Peaceful Societies

Large-scale forces such as national peace movements can normally promote harmony at the local level and foster more peaceful communities. The opposite generalization often applies: that wars can promote local strife, which helps build violent societies. Developments last week in New Delhi offer hope that peace in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir may some day be possible, and with it the traditional peacefulness in the villages of Ladakh, a district of the state, might be strengthened.

According to Ravinna Aggarwal’s book Beyond Lines of Control (2004), the village peacefulness found so famously among the Buddhist peoples of Ladakh is constantly threatened by the long-standing hostility and problems within the larger state, which are exacerbated by the international tensions between India and Pakistan. Unsophisticated outsiders often simplify the conflict between the two nations into Hindu India versus Muslim Pakistan. In that view, those two nations focus their animosity on the Kashmir region, which has been divided since partition and independence.

But the fissures in Jammu and Kashmir are far more complex, the problems much deeper, than such a simple view allows. And, the critical issue, the violence in Kashmir deeply affects and disturbs Ladakh, which has its own divisions, hostilities, histories, and desires for peace.

Kashmir has been tortured by violence for the past three months. Young people have been throwing rocks at military patrols, nothing new of course in a state where rioting and killing have been the dominant modes of persuasion by extremists for decades. A peacemaking initiative taken by The Centre, India’s term for its national government in New Delhi, was announced last Wednesday. Mr. P. Chidambaram, Indian Home Minister, informed the press that he had appointed a panel of three peace makers, called “interlocutors,” skilled envoys who would attempt to promote a resolution to the Kashmir dispute. The Indian press was filled with news stories and analyses.

Chidambaram told the reporters that the three members of the panel “are not politicians, but all of them have been in public life; they are well known to the people of India.” He said he expected the three experts to reach out to the young people and the students of Kashmir, Jammu, and Ladakh, especially the youth of Kashmir who have been throwing rocks at the military forces. He said that the appointment of the panel of interlocutors demonstrated the seriousness of the national government for solving the Kashmir issue. He praised his appointees: “We think they are very credible people, people with good track records.”

Many in India had expected the appointment of experienced, senior politicians. The makeup of the new panel surprised the nation. The Home Minister defended his decision and urged that everyone engage with the new group. He expects the panel to interact with people holding a wide range of opinions in the state, and in all three districts. He added that he “would appeal to all sections of people of Jammu and Kashmir and all shades of political opinion to engage with the interlocutors so that we can move forward on the path of finding a solution to the problem.”

Dileep Padgaonkar, a prominent journalist, will be the chief interlocutor. He has worked for the prestigious Times of India newspaper at various senior positions, including as its Paris Correspondent and its Consulting Editor. He was engaged earlier as a peacemaker on a now-defunct committee that studied the Kashmir problem.

The second member of the panel, Radha Kumar, is an experienced mediator and peace scholar. She is the Director of the Nelson Mandela Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution at the Jamia Milia Islamia university in Delhi and the Director of the Delhi Policy Group. She is the author and editor of various reports, such as the “Frameworks for a Kashmir Settlement” (2007 and 2006). She has also authored the books Making Peace with Partition (2005) and Divide and Fall? Bosnia in the Annals of Partition (1997).

Professor M. M. Ansari, the third member of the panel, has been Information Commissioner at the Central Information Commission since 2005. He has written several research and policy studies related to welfare issues. He was the director at the Hamdard University in Pakistan before he was appointed to the post of Information Commissioner for the government of India.

To judge by the press reports, reactions in India have been varied—and perhaps predictable. Syed Ali Geelani, a hard-line separatist leader in Kashmir, dismissed the news. “It is a futile exercise to hoodwink the international community. The step is not going to lead anywhere.” He stated that his own five-point proposal is the only possible basis for a fruitful dialog with the Centre.

Other leaders in Kashmir were not so cynical. Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, the chairman of the moderate faction of the Hurriyat Conference, and Yasin Malik, the leader of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, indicated they would consider their options before making further comments. Malik said that he did not intend to quickly jump to conclusions.

Ms. Kumar has been engaged in conversations in the past with both Farooq, the moderate, and Geelani, the hard-liner. She recently visited Geelani at a hospital in Kashmir, where he was undergoing medical treatment.

Padgaonkar, the chair of the group, said all the right things immediately after the announcement. He told the Press Trust Of India that his group cannot be expected to come up with immediate solutions, but it will solicit a wide a range of opinions before making any statements. “Our endeavor is to make recommendations which should bring peace and solve the Kashmir issue,” he said.

Inuit teenagers in one community advocate better discipline in their school plus educational programs more focused on substantial learning and less on emotional well being. The students at the Kiilinik High School in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, voiced many criticisms about their school last week to Nunatsiaqonline, particularly about some of the cultural programs and the lack of appropriate punishments.

The news reporter interviewed groups of students in the Cambridge Bay high school and heard some tough sounding messages. In one 11th grade class, the students urged their school to focus more on concrete education rather than on the feelings of the young people. They are concerned that they must get good educations, since those who graduate from universities can then secure positions in the medical professions or as teachers. In their town, good jobs await people who are well educated, they realize.

The students also suggested that the school should be tougher on classmates who screw up. One teenage boy said that the school should bring back corporal punishment—or at least some form of discipline—for those who need it. The students want to see the school crack down on absenteeism, late arrivals, and bad behavior patterns.

The school used to send students who were late to a detention room, called the “personal reflection” room—dubbed the “prison room” by the students—but that practice was abandoned. Now they are just told to sit out in the hall. The students want to bring back the PR room. One girl told the press, “students need to know they can’t cut classes.” Many of the young people have dropped out of school, but the students who remain have no sympathy. If they can’t make it, they should be failed, they believe.

But they are not entirely hard-nosed. The students urge that more fun activities should be incorporated into the school, which might help lower the number of kids dropping out. They suggested that the Kiilinik High School should institute something they called “spirit days,” plus a winter prom. They also would like the school to bring back morning assemblies.

The kids dislike the multi-level style of classes. That practice aims to recognize the different levels at which students learn, but the Kiilinik 11th graders feel their teachers are having a hard time coping with the variations in skill levels in their classrooms. They criticize the cancellation of French classes, and they condemn the way the school is apparently not flunking out students who fail their courses.

They are critical of Nunavut’s aulaajaqtuut program, which tries to promote emotional well-being. Having people role-play a caribou hunt, figure out what their emotional needs are, and put them into clear statements strikes the Churchill Bay students as boring and useless. Some of them say they can understand some Inniunaqtun, the local Inuit language, but they admit they are not fluent.

The high school juniors were evidently glad to have the opportunity to express their opinions, which they said are rarely solicited. The parent of one of the students told the news service, “people have to get over looking at youth as a problem. They’re the solution.”

A generation or two ago, anthropologists celebrated the Ju/’hoansi as an archetypical peaceful society, a people who sometimes had their squabbles but who were so dependent on one another that serious fighting was simply out of the question. The scholars who were involved with various research projects in the Kalahari Desert described the ways the Ju/’hoansi, then called the !Kung, foraged for food, settled disputes, performed trance dances, raised children, and interacted more or less peacefully with one another.

In 1978, Patricia Draper wrote that the peaceful coexistence of a Ju/’hoansi group was its stored surplus. In other words, in a desert environment which is subject to wide local variations in food and water supplies, the ability of bands to get along with others was essential for everyone to survive when those resources became scarce. Peacefulness and a willingness to share territories during hard times equaled survival.

Richard B. Lee, however, in a monumental 1979 book, tried to dispel the notion that the Ju/’hoansi were always non-violent. His work provided statistics about the murders that had been recorded in their society, and it attempted to dampen romantic notions about the peacefulness of the people. Other scholars disputed his conclusions.

However peaceful the Ju/’hoansi may have been then, or may still be, they have certainly been one of the most highly studied small, traditional societies on earth. Several members of the Marshall family pioneered research on the Ju/’hoansi in the 1950s. Anthropologists in the Harvard Kalahari Research Group, now very senior scholars, continued to study them avidly, and many younger investigators have followed.

A recent journal article by Robert Hitchcock and others describes the history of the investigations of the San people in general, and the Ju/’hoansi in particular, over the past 50 years. The thrust of the current report is that the living conditions of the Ju/’hoansi were changing even in the 1960s and 1970s when the early research was being published.

Their article opens with the startling assertion that, by measures such as their standard of living, their mortality rates, or their land ownership, the San are worse off today than they were 50 years ago. But at the same time, they are much more involved with trying to promote their own conditions, more outspoken about what they want for their own futures.

The article concentrates primarily on the Ju/’hoansi of the northwestern corner of Botswana, in the Dobe-/Xai/Xai area, where the members of the Harvard Kalahari Research Group did most of their research, rather than the Nyae Nyae region across the border in Namibia, where the Marshall family expedition had worked even earlier, in the 1950s.

As the scholars were focusing on different aspects of Ju/’hoansi life—which are summarized in the article—many of the San people began to abandon their nomadic, foraging lifestyles and migrate into permanent settlements that had better access to water, food, and health care. They did encounter some restrictions, particularly in Botswana, where they had to obtain licenses in order to hunt wildlife, permits that the government did not always make easily available. They were allowed to gather wild plant foods without government interference, except for the devil’s claw, which Botswana regulates. Gathering the devil’s claw for the export market is one of the major sources of income for the Ju/’hoansi across the border in the Nyae Nyae Conservancy.

The visiting anthropologists had to adapt to the changing needs of the people they were studying. Hitchcock et al. point out that the Ju/’hoansi themselves quickly began to take charge of the research that visiting scholars were attempting to do. They no longer wanted researchers to study them for the sake of their own interests. Instead, they wanted practical investigations that would aid their developmental agendas, projects that would have direct impacts on their needs. The Ju/’hoansi began attending meetings and speaking out at conferences in favor of their own interests.

The scholars thus became more involved in practical projects, many of them collaborative and participatory, that relate to development issues, land reform, adaptations to drought, access to water, environmental stresses, and social justice concerns. Local people see the benefits of the research to themselves, such as investigations that involve language training and educational practices.

Many of the more recent studies tend to be of a short term nature, addressed to finding the answers to specific questions, rather than long term, year long efforts as were done earlier. A sense of long-term trust between researchers and communities, the result of scholars living with people for many months, has suffered in this latest research environment, but the results, often determined by snapshot surveys conducted through interpreters, are useful nonetheless.

Hitchcock and his co-authors carefully review the ways the Botswana government has tried to interact with its indigenous minority peoples. They describe in detail some of the problems the Ju/’hoansi in that country have had to overcome over the past 40 years. For instance, at one point the government had to kill all the cattle in the area where the Ju/’hoansi live due to an outbreak of contagious bovine pleuropneumonia. The residents of the area were faced with a major crisis, which government handouts did not entirely ameliorate. Some fled across the border to Namibia, others went back to subsistence hunting, and still others moved into the Okavango Delta region of Botswana.

The Ju/’hoansi have tried to gain greater control over their traditional lands in Botswana, but they were not as successful as their relatives across the border in Namibia, which established the Nyae Nyae Conservancy for them. The Botswana Ju/’hoansi, however, have been able to participate in the government’s Community Based Natural Resource Management Program to work out issues such as local hunting arrangements.

But prejudice persists in that country. Hitchcock et al. quote one high ranking government official as saying, “If [the San] are in the way, [they] should be gotten out of the way … (p.180).”

Hitchcock and his colleagues provide a very useful overview of the complexities of life for the Ju/’hoansi in Botswana, and the ways anthropologists have interacted with them in recent decades. Fortunately, the article is freely available in PDF format on the Web.

Hitchcock, Robert K., Megan Biesele, and Wayne Babchuk. 2009. “Environmental Anthropology in the Kalahari: Development, Resettlement, and Ecological Change Among the San of Southern Africa.” Vis-à-vis: Explorations in Anthropology (9) no. 2: 170-188

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 biology, archaeology, the ecology of human behavior, and forager studies to review the latest developments in the evolution of conflict and dispute management. Specialists in fields such as nomadic studies, who have done research on cooperation, competition, and sharing; archaeologists who specialize in the pre-historic development of human violence; and primatologists who have worked on aggression, reconciliation, and conflict management in non-human species should have the opportunity to interact with one another.

According to the website of the Lorentz Center, “relevant topics such as evolutionary models of conflict, restraint, ritualization, cost-benefit models of aggression, territorial defense, and resource competition … [will be included]. Findings from each of these disciplines pertain to the study of conflict within an evolutionary framework. This workshop takes a specific focus on how knowledge from these natural and social science fields may be integrated to produce a more complete view of aggression and peacemaking.”

The description of the workshop also states that the basic scientific findings in the fields of evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology “have implications for interpreting social behavior that to date have been under utilized.” Therefore, the long range goal of the meeting is “that some new applications of theory and subsequent collaborations between scientists from diverse fields will be germinated from the workshop.”

On Monday, October 18th, the program focuses on “The Antiquity of War and Peace,” and features a number of prominent scholars who have published on the subject. Tuesday’s program, “Evolutionary and Ecological Models and Theories,” will be moderated in the morning by Kirk Endicott, famed for his research and publications about the Batek.

The morning panel on Wednesday, October 20th, will be on “Forager Aggression and Conflict Management.” Participants will include Dr. Endicott and his wife, Karen Endicott, who also has published on the Batek. Thursday’s workshop will cover “Conflict Resolution in Human and Nonhuman Primates,” again with prominent scholars presenting.

On Friday, October 22nd, the conference will conclude with a session titled “Integration and Synthesis of Knowledge about Aggression and Peacemaking.” Scholars who are household names in this field, such as R. Brian Ferguson, Robert Sussman, Douglas Fry, and Johan van der Dennen, will be presenting. Fry and van der Dennen are the coordinators of the conference.

The purpose of the Lorentz Center, which is funded by Leiden University, is to host workshops that produce interaction and collaboration among scientists and scholars. The website lists the 44 participants who are planning, so far, to attend this workshop, but it also indicates that the center can accommodate up to 60 people, so it is possible registrants may still be accepted. The website registration form does not mention any registration charges. A contact link on the website provides an email address for people to use who might be interested in the possibility of getting involved, even at this late date.

The story of the Hutterites is told briefly and simply in a current magazine article prepared for school children who are learning to tolerate others, an essential ingredient in counteracting hatred and violence.

The recent issue of Teaching Tolerance magazine, fall 2010, number 38, points out in the article “A War on the Peaceful” that the Hutterites have been different throughout their nearly 500 years of existence. The brief report indicates they believe in living communally, as the original followers of Jesus did, and that they don’t fight, as Christ commanded. They are very different indeed. The article describes the hatreds and persecutions the Hutterites have faced throughout much of their history.

They migrated from Europe to the United States in the 1870s to escape the intolerance and bigotry of the Old World, only to be confronted by even greater persecution when America went to war in 1917. The Hutterites spoke German, so they were identified with Germany, the enemy in World War I. Compounding the problem, they were—and still are—pacifists. Their refusal to fight in the war their nation had joined prompted intense hostility.

In the rural Plains States, they were hassled and harassed, their farms were vandalized, their neighbors accused them of being cowards. Their young men were inducted into the armed services even though they made it clear they would not fight. They refused to obey military orders or to wear uniforms, so soldiers treated them cruelly. They were chased and beaten. Two young Hutterite men were tortured to death in a military prison in Kansas.

South Dakota forced the Hutterite colonies in the state to close, so they moved to Canada to escape the persecution. The article in Teaching Tolerance does not mention that they have also been subject to discrimination in some of the Canadian provinces due to their different ways of living and their peaceful beliefs.

The article concludes that many people still find Hutterite ways to be somewhat strange. The Hutterites work hard, have few personal possessions, and enjoy less privacy than many others. But they are taken care of by the colonies they live in and their numbers are growing.

Teaching Tolerance magazine is published twice a year, in the autumn and spring, and is available free to educators. It is published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, headquartered in Montgomery, Alabama, which has been working since 1971 to expose hate groups and foster community attitudes that celebrate tolerance and diversity.

Coincidentally, a reader contacted Peaceful Societies last week to alert us to a new website that provides a thorough overview of the three branches of the Hutterites. It is prepared by Hutterites themselves. Called “Hutterite Heritage,” the website covers not only the history of their development as a people over the past 500 years, but it also describes their beliefs, culture, family life, work, education, and much more. A link to this excellent resource has now been added to the Hutterite page in this website.

The war of words about the persecution of the San societies in Botswana grew ever hotter last week, though calls for compromise may yet prompt a peaceful resolution of the matter—in line with the heritage, at least, of the G/wi people. A hopeful reading of the news suggests the possibility that both sides of the issue may yet stand down from their positions.

On Monday, Survival International (SI) called for tourists to boycott all of Botswana as a tourism destination because the southern African nation continues to discriminate against the G/wi and G//ana people by not allowing them access to water. Botswana used Monday the 27th, World Tourism Day, to promote itself as a nation of “cultural diversity and welcoming people.” SI ridiculed the statement.

In the opinion of the British NGO, which fights for the rights of persecuted minority peoples around the world, the accolades for Botswana due to its conservation initiatives and its eco-friendly tourism are nothing but a travesty. According to the director of the organization, Stephen Corry, the president of Botswana, Ian Khama, “continues to sit on the board of Conservation International, and the country receives plaudits for its conservation and tourism industries [but] tourists should decide if they really want to support the destruction of Africa’s hunting Bushmen.”

SI maintains that the government continues to harass the San peoples, despite their victory in the nation’s high court in 2006, which granted them the right to return to their homes in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR). The government had expelled them from the land some years earlier because it didn’t want to share the royalties from diamonds with the so-called “Bushmen.” The government denies them the right to open a new borehole for water, or even to reopen an old one that it closed shortly after the expulsion. In July this year, one justice of the High Court turned down their suit to require the government to allow them the right to reopen the existing, closed, borehole.

On Tuesday last week, the San people filed an appeal to the July ruling. Gordon Bennett, the lawyer for the San, told the African newspaper the Mail & Guardian his clients were willing to re-commission the borehole at their own expense. “But the government is denying them access to water, as it wants them to leave the reserve,” he said. He indicated their appeal is based on the wording of Botswana’s Water Act, which says that people who occupy land have the right to sink boreholes for their own domestic use. He maintains that the San are the legal owners of the land they live on in the CKGR, and that the High Court had recognized that.

A resident of the CKGR, Smith Moeti, told the paper that conditions in the reserve remain very difficult. The government still refuses to give the residents hunting licenses, and of course they have no water or health facilities.

A spokesperson for SI says that the earliest the latest appeal can be heard is January 2011. Their attorneys will have to wait until November to see if their appeal can be heard then, or if they will have to wait even longer.

Wilderness Safaris, the owner of a new, luxury tourist lodge in the CKGR, located fairly near some struggling San communities, has refused calls that it should share some of its water with the nearby people. It feels that its business model is not suited to giving away water like that. The company, of course, was granted a permit to drill a new borehole for its purposes—entertaining Western guests.

Mmegi, a Botswana daily newspaper, asked Jeff Ramsay, a spokesperson for the government, about SI’s call for a tourist boycott. He replied that the government and the San were about to resolve their differences amicably, and that SI was just trying to gain attention. He refuted the SI claim that the government is discriminating against the San by depriving them of water, but since it is an ongoing court case, he really couldn’t discuss it any further. He assured the paper that the issue will be wrapped up soon. “The key is to manage the resource on a sustainable basis, to benefit those within and around the CKGR,” he said.

The British newspaper the Telegraph, weighed in on the issue on Friday. The paper tried to present the essence of both sides of the issue. It quoted SI’s arguments as well as those of the Botswana government. The additional wrinkle that the paper highlighted is the disconnect between conservationists, who generally support the conservation initiatives of the Botswana government, and the pressures and tactics of SI.

The World Travel and Tourism Council gave the country its Tourism for Tomorrow award in May and it defends its decision. A WTTC spokesperson said that the organization recognized the Botswana Tourism Board “for its outstanding stewardship of the Okavango Delta, a global biodiversity conservation priority.”

The spokesperson for another organization, Great Plains Conservation, indicated he was saddened by SI’s campaign against the Botswana government. He cited the “unrivalled track record” of the government in protecting wildlife and “uplifting the lives of its people.” He also lauded the revenues the government collects from the various tourist installations in the country.

Interestingly, the British newspaper concluded its report by quoting another observer, Chris McIntyre, who is the managing director of Expert Africa and the author of several guidebooks to Botswana. He criticizes both the government and SI. The government was overzealous and inept in its treatment of the San, but he did not accept the reasoning that diamond mining was behind the government’s actions.

He feels that SI’s call for a boycott of tourism in Botswana is counter productive. The country has good schools, a fine social program, and is doing very well compared to much of the rest of Africa. It should be the last country on the continent to be castigated for its human rights record.

He called for a compromise. The government cannot backtrack at this point, he feels, since it has dug in its heels. “No African government likes being told what to do. What we need is a compromise, and what I’d like to see is Survival’s campaign aiming to achieve one,” he said.

The news on Tristan da Cunha, a peaceful community of less than 300 people, normally focuses on births, deaths, and weddings—and occasional changes in the local structures of authority. The island, which proudly bills itself as the world’s most isolated inhabited community, has no airport, so the arrival of ships provides special excitement for the inhabitants of the volcanic dot in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean.

The SA Agulhas, a South African vessel which makes an annual supply trip to Tristan, arrived on September 9th and is expecting to depart for Cape Town on October 2nd. Built by Mitsubishi in 1977, the ship is operated by the Directorate of Antarctica and Islands in South Africa’s Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism.

Its annual trip is extremely important for the Tristan Islanders because it allows up to 30 visitors to stay on the island for three to four weeks, before the ship has to leave again. It has a helicopter, so the 30 passengers it carries can go back and forth from the ship to the island, whether the tiny harbor is open or closed. The passengers are relatives of Tristan Islanders who are celebrating the beginning of spring with a visit to the island.

This year, the arrival of the ship has been even more significant because the Island Administrator, David Morley and his wife Jacki are leaving. They have served on Tristan for three years and they are being replaced by a new administrator, Sean Burns, who arrived with his wife Marina. Mr. Burns will overlap with Mr. Morley for the three weeks while the ship is anchored off the island.

Both men are career diplomats. Mr. Burns has served in Tanzania, Antigua, Bangladesh, Senegal, Kenya and South Korea as well as in London. Mrs. Burns has experience as a teacher of English as a foreign language, primarily for the British Council.

The Tristan Times ran a news story last week about the events celebrating the departure of the old Administrator and the arrival of the new one. On Sunday the 19th, the Chief Islander, Ian Lavarello, gave a speech at a reception welcoming the new Administrator. He recalled the financial difficulties that greeted Mr. Morley three years ago, and alluded to the fact that those problems are not yet over. The island has shifted from a subsistence to a cash-based economy, and he expressed pride that everyone was employed.

But he noted that the financial reserves of the island are slim, more so than ever, though he expressed confidence that everyone would work together to find solutions, as they have done with problems in the past. He expected that the Tristan Islanders would continue to retain, as the newspaper expressed it, their “independent life style.”

But the paper could not ignore the really important events of September. During the visit of the ship, the community celebrated its own rites of spring: a wedding, the baptisms of three babies, plus many parties and receptions.

The Semai are able to maintain peace in their communities because they can effectively resolve their conflicts. Three scholars who are intimately familiar with those people describe, in a recent article, how they developed their formal, conflict resolution meetings in the last century by modifying Malay practices. The authors maintain, however, that the Semai commitment to peacefully resolving disputes is based primarily on their own earlier, traditional beliefs.

The authors—two of whom, Juli Edo and Anthony Williams-Hunt, are themselves Semai—argue that the formal conflict resolution meetings, known as bicaraás (or variant spellings), as described by Robarchek (1979), represent a fairly recent development. The bicaraá is not practiced in all Semai villages. Although they live entirely within a Malay context, the Semai are not necessarily submissive to the will of the dominant society and when they need to settle disputes they can solve them in their own fashion.

Traditionally, the Semai had an egalitarian society with no headman. No one had the right to coerce another, though people did defer to the judgments of elders. Opinions as to who was an elder varied, and were often fluid. People tried to maintain a state of peace, called slamaad, by cooperation and sharing instead of by directly negotiating reciprocal relationships. This slamaad in their villages usually included at least toleration of others, if not always mutual affection.

The focus of the three authors is on a Malay chief in the late 19th century named Tok Bayas who lived near the Semai in the Cameron Highlands of Peninsular Malaysia. He accepted his authority from the sultan of Pahang state who derived his power from the British colonial masters. A Semai leader named Bah Busu became friends with the Malay chief, who accepted him as a vassal, a subordinate client.

In 1909, Tok Bayas took Busu to meet the sultan, who gave him the official regalia of his office—a kris, a gong, a couple swords, and a letter investing him with authority over the Semai people in the Cameron Highlands. Busu, in turn, appointed leaders in each of the 36 or so villages in his district to report to him. Thus, British colonial feudalism transformed the traditional, egalitarian social system of the Semai villages.

Busu presided over a new system of land ownership in which people began planting rubber trees and harvesting the cash crops for their overlords. The rubber plantations remained fertile, which prompted the Semai to settle and continue to farm the same areas rather than to move about as they had always done.

The settling affected their conflict resolution strategies. Previously, they had preferred to resolve disputes informally. The parties to conflicts would separate, gossip, or try to shame the individuals that the community felt were primarily at fault. People lived in spread out settlements, so it was easy to avoid others with whom one had disagreements.

Although informal approaches still prevailed in many cases, once the Semai settled closely together into villages, they accepted, at least at times, the more formal bicaraá meetings, derived from the Malay court system, which Busu introduced. The village headman, or his agent, would interview people to gather all the facts in any dispute, particularly to find out which individuals seemed to be the most at blame for a problem. He would seek to form a consensus within the community so he could make a judgment, and would then try to persuade the people involved to accept his resolution of the matter. Or he would convene a bicaraá.

Unlike the Malay system, where only the senior men of the community would be involved, in the more egalitarian Semai villages everyone was invited—encouraged—to attend the bicaraá. People who had the least involvement in the case would testify, for as long as they wished, about anything related to the dispute. Finally, when everyone had had their say, the officials of the village would summarize the general community sentiment, state the penalties assessed against guilty individuals, and conclude the meeting.

Frequently, to this day, villagers get sick of interminable meetings, which can go on and on for several days and nights, and the bicaraá will simply dissolve without a matter being settled. The bicaraá is still used, but it is employed as a court of last resort—it takes time for everyone. The Semai continue to maintain the slamaad, the general peace, within their villages or between their communities. Their traditional strategies of avoiding conflicts—by joking and temporarily withdrawing from others—are still widely practiced. Communities will only schedule a bicaraá if bad feelings persist.

Financial restitution is an important aspect of healing. In their previous, traditional, system of conflict resolution, a wronged individual would seek a gift from a guilty party. Typically, the person who had been wronged would ask for a substantial gift, but after lengthy negotiations, the individual who had admitted his or her guilt would give a very modest present, which would then be accepted. The dispute would be over, feelings of justice accepted, the psychological hurts resolved. The token gift would conclude the matter.

Busu introduced into this process a more complicated Malay system of fines that the headmen could impose on guilty parties after the conclusion of the bicaraá. Busu, in effect, introduced bureaucracy, formal negotiations, and complex formulas. The amounts of fines would be calculated, though often the village leaders would not agree on their correct amounts. The important issue was that the dispute was finally over, and that everyone begged forgiveness. The reconciliation often required the involvement of conflict resolution experts, officials appointed by Busu. In general, though, the primary force for settling disputes in the village was, and still is, the shame that people feel when they realize that the tide of public opinion is against them and their actions.

The authors conclude that, despite the way the bicaraá system was introduced into the Semai communities, the changes did not really have a significant impact on the very low incidence of violence. The new system worked more effectively as an instrument of state expansion than it did as an approach to resolving conflicts. To this day, effectively getting past conflicts—by whatever means—remains an essential aspect of Semai peacefulness.

Edo, Juli, Williams-Hunt, Anthony, and Dentan, Robert Knox. 2009. “Surrender, Peacekeeping, and Internal Colonialism, A Malaysian Instance.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 165 (2&3): 216-240

While several peaceful societies, such as the Paliyans, Ifaluk, and Tristan Islanders, avoid alcoholic beverages because of the potential for violence, the ancient Nubians reportedly loved to brew and drink beer. A news story last week reported the work of scientists from Emory University who have found strong evidence that, not only did the Nubians figure out how to brew beer, but their beverage of choice had enough antibiotic properties for it to also served as a medicine.

George Armelagos, an anthropologist at Emory, discovered that the bones of ancient Nubians, examined under a fluorescent microscope, showed evidence of tetracycline labeling. Some scholars dismissed the significance of the evidence, but Armelagos took the research farther. He used high pressure liquid chromatography mass-spectrometric measurements to more closely examine the bones. He found that the ancient Nubians were consuming foods compromised of fermented grains—beer—and ingesting the tetracycline through it.

He hypothesizes that the Nubians discovered, accidentally, while making a batch of wine, that Streptomyces bacteria in the soil had contaminating their beverage. The resulting gruel had turned a golden color. Gold was good so they consumed it and continued to do so. They soon discovered that drinking the beverage would help them fight their illnesses. They began producing the antibiotic beer regularly, thus lacing their bones with the tetracycline. As a result, their bones still produce yellowish-green spots under a florescent light.

As any good scientist would do, Armelagos made his own brew employing the techniques he deduced were used by the ancient Nubians. Then, of course, he fed it to his graduate students. They said it tasted like sour porridge. It was not a Bud Light, according to the news report. The professor, whose specialty is the study of ancient diets and foods, suspects that the Nubians would have normally drained off the fluid portions of their gruel to drink, then eaten the solids separately. After a few generations, however, the use of the antibiotic beer evidently waned and was soon forgotten.

Despite all the literature about various peaceful societies avoiding alcoholic beverages, the Fipa people, another nonviolent African society described by Roy Willis (1989b), apparently love to drink beer. It is an important aspect of their socializing. When men and women, participating as equals, pass bowls of beer around a room, they demonstrate that they can share the beverage without any displays of greed or selfishness. The beer drinking reinforces their peacefulness. Professor Armelagos may find it difficult to take his research on the beer drinking habits of the ancient Nubians quite that far.

The cause of peace is advanced when the rights and interests of minority peoples such as the Kadar are acknowledged and respected by larger states and nations. These small societies are often at the losing ends of disputes—the dams are built, the forests are clearcut, rights to lands are denied, communities are destroyed.

Two of the Kadar villages to survive in a riverine forest environment in the Western Ghats mountain range of southwestern India have been threatened by a power dam along the Chalakudy River. The threat has clouded the existence of these communities for a number of years. The project has been on hold since February, after the national government in New Delhi stopped it.

Over the past month, the tide of news about the Kadar has been more positive—at least for those who champion the lives of the people and the endangered wildlife. An August 21st news report described the continuing war of words, which has been covered a lot in these news pages in the past few years, between environmentalists opposed to the dam and the business and government interests in Kerala that support it.

According to that report, A. K. Balan, the Power Minister for the state, fired off a letter charging that environmentalists who oppose the dam and the scientists doing the research were the same people, a conflict of interest, he alleged. He named the individuals he was accusing. Ms. A. Lata, from the Chalakudy River Protection Council, replied that the minister had made many erroneous statements. Significantly, he had failed, she said, to understand the overriding importance of protecting the entire Western Ghats region. That was a much bigger, more significant, issue than the narrow questions relating to the power needs of today’s population and industry in Kerala.

The news was even better on August 30th. A report from the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF) that day described the work the agency is doing with the Kadar, and the ways that grant funds are changing their relationship to the forest. According to the story, the Kadar used to hunt both of the large hornbill species that still live in the mountainous forests of Kerala, the great hornbills and the Malabar pied hornbills. The Kadar used to hunt them for food until it was declared illegal and they mostly stopped.

The CEPF is a worldwide funding agency that focuses on protecting major biodiversity hotspots in tropical and subtropical countries. The Western Ghats range is one of the hotspots they have designated. Under a project funded by the agency, the Kadar are being trained as guards to protect the huge birds. The hornbills are in an avian family characterized by large bills, some of which have big casques on top of their upper mandibles, that live in tropical and subtropical Africa and Asia. Many of the species are endangered, some critically, due to the loss of habitat as well as hunting pressures.

Amitha Bachan, a botanist who had specialized in riparian flora research, took an interest in the hornbills because of their role in dispersing forest seeds. The Vazhachal Forest of Kerala, where he works, is home to many Kadar people as well as hornbills. The CEPF considers it to be a priority area within the Western Ghats hotspot region because it is the last remaining intact riparian forest in Kerala, and it is the last spot where the Malabar pied hornbills nest in the state.

Of the 1,400 remaining Kadar people, according to the CEPF, about 850 live in the Vazhachal Forest Division. Many are now engaged, for at least a few months of the year, in wage labor for forest protection activities, such as the CEPF project.

Mr. Bachan used the grant money to begin a systematic hornbill nest monitoring survey. The first thing he did was to conduct an awareness program in the Kadar communities throughout the region. Many people asked about the possibility of obtaining jobs as forest guards. He ultimately hired 31 Kadar and gave them field training so they could begin monitoring the hornbill nest trees.

This year, the Kerala Ministry of Environment and Forests recognized the importance of the hornbill project and started funding the monitoring guards too. The ministry and the Kadar guards now take a lot of pride in the program. A local farm cooperative has adopted an image of one of the hornbills as its logo.

The CEPF story states that the guards are quite enthusiastic about their work, even though they are employed for only three months of the year. Despite that, many continue to gather data for the remaining nine months because of their personal commitments. They enjoy their jobs because they allow them to work in the forest observing wildlife. By extension, the jobs support their traditional skills and customs. They apprehended a few hornbill poachers, but even those hunters have changed their ways and are now also protecting the birds. The numbers of nests are slowly increasing, and the birds appear to be increasing their nesting range, facts which suggest that the program has been successful so far.

The news about the Kadar got even better last week with a report in The Hindu that the Kerala Revenue Minister, K. P. Rajendran, has been distributing certificates of land rights to tribal people in 10 different communities in the state. He spoke to the press after giving out the deeds and indicated that his administration planned to distribute land titles to all landless tribal families while the government was still in office.

The news report in The Hindu did not mention the tribal affiliations of the 10 different communities it named, but three of the ten are clearly Kadar villages, including Malakkappara, Vachumaram, and, predictably, Vazhacal. In all, 190 families received land titles. The Vazhachal Kadar community has been in the news a lot lately—it is located just downstream from the proposed Athirappilly Dam, and it would be mostly destroyed if the dam were to be built. It is doubtful that the new land titles would affect a decision to build a dam, but they do demonstrate an increasing respect by the government for the rights of the Kadar.

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The Ju/’hoansi and the Anthropologists: an Overview [journal article review]

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Hutterite Heritage of Peace

Botswana’s Contest with the G/wi

Tristan Islanders Enjoy Excitement

Keeping the Peace, Semai Style [journal article review]

Does Drinking Beer Foster Peacefulness?

Kadar News Increasingly Upbeat

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