What prompts violence and warfare among human beings? What are the best ways to promote peacefulness within societies, and peace between them? Is humanity fundamentally aggressive? Numerous scholars and writers have argued all of those questions. Some seek to prove that all humans are warlike in nature. Their arguments have… Continue reading…
How do scholars and students of peaceful, nonkilling societies overcome the objections of “deniers,” individuals who refuse to admit even the possibility that such peoples exist? The question captivated the members of the Nonkilling Anthropology Research Committee of the Center for Global Nonkilling (CGNK), meeting in Montréal on November 17th…. Continue reading…
Papers by Kirk Endicott and Alberto Gomes, reviewed here in recent weeks, represented only part of the richness of information about peaceful societies available at a panel session of the American Anthropological Association in Montreal last month. Rather than continue to review the nine additional papers, all of which were… Continue reading…
Kirk Endicott delivered an engrossing paper that described the nature of Batek nonviolence, plus the conditions that foster it, at a panel session on Wednesday evening, November 16th, in Montreal. His presentation was part of the program “Challenging the Legacy of Innate Depravity: The New Tidemarks of the Nonkilling Paradigm,”… Continue reading…
The Center for Global Nonkilling (CGNK) was created to promote the measurable goal of fostering a world free of killing. One of its research programs is to study societies that are reasonably free of killing, a close match-up in interests with this website. As part of that commitment, the CGNK… Continue reading…
An intriguing journal article last fall examined the Semai of Peninsular Malaysia and the Mardu of Western Australia in the light of values theory to search for the structures, attitudes and relationships that help form peaceful societies. Marta Miklikowska and Douglas P. Fry came to some interesting conclusions after examining… Continue reading…
An intriguing journal article last fall examined the Semai of Peninsular Malaysia and the Mardu of Western Australia in the light of values theory to search for the structures, attitudes and relationships that help form peaceful societies. Marta Miklikowska and Douglas P. Fry came to some interesting conclusions after examining… Continue reading…
Next week, the Lorentz Center at Leiden University in the Netherlands is hosting a five day workshop, “Aggression and Peacemaking in an Evolutionary Context,” which could be of interest to students of peaceful societies. The aim of the five-day meeting, October 18 – 22, is to bring together scholars in… Continue reading…
Douglas Fry asks, rhetorically, if it is possible to learn anything from societies that do not go to war, and he answers that we could learn how to foster peace in the world. He is too keen an anthropologist to state, prescriptively, that this or that approach will prevent war…. Continue reading…
A research report by Stephen M. Younger, published in Current Anthropology last fall, provides an intriguing analysis of some of the conditions that may foster peacefulness in human societies. Younger acknowledges broader literature that demonstrates the ability of people to live together peacefully, but his research allows him to go… Continue reading…
