which is at the heart of Boulgou's agro-pastoral economy. It generates cross-cutting ties, built on trust and friendship. This boundary is also a zone of confrontation and conflict and this chapter will turn to the analysis of the more conflictual side of the ethnic boundary. It will show how conflict helps to maintain the illusion of an impermeable divide and will identify the actors that profit from this concealment.

The anthropology of conflict

Anthropological conflict studies have predominantly dealt with conflict as occurrences of violent clashes and warfare. As I outlined in the introduction, this book aims at a broader perspective, taking violence as only one option. Much can be gained from a wider approach, from de-stigmatizing conflict and from looking at conflict and dispute as social institutions, as Richards and Helander (2005: 3) have done in their attempt to take the study of conflict further and in a different direction. In their work, they partly draw on the first generation of anthropological conflict studies with its focus on the social function of (both violent and non-violent) conflict. Earlier theorists had perceived conflict and violence as essentially positive social factors – including the view that ‘dividing the inhabitants of a country into two different groups [will] lead to a conflict favourable to creativeness and progress’ – as Gluckman cites from Eliot's ‘definition of culture’ (Gluckman, 1964; Goody, 1957; Sahlins, 1961).