Peaceful Societies

In order to heal effectively, the amchi, the traditional Ladakhi healer, must understand Buddhist religious practices as well as proper healing methods. The amchi rituals, such as the one described in a recent article, represent a convergence of religious and healing methods.

Laurent Pordié, an anthropologist with the Department of Social Sciences at the French Institute of Pondicherry, describes the proceedings at a ten-day amchi ritual event he observed in November 2000. The rituals were held in the Changtang section of southeast Ladakh, at an amchi temple dedicated to the Buddhist Master of Remedies, Sangye Smanla. The only such temple in Ladakh, it was built as a memorial to the father of the builder, Gelong Rigzin, who himself is a highly revered amchi.

The basic point of the proceedings is to ritually consecrate medicinal preparations prepared by amchis who travel to the temple to participate. The participants believe that the consecrated medicines have greater efficacy after the rituals, called the smandrup, are completed. Gelong Rigzin, who is responsible for conducting the rituals in the name of the Changtang Amchi Association, is, himself, an amchi as well as a monk.

The author witnessed the lengthy rituals from the periphery of the temple along with three other members of a French NGO. In addition, a five-member American film crew, preparing a documentary on traditional medicinal practices, sat along the edges watching and filming. The monks and amchis that participated in the day and night rituals were of course aware of the observers, but they proceeded with their activities anyway.

The author describes in considerable detail the sequences of the ritual activities day by day in order to give a feeling for their complexity and substance. He provides a diagram of the seating of the participants around the perimeter of the temple to accompany his description.

Activities of the first two days were preliminary. The amchis made ceremonial effigies, called storma, out of barley flour and butter, which they used with the appropriate texts during the ceremonies. They prepared medicines with ingredients that they had brought with them and they put the preparations in bags that they placed on the lower part of the altar, which had an effigy of Sangye Smanla on it.

The lead amchi put a large container with medicines on the altar, and he put the rest in glass cabinets that had paintings and statues of the deities. The participants also put other effigies—statues and photographs of masters and deities—on the altar, along with offerings such as butter lamps, butter, incense, and rice. Accompanied by cymbals and drums, the amchis and the monks conducted their rituals, recited texts, and summoned deities with bells. They used symbolic gestures called mudrā with many of the rituals. While one of the participants made mudrās to purify medicines, the others began to chant as a chorus.

As the rituals proceeded, the amchis ingested portions of the consecrated medicines to augment their powers. Thus, argues Pordié, the smandrup transforms a man-made object into a form of fetish, much as the Christian Eucharist creates, through the consecrating actions of the priest, the body of Christ in the host.

On the final day of the rituals, the officiating amchi, Padma Tsetar, gave the participants some pills taken from the altar plus a few drops of brandy which he poured into the palms of their hands. He drank a small sip. A nun, helping with the rituals, went throughout the temple with her incense, carefully keeping her face toward the altar at all times, while Padma Tsetar swayed back and forth at the altar. Each participant took small handfuls of rice and threw them at the altar when the bells stopped ringing.

Padma Tsetar then moved in front of each participant with a plate of rice which also had a few sticks of incense on it. He took the bags of medicines from the lower part of the altar and gave them back to their owners. They, in turn, put bits of the preparations on the small tables in front of them. An assistant took a bowl made from a human skull and passed it around. Each amchi put small amounts of medicines into the bowl and returned his bag or bags of preparations to the altar shelf.

After lunch, Gelong Rigzin poured some chang, Ladakhi barley beer, into the skull bowl, and the assistant put it onto the altar. After a series of recitations and ritual activities, the contents of the skull possessed unsurpassed therapeutic powers. Each of the participants, including the foreign observers, took a spoonful of the mixture in order to ingest the medicinal powers. The monks, amchis, and nun began concluding the proceedings. They replaced objects to their normal locations, finished up their recitations, and put away their texts. The ten-day ritual concluded.

The author maintains that amchis throughout Ladakh recognize the importance of the smandrup held annually in Changtang, though relatively few have attended in person. They often invoke the powers of the smandrup in order to help make their healing more effective. They consecrate their preparations and medicinal materials, recite mantras while reducing plants to powders, and think of Sangye Smanla as they transform their medicines into power potions. And they ingest a little to gain some of the powers themselves.

The author points out, in his conclusion, that this traditional ritual is still subject to the development process, as is all life in Ladakh. He argues that by including the foreigners—as observers—into the ritual, the lead amchi was fostering the development process in Ladakh and bringing it into the lives of the participants. The Westerners helped reformulate the smandrup in the eyes of the amchis, thus adapting it so it would acquire some of the contemporary ideology of development. The ritual produced efficacy and meaning in traditional Ladakhi terms, but it also formed part of a dialog with the outside world.

Pordié, Laurent. 2008. “Reformulating Ingredients: Outlines of a Contemporary Ritual for the Consecration of Medicines in Ladakh.” In Modern Ladakh: Anthropological Perspectives on Continuity and Change, edited by Martijn van Beek and Fernanda Pirie, p.153-174. Leiden and Boston: Brill. This is part two of a three-part series of reviews of important articles in this new book on Ladakh.

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 Global Nonviolence). Sponsel addresses the questions from the perspective of an anthropologist rather than from that of a political scientist, which is Paige’s field.

Sponsel’s current work significantly updates an article on the natural history of peace that he published in 1996, a PDF of which is in the Archive of this website. His latest article provides an up-to-date, effective review of the literature that demonstrates the importance of peaceful societies. He describes the very real possibility that modern societies can derive profound benefits from acknowledging that peacefulness is truly possible, and that societies can re-make themselves by promoting nonkilling cultures. His current work, due for publication in a book later in 2009, is already available on the Web.

He accepts Paige’s definition of a nonkilling society as one “characterized by no killing of humans and no threats to kill; no weapons designed to kill humans and no justification for using them; and no conditions of society dependent upon threat or use of killing for maintenance or change.” Rather than just discussing nonkilling societies as a theoretical construct, however, Sponsel demonstrates that they really do exist.

He cites perhaps the most famous peaceful society of all, at least among anthropologists—the Semai of Malaysia—as well as several other nonviolent peoples. The author points out that the major difference between the highly peaceful Semai and the Waorani of Ecuador, who often used to be violent, is the fact that the former have a worldview that compels them to try to always be peaceful, while the latter readily accepted violence.

Professor Sponsel is quite decisive in his arguments about the importance of the literature. He has little patience for the Hobbesian view, held by many scholars, that humanity is, by nature, violent and warlike. “Given this extensive documentation of nonviolent and peaceful socio-cultural systems, the only way that any author, scholar, or scientist can possibly assert that human nature is inherently murderous and warlike is by ignoring the ample evidence to the contrary from a multitude of diverse sources,” he writes. Authors who defend the idea of innate human aggressiveness are either willfully ignorant, their scholarship is deficient, or, for whatever reason, they won’t deal with information that undercuts their preconceptions, he argues.

He goes much further. He points out that that the “era of lethality,” the recent few thousand year period in human history when people have been fighting wars, corresponds to the development in humanity of social inequality and complex civilizations. There is very little if any evidence of warfare before the Neolithic period—it appears to have originated with the state form of social organization. Sponsel admits, of course, that humanity cannot return to a hunter-gatherer past, but many of the more peaceful societies portrayed in the anthropological literature can provide, he maintains, heuristic models of a nonkilling society.

The author marshals arguments from other fields to demonstrate that it is certainly possible for a killing society to change into a nonkilling one. Germany and Japan, for instance, have modified themselves since the end of the Second World War into more peaceable societies. Costa Rica also demonstrates that a modern nation state can transform itself into a society that focuses, as he puts it, on “life-enhancing activities.”

Tibet is another example of a relatively peaceful state. The Tibetans choose to follow a leader, the Dalai Lama, who refuses to allow his followers to fight for their freedom from China. Sponsel suggests that, under the Dalai Lama’s leadership, “Tibetans appear to present the most outstanding case of a nonviolent response to violent invasion, occupation, and suppression.” He has hope that, given enough time, the Tibetans may be able to follow the example of the Indians when they overthrew the British Raj, the South Africans when they defeated apartheid, and the Filipinos when they got rid of the Marcos dictatorship. Some day, Tibetans may achieve a comparable victory, peacefully, in their country.

Sponsel describes in detail the landmark studies by Douglas Fry (2006 and 2007) about the importance of recognizing the human potential for peacefulness. He counsels that a large, collaborative project is needed to develop the theory and practice of peace and nonviolence, something on the scope of the Manhattan Project during World War II that developed the first atomic bomb. Not only is war too expensive in terms of human lives, it is too hard on the environment, he argues, and “indeed, war is rapidly becoming an unaffordable anachronism in the 21st century.”

The second half of the essay seeks to answer the second question that the author adapted from Paige: what are the possibilities of a nonkilling anthropology? He reviews the work of prominent anthropologists from the past who have been pacifists, such as Franz Boas, and more recent anthropologists who have promoted the study of peacefulness in human societies, such as Ashley Montagu.

Sponsel analyzes the relative lack of interest by anthropologists on nonkilling in human societies, but to judge by the forcefulness of his essay he does not appear to be discouraged that most of his colleagues still prefer to study violence and warfare rather than peacefulness and prosocial cultures. He suggests how nonkilling academic anthropology curricula could be prepared, but he recognizes that there are impediments to the further development of a more peace-focused academic agenda—such as the need to update the fundamental criteria and emphases in his profession.

Ultimately, though, Sponsel mixes realism with his hopes for a greater focus on nonkilling societies. “It is most sad to say that peace is likely to emerge and prevail globally only when it becomes more profitable than war,” he writes. It is a sad but probably valid conclusion to a profound analysis by an outstanding peace scholar.

Sponsel, Leslie E. No Date. “Reflections on the Possibilities of a Nonkilling Society and a Nonkilling Anthropology.” To Be Published in the book Towards a Nonkilling Paradigm, edited by Joam Evans. Publication expected in 2009. Available on the Web in PDF form.

Amish farmers in Wisconsin have run up against a legal requirement that they refuse to honor: a 2005 state law that requires all farms to register their livestock herds. An Amish farmer in Clark County is facing a civil court suit because he will not violate his religious beliefs, which he feels would be compromised by the state’s livestock premises registration law.

Emanuel Miller, Jr., a 28 year old pig farmer from Loyal, Wisconsin, has been charged by the Clark County District Attorney for failing to comply with the law, according to a news story last Saturday. He will not register his pigs because, along with other Wisconsin Amish, he believes that the number that would be assigned to his farm by the state Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection would label his property with the mark of the beast, as mentioned in the book of Revelation.

The state contends that livestock herds must be registered so that when disease outbreaks occur, farms can be contacted quickly to contain their spread. When an outbreak of the disease pseudorabies occurred in 2007, the department discovered that 54 farms were unregistered, 44 of which were owned by the Amish. Department resources were strained to ascertain and contact the unregistered farms during that outbreak.

Mr. Miller’s father, Emanuel Miller, Sr., represented 100 Amish farmers in a meeting with department officials in Milwaukee in August. The county district attorney has chosen Mr. Miller’s son as a representative farmer to prosecute because he seems to be familiar with the issues. He will be represented in court by Ken Artis, an attorney who has helped the Amish in a recent building codes case. A meeting on March 20 will schedule a court trial.

On the last day of December, the Tristan Islanders celebrate Old Year’s Night rather than New Year’s Eve. However, according to the official Tristan da Cunha Website, this year there have been some changes in their normal holiday patterns.

The late arrivals of two major supply ships, the MV Baltic Trader on December 19 and the MV Edinburgh the next day, interfered with the traditional schedule of activities. Crews unloading the ships had to keep working right up to Christmas Eve, and they were expecting to resume work between Christmas Day and Old Year’s Night. The annual Sheep Shearing Day, usually held at the Patches three miles from the Settlement the Saturday before Christmas, will be rescheduled in January.

Normally, everyone on Tristan da Cunha looks forward to Break Up Day in the middle of December, when everything on the island more or less shuts down for a three week holiday. Families stock up with supplies from the island store ahead of time, though people have some access to their supplies in the freezers during the holidays. The Internet Café and the Administration Office are open only during limited hours, the doctor provides services as needed, staff members keep the generator running, and the pub is closed.

Old Year’s Night is a celebration of mid-summer on the island. The Administrator holds a reception for the Tristan men on the lawn of the Residency, if the weather is good. Everyone watches for the appearance of the elaborately costumed “Green Men.” Also referred to as Okalolies, these masked men move around the village during the afternoon of Old Year’s Night and attempt to scare women, children, and dogs (see some fine photos). The party then shifts to the home of the Chief Islander where the Green Men sometimes unmask—so that they can have a drink.

The revelers then break up and go to their separate homes to continue toasting in the new year with a braai, a South African style barbecue. Many simply move down to the beach to send off the old year with a driftwood fire under the stars.

Peter Munch described similar festivities in his 1937 – 1938 diary of his visit to Tristan, which his daughter published in 2008. The mummery—dressing in women’s clothing, blackening faces, wearing hats with flowers, and putting on cows’ tails—was an important part of the December 31 overnight celebration that year. The men danced, sang, and visited nearly all the houses. The mean-spirited missionary who tried to rule the Islanders at the time dampened the spirits of the people to some extent, but Munch and the other Norwegians visitors that summer enjoyed participating in the all-night revelry nonetheless.

ANI, the Indian news agency, reported last week that the annual Losar festival, the Ladakhi New Year celebrations, had begun. Fernanda Pirie, whose recent book analyzed the peacefulness in Photoksar, has published a detailed description of the Losar celebrations that were held in the remote village a few years ago. It appears in a new anthology about Ladakh.

The annual Losar rituals in Ladakh chase away the bad from the old year—sicknesses and deaths—and welcome in the good for the new year—babies to be born, snow to fall. As a rite of passage, Losar exorcises evil spirits and symbolically denies aging and death through the dancing, pantomime, and music that celebrate youth and fertility.

In the last days of the old year, the Photoksar villagers begin celebrating by placing butter lamps on the outsides of their houses. Boys of the village visit homes and are given flat bread to eat as they gather around fires and sing songs. Then they fling burning branches from the fires down the slopes and make loud cries in order to frighten evil spirits away from the village.

A party atmosphere prevails around the bonfires—the boys tell lewd jokes and dance, and any girls or women watching flee in embarrassment. These activities, Pirie argues, show that the boys are denying the powers of the evil spirits, asserting their supposed dominance over the females, and foreshadowing the celebrations of youth during the festival.

On the last day of the year, households affirm their social ties by hosting dinners for other members of their phaspuns, social groupings of families in Ladakhi villages that cut across kinship lines. The oldest man at each meal gives an offering of food to the spirits of the house and of the earth and tosses food to unwelcome ghosts. When the meal is over, children will make balls of dough and throw them around, boys versus girls—one of the few times that Ladakhis ever waste food or that children are allowed to act up.

Later in the day, people take plates of food up a hill as offerings to deceased ancestors—attempts to appease any ghosts that may become troublesome. Remaining food is fried up and distributed to the people present. During each phase of the Losar rituals, sharing food is critical.

On the first day of the new year, people venerate the Buddhist deities and celebrate family relations. Groups of men take offerings up to the temples on the hill above the village and raise new prayer flags on the poles outside. Other men change the prayer flags that fly on branches above each house in the village. Later, the women prepare more plates of food for the deities of the house, and they take more plates of meat and bread, plus censers of burning juniper, up to the temples.

When they return, everyone in each house lines up around the stove so the mother can pour out for each a small amount of chang, Ladakhi barley beer which is decorated with butter. She greets the family members in turn, and they return her greetings. Then the grandmother in the house performs the same ritual. Finally a man takes a jug of chang and visits the headman and the astrologer of the village to give them offerings from the family. The new year is thus welcomed by propitiating evil forces and affirming social relationships.

That evening, the forces of evil—two Babar—make their appearance at the main village flag pole, the symbolic center of town. The men playing the Babar roles have partially blackened faces and are dressed in dirty, yak’s-hair carpets; one holds a drum and the other a couple horns. They symbolize decay and evil—the harm that the spirits can bring to people.

The next day, three other dressed up characters—an Api (elderly grandmother) and two Meme (elderly grandfathers)—appear. They represent to the villagers the natural processes of aging and decay. These three characters, plus the two Babar, become the central figures for the remaining Losar festivities. The Babar act as masters of ceremonies at celebrations, while the Api-Meme act as his assistants.

The characters visit all the households in turn and participate in the partying, feasting, singing and dancing. The women of the households join in the festivities as well as the men. The Api-Meme typically act as hosts at the parties, while the Babar take their places at the head of the food lines. The Babar symbolically steal food in each home.

On the days that follow, dances include all the villagers. The socially prominent men of the village—the headman and the amchi—are honored. The honorees reciprocate by giving money to the Babar and the Api-Meme. After all the household rounds each day, the Babar and Api-Meme return to the village center at dusk to signal the beginning of the evening celebrations.

The night time dances may be more wild than the ones in the afternoon. The Babar stand near the center of things, one rattling his drum, the other blowing his horn. Meanwhile, the Api-Meme move about with large ladles of chang for the participants. The celebrations that welcome in the new year are thus hosted by figures that symbolize the aging and evils of the past year, forces that Losar exorcises. The degenerate nature of the celebrations boosts the spirits of fertility and youth.

The traditional Losar festival that the author witnessed in Photoksar challenged the structure of society. But as the Api-Meme stole food and young people transgressed normal proprieties, their activities renewed the social order and provided needed youth and vitality for the new year. However, the forces of modernity seem to be prevailing in Photoksar. The author visited again more recently and learned that many of the traditional aspects of the Losar celebrations in the village have been dropped at the insistence of the village lama.

Pirie, Fernanda. 2008. “Dancing in the Face of Death: Losar Celebrations in Photoskar.” In Modern Ladakh: Anthropological Perspectives on Continuity and Change, edited by Martijn van Beek and Fernanda Pirie, p.175-193. Leiden and Boston: Brill. This is part one of a three-part series of reviews of important articles in this new book.

Operation Christmas Drop, an annual humanitarian effort from Anderson Air Force Base in Guam that air drops holiday packages to the people of remote Micronesian islands, including Ifaluk, started off with a bust this year.

The Christmas drop tradition began in 1952 when some air force people, flying over a remote island, noticed some islanders below waving to them. They got the idea of getting together some stuff on the plane, putting it in a package, and dropping it to them. That single act of charity became a holiday tradition at the US airbase.

This year, the operation collected over 23 tons of supplies, equipment, clothing, medicine, and toys to distribute to the residents of 68 isolated places, islands that normally have contact with the outside world only through infrequent ship service. The people of Guam donated not only a lot of material items for the distribution, but they also contributed about $35,000. Many also gained support for the project from contacts on the US mainland.

One of the major criticisms of the Christmas drop program in recent years has been the choice of gifts for the islanders. Peter Malmai, from Ifaluk, said the crate last year was filled with toys, but it was hard to eat them. “It’s like we got one of everything, … but what we need most are more hooks and line,” he said. Evidently the organizers of the annual program heard similar complaints from others, for the emphasis this year was on more practical gifts, such as fishing gear. They spent $5,000 of the donated money on fishing supplies, and contacted mainland fishing clubs for contributions.

The first air drop began on Sunday, last week, the 14th, with the media invited to go along. Unfortunately, it did not go too well. A Pacific News Center release shows everyone climbing into the C130 Globemaster cargo plane, the captain talking, then the 250 pound crates of supplies being pushed out the rear cargo bay, only to drop, without the parachutes opening, into the sea next to an island.

Another news story provides more detail. The Air Force was using a new style of container made of rubber since they had run out of the large cardboard boxes they had used, without problems, in the past. The first rubber box out of the plane on Sunday, over one of the island in Chuuk, filled with tools, clothing, and canned foods, exploded. Two more snapped open when they were caught by updrafts after leaving the plane. Fishhooks, machetes, and canned goods plopped into the shallow sea next to the island. Clothing fluttered in the breezes. The resourceful islanders apparently retrieved much of the goods from the floor of the sea.

The air force people tried using strips of duct tape to hold the next box together. It only half exploded. The package ripped open, rolled upside down, the parachute failed to deploy, and the gifts again plunged into the sea. Fortunately, no one was hurt by falling machetes. The captain in charge of the operation this year, in a blog entry about the experience, said that resourceful staff people solved the problems of the inadequate containers (and, presumably, the parachutes that failed to deploy). The air drop continued with complete success from Monday through the rest of the week.

It is not clear how many hooks and fishing lines made it to Ifaluk.

Hutterite colonies in southwestern Saskatchewan have been sharing their food resources with needy people at Christmas time each year with the help of a local Salvation Army post.

The 11th Annual Hutterite/Salvation Army Food Bank drive in the town of Swift Current has been more successful than ever this year, despite the downturn in the economy, according to a news report last week. Every year, Hutterite colonies in the province share their garden vegetables and meats—tons of food—to enrich the canned goods that form the bulk of the Salvation Army holiday food packages for needy families.

Captain Paul Loner of the Salvation Army in Swift Current gives the Hutterites a lot of credit for their support. “We want the public to know and understand some of the support that you give …. We like to be able to share that good news as to how you support us.” The Hutterite contributions evidently form a significant portion of the Christmas packages for needy families in that section of Saskatchewan each year.

Another person who has been involved with the cooperative project for years also spoke to the press quite approvingly of the Hutterite response. Each year they are more generous, and everyone appreciates it, he said. They are willing to share their good fortune with others in the region, and they have found an effective way to do it.

Lovina Eicher, an Amish woman living in Michigan with her husband and children, is the author of a weekly syndicated newspaper column, “The Amish Cook.” Her column of December 17 describes her daily work, family activities of the previous several days, her cooking and baking, and her children’s preparations for Christmas.

Ms. Eicher writes about the laundry chores of Monday morning, work that is much easier in their present home than it was earlier. At their previous residence, she had to pump water by hand from a cistern, haul it to a kerosene stove to be heated, then haul it to the washing machine so she could wash the clothes. Now she can just use hoses to run the hot and cold water into the machine. Life is so much easier for her, especially since her husband put up a clothes line in the basement so she can now hang up the laundry to dry from the heat of the coal stove.

She writes about the various siblings that have visited in recent days, or plan to visit. Visiting is obviously an important part of her daily life. The focus of the visits—or at least the focus of Ms. Eicher’s writing—is the food. Home-made pizza, cake, chocolate pudding. One day her daughter Verena made cupcakes while Loretta , another daughter, helped frost and decorate them. Details on family relationships that are not clear from the text of the column are clarified in her website, which is maintained by another person.

She comments on the excitement in the house that morning as the kids prepared to leave for school. The Christmas program was to be on Thursday and they have been rehearsing their parts. Ms. Eicher and her husband Joe plan to attend, as they do all such school activities. On Friday, the children expected to have a school Christmas party, at which the students in each grade exchange gifts.

Ms. Eicher continues her column by describing the menu for the dinner she had with her sister and family the previous evening—baked chicken, dressing, mashed potatoes, gravy, corn and potato salad, cole slaw, macaroni salad, and cheese. They had chocolate pudding pie, Jello fruit salad, and ice cream for desert. She closes the column with a recipe for homemade cheesecake. An Amish Christmas, at least in one home, sounds like continuous feasting.

Tupakula Munemma, the Yanadi woman who garnered attention in the Indian press over a month ago when she made a rousing speech at a political convention, is still in the news.

At a major convention of the Praja Rajyam Party in Vijayawada, a large city in Andhra Pradesh which is the headquarters of the new political group, Ms. Munemma told her enthusiastic supporters that she was quite pleased with all the recognition she has received from the party. She emphasized themes she had spoken about earlier—that India needed to improve the living standards of the weakest members of society.

She has evidently achieved star status in the party, not far behind film superstar Chiranjeevi and the other party founding leaders. Chiranjeevi announced that she would be the party’s candidate for election from the Nellore District of the state, the first party candidate he has chosen. According to one enthusiastic newspaper account, “crowds rushed to have a glance [at] the woman leader hailing from [the] Yanadi tribe in a remote village in Nellore district.”

A news story on the party website indicated that her trip from her village to the city, which took a whole day, energized the activists, especially the women. The highlight of the festive atmosphere during the upbeat day was the appearance of Ms. Munemma. Hundreds of women and youths jostled to get their photographs taken with her during her visit.

While many people around the world celebrated the 60th anniversary last Wednesday of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Botswana took the occasion to announce repressive measures against the G/wi. That country apparently did not notice the tragic paradox.

Last Thursday morning, December 11, Google News provided links to 4,056 stories and articles issued over the previous few days in the world’s press about celebrations of the landmark human rights document. Many news accounts concentrated on a variety of human rights abuses, though the case of the San peoples of the Kalahari received scant attention.

The December 10 New York Times, for instance, focused its 60th anniversary article on the human rights situation in China and the way that country celebrated the occasion. Evidently the Chinese media spent the day filled with self congratulations about China’s progress in promoting the rights of individuals and free speech.

The Times article mentions a story that appeared in the paper China Daily on Wednesday, which lauded three decades of progressive new laws that promote rights and freedoms. Wang Chen, Minister of the State Council Information Office, noted in the article that his country has 229 laws and 600 administrative decrees that protect human rights. He wrote, as the New York Times reported it, that “so long as we unswervingly implement the constitutional principle of respecting and protecting human rights, constantly improve democracy and the rule of law, our society will become more harmonious and people will live a still better life.”

The Times reported that also on Wednesday, 40 people were seen protesting near the Foreign Ministry in Beijing. The protesters evidently made the mistake of demonstrating for about 30 minutes against government corruption and in favor of free elections. Then the Chinese police whisked them away.

Perhaps the most significant celebration of the 60th anniversary on Wednesday occurred in Paris, where the declaration was signed at the Palais de Chaillot on December 10, 1948. The Declaration, based in part on the French Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789 and on the U.S. Declaration of Independence, was adopted that year by 58 member states of the United Nations. The non-binding text has inspired declarations of human rights in the laws and constitutions of at least 90 countries.

A ninety-year old holocaust survivor, Stephane Hessel, spoke at the Paris celebration, and read the preamble to the Declaration before an audience of officials and human rights activists. Hessel, a diplomat who participated in drafting the 1948 Declaration, told AFP that its principles, such as Article 1 declaring that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” are still highly relevant today.

Hessel was optimistic in his assessment of the human rights situation around the world. Mentioning the election of Barack Obama as the first Black to hold the office of U.S. President, he said that “pessimists say things are getting worse and worse, that the world is a terrible place, but there has never been so much progress in 60 years.” He pointed out that the world has gotten rid of apartheid, established an International Criminal Court, and abolished the former Soviet Union and its infamous gulags.

Other world notables also marked the occasion. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was not able to attend the celebrations in Paris, but he sent a message to the gathering conveying his hope “that we will act on our collective responsibility to uphold the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration.” U.S. President Elect Barack Obama issued a statement of commemoration too, though it focused primarily on his own country’s stance in favor of human rights.

The government of Botswana marked the occasion last Wednesday in its own fashion—by announcing that it had approved the Environmental Impact Assessment of Gem Diamonds to begin a controversial diamond mine in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. One of the government’s conditions was that the company, which would have to bore wells for water, would not be allowed to share any of that water with the San people who live in the reserve. It did, however, reserve the right to use excess water from company bore holes to benefit wildlife. Commemorate human rights by destroying a human society.

The G/wi, one of the San societies of the Kalahari, won a landmark law suit against the Botswana government in late 2006, which compelled it to allow them to return to their homes, but while the government has been forced to allow them to move back, it has forbade them to use the water from a pre-existing water hole.

Stephen Corry, the Director of Survival International, remarked about the announcement from Botswana that it is “absolutely scandalous that the Botswana government is insisting that Gem Diamonds does not provide the Bushmen with water. The government is clearly determined to go to any lengths to keep the Bushmen off their land.”

A couple of the four thousand news stories around the world, such as one from India, briefly mentioned the persecutions of the indigenous San peoples of the Kalahari in their stories about the global tragedy of human rights abuses. None seemed to notice that the Botswana government had its own sense of irony in the timing of its most recent announcement.

Peaceful Societies

Peaceful Societies

Ladakhi Amchi Rituals Consecrate Medicines [anthology chapter review]

Is a Nonkilling Society Possible? [unpublished paper review]

Amish Farmers Refuse to Register their Herds

Tristan Islanders Welcome the New Year

New Year Celebrations in Ladakh [anthology chapter review]

Bringing Christmas to the Ifaluk

The Christmas Spirit among Saskatchewan Hutterites

The Amish Prepare for Christmas

Yanadi Woman Achieves Star Billing

Celebrate Human Rights—Persecute the G/wi

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