Peacefulness in general
Nonkilling/Peaceful Anthropology
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. That one word summarized the […]
Summary of Evidence for Peaceful Societies [Panel Presentations, part 3]
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 quite insightful, it might be […]
Center for Global Nonkilling [Panel Presentations, part 1]
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,” held as part of the […]
Center for Global Nonkilling [book review]
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 organized an Exploratory Colloquium on […]
Values for Peace [journal article review]
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 the two societies. The authors, […]
Workshop Next Week on Aggression and Peacemaking
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 fields such as primatology, evolutionary […]
Peace Systems Exist—and More Can Be Developed [journal article review]
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. But the information he provides […]
Conditions that Foster Peacefulness in Polynesia
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 deeper into the mechanisms and […]
Conference on Violence and Promoting Peaceful Societies
Elizabeth Cashdan asks a profound question: “What evolutionary forces underlie human violence, and how can we use this knowledge to promote a more peaceful society?” According to a news story last Saturday in the Salt Lake Tribune, the University of Utah is hosting a conference this week which addresses those issues. Entitled “The Evolution of […]
Is a Nonkilling Society Possible? [unpublished paper review]
Leslie Sponsel opens a recent essay on the futility of violence and war with two profound questions: Is a nonkilling society possible, and what are the possibilities of a nonkilling anthropology? He adapts these two questions from Glenn D. Paige’s pathbreaking 2002 work Nonkilling Global Political Science (available on the website of the Center for […]
