Peaceful Societies

The Amish are hassled by American communities about the manure their horses drop, the outhouses they erect, the building codes they sometimes ignore, and the slow moving vehicle warning triangles some of them refuse to use. One Amish store in Pennsylvania was condemned because it did not sell American flags, much like hundreds of other stores catering primarily to pacifist Anabaptist patrons.

Some communities, however, have had diametrically opposite reactions: people have openly expressed pleasure in having the Amish as neighbors. A news story last week discussed how this more favorable approach has been taken to a new level by a county in north-central West Virginia.

Philippi, Barbour County, West Virginia (Photo by Valerius Tygart in the Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons license)

Barbour County, particularly its county seat of Philippi, has been openly courting young Amish families from Pennsylvania and Ohio, trying to induce them to move into the Mountain State and set up businesses. The promoters also hope that the distinctive dress and customs of the Amish will start attracting tourists to visit the economically struggling area.

Reggie Trefethen, the director of business development for Barbour County, decided to take a new approach to economic development. Instead of visiting corporate managers and trying to convince them to move their factories or stores to the mountains, he has been visiting Amish families, though with a similar message—move to our area and your business will prosper.

During his visits in the shops and homes of the Amish, he has been seeking to convince them to resettle in Philippi or in the surrounding rural area. He wants to develop retail businesses and, not incidentally, perhaps some Amish tourism. The county has already tried unsuccessfully to attract manufacturers or other sizable employers.

A group of Amish from north-central Ohio has expressed tentative interest in the plan, and if it works out, the county may well have 16 new Amish businesses, such as cheese makers and furniture shops, move into downtown Philippi by the end of this year. And, of course, it will also have bearded men and bonneted women driving horse drawn buggies for the expected tourists to gawk at. With abandoned store fronts available for small businesses to move into in Philippi, officials do not see any downside to the plan.

The store fronts of Philippi, West Virginia (Photo by J. Stephen Conn on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Mr. Trefethen has been working hard at his task. He’s been visiting Amish communities in the two neighboring states for months, giving them PowerPoint presentations that he printed out for people who do not have electricity. He told the reporter that the Amish he has spoken with have been “cordial but … guarded.” They asked such questions as whether the roads in the county were able to handle horse and buggy traffic, the extent of the tillable soil, and the availability of farmland.

He said that the current residents of Philippi and surrounding Barbour County have an accepting attitude toward the plan. He has been talking with people in the county sheriff’s office to explore possible issues that horse and buggy traffic on the public roads might cause. He emphasized that if they do decide to come, the Amish would cover the costs of moving to West Virginia themselves.

If the Barbour County approach does work, and if it gets enough media attention, perhaps it will set a positive example of how to cherish and welcome the very different, but very neighborly and hard-working, Amish people into a community.

South Pacific travel websites last week marked the rollout of a new campaign to boost tourism in Tahiti by publicizing a branding approach called “Embraced by Mana.” The PR release gushed, “The iconic beauty of The Islands [sic] of Tahiti and the unique Tahitian culture are showcased in the new global brand ….”

Tahitians perform before an audience at the Intercontinental Resort on Tahiti (from a video by Gloria Manna on Flickr.com, Creative Commons license)

Seeking to overcome the stereotypical image of Tahitians as people who perform for tourists, the publicity statement tried to say a bit more about the culture of the islands. It indicated that “Tahitians believe in Mana as a life force and spirit that connects all living things.” This cultural concept utilized by the branding campaign was designed to appeal to travelers who could learn to recognize Tahiti “as a destination of world-class, iconic beauty and diverse, cultural discovery.” At least, that is the way Paul Sloan, CEO and Director General of Tahiti Tourisme, promoted his campaign.

A search in news stories about the new campaign’s references to mana as an important Tahitian cultural construct yielded articles that repeated the fluff of the press releases. “Mana is a life force and spirit that connects all living things, and is an element that forms the basis of spirituality for many Polynesian peoples…Mana can be present in people, places, and objects…” wrote one news story. But it provided no further information about what mana really is—or was—to the Tahitians, and if or how it might relate to the traditional peacefulness of their society.

A recent psychological dictionary by Colman (1) defines mana as a Polynesian and Melanesian word that was brought into analytical psychology by Carl Jung. It denotes a “supernatural life force” originating in the spirit world, or the head, that can be focused on objects or other people. Transmitted from one person to another, it confers ritual power and social status.

A beach on Tahiti, the sun setting over the nearby island of Moorea (photo by Jay Buangan on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

A more thorough 2005 reference article by Roy Wagner (2) provides a lot of additional information about mana, though it gets harder and harder to relate the concept to pristine Tahitian beaches and waving palm trees the farther one diverges from the tourism tropes. Wagner points out at the outset of his 2005 encyclopedic overview that the word mana is one of those vague words applied to concepts in the anthropological literature that are hard to explain in ordinary terms. For instance, mana means personal as well as impersonal power that is both sacred and secular.

Although mana may be used to describe specific tasks, such woodcarving or navigating at sea (or, perhaps, promoting tourism), Wagner writes that mana itself is not specifiable. It is better used to describe powers, such as that of leaders. The mana of a leader such as a U.S. president suggests an attribute of the personal qualities of the individual—the bravado of Theodore Roosevelt or the charisma of John F. Kennedy—more than it does the actual powers listed in the U.S. Constitution.

Wagner asks how mana affects morality, but his answer, like the entire concept, seems circular to a non-Polynesian. Mana is moral “to the extent that the morality in question has mana (p.5631).” But he goes on to explain that mana is the organizing force for human tasks, and the guarantor of social hierarchies. Leadership, he writes, has mana. Beyond that, mana has no limits. Along with their concept of tapu (taboo), to the Polynesians mana provides content and form to the world.

It becomes clear why the tourist people decided to simplify their campaign. But with all the differing possible connotations of mana in Polynesia, two critical questions remain: how the concept relates to social controls that lead (or, past tense, led) to peacefulness, and how those controls relate in particular to the Tahitians.

Raymond Firth, a pioneering anthropologist from New Zealand, did path breaking field work in Tikopia, located 4,500 km (2,800 miles) west of Tahiti in the Solomon Islands, but populated by Polynesian people. He first visited Tikopia in 1928 before the island was significantly westernized, where one of his interests was a careful study of mana.

Firth’s article on mana, originally published in 1940, was reprinted in his 1967 book Tikopia Ritual and Belief (3). Mana, he wrote, expresses phenomena that are socially approved. In essence, mana describes results that are attained thorough positive actions. If applied to a person, it is a mark of approval, a judgment in favor of the individual. One of Firth’s informants called a statement by someone that another person has mana as a “speech of praise (1967, p.185).”

While Robert I. Levy did his field work in Tahiti long after they were westernized, he did investigate the concept of mana. Levy (1973) related it to traditional Tahitian culture. He pointed out, as Wagner did more recently, that both mana and tapu (taboo) are closely inter-related, essential concepts for understanding objects, spirits and people—and the powers that infuse them. Tapu combines sacredness and prohibition. Mana and tapu, he wrote, “are related in that the magical or political principle which legitimatizes and enforces the tapu is based on mana (p.156).” In other words, the strictures that enforce the peaceful social order are based on an understanding and acceptance of both mana and tapu.

Levy expanded on that. He wrote that in traditional Tahitian society, the people developed their concepts of tapu and mana into a system of social and political controls. Those controls were essential for forming a nonviolent social order. As of the time of his field work in Tahiti, the terms were still being used and the Tahitians were still attaching traditional meanings to them. But mana had also acquired other meanings: personal power and authority, or secular power, such as that held by the territorial governor.

It is not clear from the scholarly literature how much the concepts of mana and tapu are relevant today, though an article on mana in the Wikipedia implies that it is still viewed in both Hawaiian and Tahitian cultures as an important form of healing power and spiritual energy. Perhaps the tourist promoters will foster a renaissance of traditional Tahitian values after all with their mana campaign.

(1) Colman, Andrew M. 2015. A Dictionary of Psychology, 4th ed. Oxford University Press

(2) Wagner, Roy. 2005. “Mana.” In Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed. edited by Lindsay Jones, vol. 8, p.5631-5633. Gale

(3) Firth, Raymond. 1967. Tikopia Ritual and Belief. Boston: Beacon Press. Chapter 8, “The Analysis of Mana: An Empirical Approach,” p.174-194, a reprint of an article that originally appeared in the Journal of the Polynesian Society vol.49: 483-510, 1940.

Two news stories last week highlighted the challenges involved with educating children raised in Sumbawanga, the major city of Tanzania’s Rukwa Region and the traditional heartland of the Fipa people.

The first article, published by the Daily News from Tanzania on January 15th, described the concerns officials have for the fact that local parents appear to be keeping their children out of school. Magalulla Saidi Magalulla, the Rukwa Regional Commissioner, has threatened to arrest parents who prevent their children from attending school.

During a trip to Sumbawanga, he visited some schools and learned that 90 children in three of them had not yet started coming. He warned parents that the president of Tanzania, John Magufuli, has emphasized the importance of providing free education for children. The Regional Commissioner warned parents that excuses will not be accepted. Even students who don’t have uniforms are required to attend school, he declared.

He added that he was concerned when he heard reports that the headmasters of some primary schools were refusing to accept students who don’t have the proper uniforms. He said, basically, that the children must be educated.

School toilet for girls in Tanzania (Photo by SuSanA Secretariat on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

A second story in the same newspaper on the 18th focused on one of the possible causes of a lack of attendance at the schools: inadequate, or non-existent, toilets. The head teacher at the Chipu Primary School in Sumbawanga Municipality, Mr. Arord Mkwama, admitted in an interview with the press that the situation has served to prevent children from attending the school.

The 1,045 students at his school are forced to relieve themselves in the shrubbery around the building. The paper questioned the staff and found that four out of the nine apartments provided for the staff also do not have toilet facilities. The paper quoted a parent, who is keeping his children away from the school, as saying, “we (parents) have decided to stop our children from attending classes until latrines are built. It’s embarrassing and discomforting when pupils and their teachers lack sanitary facilities.”

Other parents whom the news reporter spoke with said that their children were forced to return to their homes to relieve themselves. One parent claimed that the girls were suffering from urinary tract infections due to the situation. She said it embarrassed her to see children running from the school to seek privacy in the bushes during the school day.

The village chair, Mr. Deus Masanja, said that the villagers had contributed 35,000 bricks for the construction of the school toilets, but he suggested it might be wise to close the school temporarily until the new sanitary facilities can be built. The reporter did not indicate whether or not the village authorities in Chipu had mentioned the problem to the Regional Commissioner during his visit to Sumbawanga a few days earlier.

A schoolgirl relaxing on a beach in Karema, Tanzania (Photo by Dietmar Temps on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Historian Kathleen R. Smythe wrote an article about the importance to Fipa girls a hundred years ago of getting an education. Prof. Smythe did not mention difficulties such as providing proper sanitation to the school run by a mission in Karema, a settlement slightly to the north of the traditional Fipa territory on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, but it was clear from her study that many Fipa parents in the area did send their children, including their girls, to the mission school with some enthusiasm.

Prof. Smythe found that the missionary sisters required the girls to help with their share of the work around the school, such as doing the laundry, hauling water, gathering firewood, and helping raise and preserve foods. The sisters felt that hard work was an important aspect of their educations. The scholar did point out that boys at the school received better educations than the girls did. However, since many of those Fipa girls did not have parents, life at the school was probably the best option open to them.

Also, Smythe suspected, the fact that the missionary teachers at the school were women may have encouraged the Fipa girls. One missionary father wrote in 1919 that the major use the girls seemed to be making of their newly learned literary abilities was to write love notes. He grumped that he was not able to suppress that practice.

The news about education for Fipa girls does not end a century ago. In March 2013, Ms. Salma Kikwete, at the time the First Lady of Tanzania, traveled to Sumbawanga to visit a school. She told the 1,000 girls enrolled there about the importance of their getting an education. She urged them to consider education as a better choice than getting pregnant. She told the students that while they may not have the support of their parents, and while health and poverty may be problems for them, nonetheless they can fulfill their dreams by focusing on their studying.

To judge by the comments quoted by the Daily News last week, at least some of the Fipa parents of today agree with the perspective of Ms. Kikwete about their children—so long as the schools are safe and healthy for them. However, other parents may not be as enthusiastic about their children getting an education, presuming the report by the Regional Commissioner is accurate.

While Jean Briggs’ book Never in Anger successfully portrayed the Utku Inuit approaches to controlling displays of anger, her latest book may help them preserve their culture.

A news story published in Nunatsiaq Online on January 15th reported on the publication of a massive dictionary of the language spoken by the Utkuhiksalingmiut Inuit people (Briggs abbreviated them as Utku) while they lived nomadically on the land, south of Gjoa Haven along the Back River in the Central Canadian Arctic.

The news story provides a link to a report, in the archives of Nunatsiaq Online from 13 years ago, that included an interview with Briggs and discussed the background of her path breaking ethnography, Never in Anger. Briggs had traveled to the remote Back River of northern Canada to do field work on a group of Inuit who had not, she thought, as yet been converted to Christianity. She wanted to study shamanism as a part of their traditional beliefs. In fact, they had already adopted Christianity and the people would not admit to having any shamans.

So she spent her time in the camp, and particularly in the home of her adoptive parents, learning about the Utku ways, especially how to behave as a proper Inuk. Part of the appeal of her book is that she describes her own relationships with the Utku—misunderstandings that led to her not fitting in, and even to being ostracized for several months.

She admitted to the journalist in the 2002 interview that she herself was at fault for the difficulties she had with the Utku. “I was too volatile,” she said. “I wasn’t fun to be with.” But the point of that interview was that she was working on a dictionary of Utkuhiksalingmiut, which was finally published last October.

Briggs admitted that she doesn’t speak the Utku language fluently, though she does understand almost everything that people say to her. Not too many years after she completed her field work with the people along Back River, they resettled into permanent homes, mostly in either Gjoa Haven or in Baker Lake, and they began adopting the dialects of those communities.

The piles and piles of note cards that Briggs had made, her way of learning the language of the Utku people, formed a valuable record of the words and the English meanings of a dialect that was rapidly being forgotten in favor of the more widely spoken Inuktitut. She needed to put it all together into a published dictionary. As of 2002, she admitted that her database of Utku had more than 30,000 words, based on many repeat visits to her friends in Gjoa Haven.

The new 700 page book, Utkuhiksalingmiut Uqauhiitigut: Dictionary of Utkuhiksalingmiut Inuktitut Postbase Suffixes, was based on her 600 hours of recordings and was published by Nunavut Arctic College. The book is available online from Amazon.ca.

It focuses on suffixes, which are heavily used in the Utku dialect to form words. Briggs co-authored the book with two linguists, Alana Johns from the University of Toronto and Conor Cook, a linguist based in Iqaluit who processed many hours of definitions. Cook told the reporter that the information provided by the Utku speakers about their language was critical. By using the notes compiled by Briggs, he could understand the precise meanings of words. The discussions by the native speakers as to exactly what the words meant provided the contexts in which the words should be used.

Cook added, “A lot of the material in this dictionary is really a testament to a strong scholarly tradition within Inuit culture of precise language use and of talking about language, and I really hope that tradition is preserved.” Since the Utku dialect has no written form, Briggs said she hoped that the book would help preserve the dialect.

The Nanofasa Conservation Trust in Namibia has gotten a significant amount of funding to help it set up a “Barefoot Academy” for the Ju/’hoansi. The organization’s 2014 Annual Report, dated March 3, 2015 and available on its website, stated as one of its goals for the coming year that it wanted to “set up [a] Barefoot Academy / and get the first guys through training to become tracking teachers / Barefoot mentors.”

Issue number 2 of their newsletter, also available on the website and dated November 30, 2015, indicated that the organization was moving rapidly forward to establish its academy with a broader purpose than the annual report had envisioned. As of November, five Ju/’hoansi men and six boys were building the training center, which is being designed to conserve nature, and particularly the wildlife resources in the area, as well as to promote the continuation of the local, traditional culture through training programs for Ju/’hoansi youths. In the process, it is trying to provide work for men, women, and unemployed young people.

Last week, a news story in The Namibian, a major newspaper in that country, reported that Bank Windhoek has sponsored the founding of the Barefoot Academy with an initial grant of N$190.000 (US$11,500). The news report pointed out that the Nanofasa Conservation Trust (called the “Nanofasa Namibia Trust” by the reporter) was founded in 2011 by Aleksandra Ørbeck-Nilssen with a goal of protecting, managing and sustaining the cultural and natural integrity of the Ju/’hoansi San people who live in the Nyae Nyae Conservancy.

The reporter focused on the new academy, which will have three complementary programs based in the Ju/’hoansi villages. The first, the Hunter Program, will seek to encourage older hunters to pass along their indigenous knowledge, particularly about nature, to students. Their knowledge of wildlife, rituals, traditional methods of hunting, the fabrication of tools, topography, ecology, and of course hunting techniques, will be among the skills taught by the elders to young people.

Ørbeck-Nilssen told the paper, “The students will also learn the art of tracking and reading nature signs and will have to pass practical traditional and tracking exams to gain a certificate.” The certification will allow the students to become guides and trackers, so they can help with research projects, hunting parties, and conservation work. The names of the students will be added to a database that the organization will maintain for potential employers to use when they are searching for candidates for positions.

The second section of the new academy will be the Gathering Program, to be run by elderly Ju/’hoansi women, who will teach students traditional ways of gathering foods in the bush. They will also concentrate on rituals, storytelling, the sustainable uses of resources, and the production of traditional crafts.

Women doing craft work at a San village in the Nyae Nyae Conservancy (Photo by Gil Eilam on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

After those students complete an exam, they will be certified as bush scientists, according to The Namibian, or as makers of crafts, research assistants, or vegetation assessors.

The third program will be a Healer Academy, Ørbeck-Nilssen explained. In that program, older healers will pass along their knowledge of healing techniques employing traditional approaches, such as the use of plants and their roots. The program will emphasize the sustainable uses of those wild resources.

The Barefoot Academy also plans to teach young people ways of growing plants in greenhouses built primarily from recycled plastic beverage bottles. Ørbeck-Nilssen told The Namibian that this was a way to make sure the construction of each greenhouse was as environmentally friendly as possible. She said that malnutrition is a problem among the San people, and the greenhouses will help provide backup food sources during drought periods.

The newspaper article highlights the Barefoot Academy, and the Nanofasa Conservation Trust, by quoting Riaan van Rooyen, the head of corporate communications and social investments at Bank Windhoek. “The combination of preserving the heritage of the San communities along with the skills transfer and potential for job creation and nature conservation from this project, is phenomenal,” he said.

The official went on to explain that the project effectively captures the principal focus areas of the bank: education, training, job creation, and entrepreneurship. Van Rooyen emphasized that the creation of the database will encourage employers to find skilled workers in fields related to the sustainable uses of natural resources, conservation, and research. The newsletter of November 30, 2015, makes it clear that the Barefoot Academy has been created “in conjunction with the communities themselves, where we base the project on their interests and knowledge…”

Aleksandra Ørbeck-Nilssen picking the spines off a porcupine with Xuka, a San man (Photo by Terra Mater – Harald Pokieser on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The Nanofasa website says that Aleksandra Ørbeck-Nilssen is a 24-year old former Norwegian model and actress who has experience in New York and Paris. She traveled to Namibia and was so taken with the country, its people, and its wildlife, that she has dedicated her life to it and to the San of Nyae Nyae. The website also profiles the other Europeans and Namibians who are closely involved with the projects of the organization, of which the Barefoot Academy is only one.

As a publicity and fund-raising venture in 2016, and to showcase the indigenous knowledge of the Ju/’hoansi, Ørbeck-Nilssen is planning to walk a distance of 1,200 km from the coast of Namibia inland to a San village, accompanied by a San hunter and a young San boy. She will also be accompanied by a film crew. Her obsessions with keeping the traditional ways of the San relevant in today’s world, and teaching them to the younger generation, should make for an interesting film.

A non-profit organization in Oaxaca called Fundacion en Vía seeks to promote businesses run by women through microfinance loans and education programs. A story in the Huffington Post last week by Carly Schwartz described the program run by En Via that organizes visits by tourists, including the journalist, to tapestry studios and other businesses of Zapotec women.

Poster for a Christmas sale expo of local crafts in Teotitlán del Valle (image by Ron Mader on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The journalist spent a day in Teotitlán del Valle, a Zapotec town in the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico that is famous for its weaving industry—and for its tourism. Ms. Schwartz described sitting cross-legged in the showroom of Isabel Martinez Mendoza, whose colorful tapestries are prepared with dyes made from fruits and crushed nutshells. The author noted the stacks of tapestries and blankets for sale, and watched the lady’s 80-year old mother preparing wool for spinning. About a dozen other tourists were sitting there with her.

The elderly lady, dressed in a traditional Zapotec smock, held up a handful of wool that she was preparing to spin plus a wire paddle that she was using to smooth it out. She offered to let the tourists give it a try. The tourists passed the wool around the room and tried to mimic her motions.

The fees that En Vía collects from the tourists are used to make small loans to women in Oaxaca who otherwise would not have access to funding. With the help of the loans, the women can expand their operations. The organization also provides weekly training sessions to educate them on financial and management strategies.

Ms. Schwartz wrote that each tourist has paid $50.00 for the guided day trip to visit a community in Oaxaca, including opportunities to meet the women who have received the microloans. Product demonstrations, food tasting, and in-depth conversations with the women are all part of the daily tours, which are led by volunteers six days of the week.

The author made it clear she was impressed by the programs run by En Vía. In contrast to much tourism, where clueless visitors sometimes arouse animosities through their rudeness, the tours run by the organization foster human connections across cultures. Their model facilitates advantages for both sides of the cultural encounters, Schwartz argued. The En Vía clients benefit from having received the loans while the tourists profit from having genuine encounters with the indigenous people of Oaxaca.

Carlos Hernandez Topete, a native of Oaxaca who founded Fundacion En Vía, told Ms. Schwartz, “Responsible tourism means striving to improve the well-being of the communities we work with.” He founded the organization in the belief that Oaxaca, a poor but beautiful section of Mexico, would be an ideal place to test the concept of microfinance tourism.

As part of her day in the state, Schwartz learned a lot about human connections when one woman showed a tourist how she flattens corn into tortillas, another woman spoke about the way she makes sheep cheese, and a third joined the tourist group at a table as they ate her chicken mole enchiladas and explained that the tour groups motivated her to keep her business going as effectively as possible.

The study of societies that are already highly peaceful is a known source of information about solving social problems without using threats or violence. The Peaceful Societies website, committed for over 11 years to scholarship about groups that are, or were until recently, highly peaceful, moves today to the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) in order to further strengthen that commitment.

The new home for Peaceful Societies is the Department of Anthropology within the College of Arts and Sciences at UAB. “We are absolutely thrilled to be the new hosts of ‘Peaceful Societies,’ and we look forward to working closely with Bruce Bonta to keep this valuable online resource innovative and vital over the years to come,” says Douglas P. Fry, Chair and Professor of the Anthropology Department at UAB. The long-term prospects for the website are far stronger within the College of Arts and Sciences and Anthropology at UAB, which are developing research and educational foci on peace, justice, sustainability, and human rights, than were the website to continue to be hosted independently. At UAB, the purpose of the website remains the same: to promote peacefulness through the careful study of existing nonviolent societies.

The Hemingway theme of the new site, chosen from WordPress.org by the technical staff at UAB, reflects the normally quiet ways and natural environments of many of the world’s nonviolent peoples. But the dynamic WordPress content management system provides far better access to the contents of the website—over 1,200 news stories, reviews, and other pages published to date—than the old Dreamweaver-based site could possibly have done with its limited, static architecture.

The new site is user friendly and responsive, working equally well on desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile devices. The social media buttons on the news and reviews posts invite people to share feedback about the information provided and, thanks to WordPress, people can now subscribe to the site in RSS readers.

Many of the peaceful societies, such as the Ladakhi or the Amish, struggle to retain their traditional, peaceful lives, some more successfully than others. Their peacefulness depends on a multitude of factors that are unique to each group, though a firm belief that nonviolence is central to their lives seems to be essential for many. Other ingredients that help them maintain their peacefulness include social and psychological structures that build commitments to nonviolence; educational approaches that inculcate peacefulness in their children; and techniques for avoiding conflicts and for resolving disputes quickly.

Support from within the Department of Anthropology at UAB, and from the technical staff within the college and the university, has been critical in making this move a success. We retain the hope that the examples of the peaceful societies—the beliefs that they hold to and the choices that they make—may shape the ways people in larger state societies view their issues. The approaches those societies have taken for solving their difficulties peacefully rather than violently is often inspiring, and they convince us that the goal of a more peaceful world is achievable. We therefore plan to continue weekly news stories and reviews, and hope that colleagues at UAB and others will help expand the offerings of the website.

The Tristan Islanders celebrated the last day of the old year with traditional merry making—parties, two elaborate receptions, and a speech by the Administrator. The Tristan da Cunha website has posted pictures and information about their celebration of New Year’s, an important annual festival on the island.

The Settlement on Tristan da Cunha (Image by Michael Clarke Stuff on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The weather was fine on Tristan that day—it’s the middle of summer in the Southern Hemisphere. Alex Mitham, the Administrator, began the festivities with a reception at his residence in the Settlement for the Islanders starting at 6:00 in the evening. Later, people migrated to the home of the Chief Islander, who was also hosting a reception. Many then returned to their own homes, but at midnight the community gathered at the gong to ring in the New Year. Many parties continued for hours after that.

During the reception at the Residence, Mr. Mitham delivered his official Old Year’s Night message before a large crowd of people outside on the lawn. It was a state of the island speech that included plans for the coming New Year. He opened his remarks by graciously noting that an 11-year old Tristan boy, Nathan Swain, was the Junior Winner in the Queen’s Commonwealth Essay Competition for 2015, run by the Royal Commonwealth Society in the U.K.

The competition had received over 13,000 entries from throughout the Commonwealth countries and territories. Nathan’s picture and a link to his essay “I Am the Future” are provided on the website of the competition. With Nathan as an excellent example, Mr. Mitham argued, the future of the island will be in good hands.

Lobster fishing boats on Tristan da Cunha (Image by Brian Gratwicke on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

But the Administrator mixed careful doses of reality with his optimism. He expressed concern about the quality of the fishing resources around Tristan and its neighboring islands. He said that they would have “hard questions to face” in the coming year, though he didn’t elaborate beyond that.

He said that the financial situation of the Island is “stable,” though caution is needed in 2016 about their finances. The economy is fragile, and he expressed concern that the Islanders need to look at alternative sources of income. Island leaders are exploring what he called a “White Fish licensing” initiative, and some benefits are already coming in from that source.

He said that he had been pessimistic about the future during recent months because of various worldwide financial issues, but the fact that the island has secured approval to proceed with some important infrastructure projects gives him hope. The coming year should mark the updating of a range of services for the future. He did note that the visit in 2016 of the Royal Mail Ship will be the end of its service. He felt that everyone on the island will be sad to see the RMS depart for the last time.

The small harbor on Tristan (Image by Brian Gratwicke on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

He said that a project to rebuild and deepen the island’s small, artificial harbor has been approved. Also, a new healthcare center has been approved, plus new accommodations for doctors, new teachers, improvements to the roads, and a cleanup of the island as a whole are all in the planning stages. He is eager for further ideas from the Royal Institute for British Architects (RIBA) competition, announced in April 2015.

Mr. Mitham said that in 2016 the island will celebrate the bicentennial of the British annexation of Tristan da Cunha and the establishment of the first permanent British settlement on the island. He paid tribute to the hard work of the Island Council, the Chief Islander, and the Acting Chief Islander. He thanked the heads of the different departments and their staffs, as well as the people who had contributed to the reception that evening.

To judge by the pictures on the website, although the parties and the speech may have been important, the highlights for the residents in the Settlement were undoubtedly the activities of the Okalolies, elaborately masked people—mummers—who circulated through the village doing mischief. One picture shows a bunch of Okalolies wearing elaborate new masks and preparing to march on the residence of the Administrator.

The term “Okalolies” is of uncertain origin, but the custom of adopting masks and mumming goes a long ways back on the island, as it does in some other European cultures. Katherine Mary Barrow recorded on New Year’s 1907 that “several [of the men] are fantastically dressed and equipped with every available instrument” as they went from house to house enjoying parties (Barrow 1910, p.108).

In his landmark book The Sociology of Tristan da Cunha, Munch (1945), p.289-290, related how the amiable men in the Norwegian Scientific Expedition reacted positively on December 31, 1937, to the invitation by the Tristan Islanders to join them in their New Year’s Eve festivities.

Munch wrote that the Tristan men dressed up in women’s clothing, decorated hats with garden flowers, and put on old rags as disguises, and Munch and his colleagues followed suit. Some of them blackened their faces, put on the tails of cows, and in general tried to hide their identities. They all then went about from house to house. At each, they received refreshments from the women, such as hot drinks and bread. They would then participate in dances. The male hosts would sing songs to their guests before they departed, making as much noise as possible.

The entry in Munch’s diary for January 1, 1938 (Munch 2008), provided a more detailed description of the festivities that evening. He added that the spirit of the celebration “seemed rather flat and formal,” which he attributed to the overbearing nature of the English missionary stationed on the island at the time of their visit. Harold Wilde had tried to discourage the activities of the mummers, “just as he always tries to do what he can to dampen the islanders’ natural humour and optimism (p.62),” Munch noted.

Munch wrote in his diary that he had learned of the man’s hostility to the Tristan customs, but he had intervened and told Wilde that he’d really like to see them. The guy had relented, apparently at the last minute, so the Islanders had done their mumming, but with dampened spirits. It is clear from the photos on the website that now, 78 years later, they have elaborate masks but they persist in their mumming tradition of ringing out the old year and welcoming in the new.

Daniel Yoder, a 56-year old Amish man from Holmes County, Ohio, has built a thriving furniture business through his attention to quality manufacturing and good customer relationships. He has even allowed his company to open a website for his business, called “Daniel’s Amish.”

Kraybill and Nolt, Amish Enterprise (1995) — This book provides an overview of Amish business enterprises and their constraints

A report in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on December 24 included an interview with Yoder that elicited his thinking about the accomplishments of his company. Marcia Pledger, the journalist interviewing the businessman, wraps up her session with him by asking to what he attributes his successes. He replies that they come from the same source as all other good things—meaning of course his belief in God. But he quickly adds that he also attributes the success of his firm to the 140 employees who manufacture the bedroom and dining room furniture and who sell the products.

He describes his 120,000 square foot manufacturing plant and the fact that he has decided to add another 15,000 square foot building in order to manufacture even more furniture. He has 12 sales representatives who tell him there is a very high demand throughout the U.S. for his carefully crafted, hand-made, high-quality furniture. He has had to tell them to hold off on adding more stores to the roster of firms that they sell to. But now, he believes, the expansion is warranted because of the demand. He is not modest about describing the success of the firm to the reporter.

Many manufactures of bedroom furniture, he says, sell a queen sized bed, a king sized bed, a couple night stands, a dresser and a chest. Then they add hardware that they think looks good, and a stain they hope will sell. Daniel’s Amish offers 26 different chests, 60 dressers, nine different armoires, nine night stands—and then allows the customer to choose from 60 different stains and 40 different sets of hardware. They offer around 15 different bedroom styles. Added to all of this diversity of choices, his business emphasizes high quality craftsmanship.

Although the non-Amish president of the company opened a website recently, Yoder still believes in the personal aspects of building the business. He argues that while many people rely on the Internet for their purchases, he believes in face-to-face human interactions as much as possible. While he has access to the Internet in his office, he doesn’t buy online. Instead, he values the personal touch of a handshake with another person, and of being able to handle the furniture himself.

He travels constantly to visit stores that carry his products, to chat with the sales representatives in them, and to relate to people. “When I come in the stores they’re very anxious to meet me again,” he tells Ms. Pledger. “They have questions about the product. And I help them close sales for a couple of days.” The staff in his office can follow his travels—driven by his hired driver, of course—by noting the communities from which orders come flooding in.

The reporter conveys the things he is most proud of, especially the high quality of the furniture. He clearly values the fact that he employs a large number of people. But when she asks him directly what he is most proud of, he replies that he is a “furniture guy,” who is glad to be running the company. He says he likes being there to make decisions, and to give advice when needed. He adds, “I have a big heart.”

While most Amish are noted for their modesty and humility, Mr. Yoder apparently has a high opinion of himself. Kraybill and Nolt (1995) discussed the issue of modesty in a book that is the standard source on the transition of the Amish from a strictly farming society to one where many people operate successful businesses. The two scholars write that “success is not a favored word in Amish circles (p.221).”

The authors explain that the Amish prize diffidence and humility, and they are normally leery of success since it might prompt arrogance and pride. If a successful Amish business person were to admit that the enterprise is noticeably productive, it might lead to vanity—which might produce interpersonal problems that could lead to the violence that would violate their entire way of doing things.

As a result, Kraybill and Nolt write, Amish business persons normally cloak their obvious successes in modesty. They tend to be diffident and make long pauses in their statements as they downplay their accomplishments. Business owners, asked about their successes, may hedge by describing the operations of other Amish people nearby in order to avoid the pitfalls of pride in their own projects—many of which, of course, are quite successful.

Kraybill and Nolt base their work on the Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Amish settlement. It is possible that conditions and beliefs among the Amish of Holmes County, Ohio, differ from their colleagues in Pennsylvania, though it is also possible that Mr. Yoder’s immodesty may be an exception to the ways that normally prevail in his settlement.

The Chief Minister of India’s Jharkhand state celebrated the 91st birthday of a prominent leader of his political party, the BJP, by calling attention to the needs of the Birhor people.

Raghubar Das, left, Chief Minister of Jharkhand State, meets Prime Minister Modi of India (from the Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons license)

On December 25, Chief Minister Raghubar Das went to the Birhor village of Dohakatu, in the Ramgarh district of Jharkhand, to celebrate the birthday of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a former BJP Prime Minister of India. Das said to the assembled tribal people and reporters that Vajpayee’s work on behalf of India’s tribal societies was praiseworthy.

Das said that the former prime minister had been an exemplary politician during his 60 years of political life. The Chief Minister used the occasion of Vajpayee’s birthday celebration to announce that he was planning to establish a separate section in the forthcoming annual budget for the so-called “primitive tribes” of his state. As he accepted a piece of birthday cake from a Birhor student, he commented that his administration has taken initiatives to try and improve the conditions of the tribal society.

One of the news sources covering the event indicated that Das helped some Birhor children cut a three-layer birthday cake, and during the hour he was in the village he distributed fruits and blankets to the 17 families living there. Other state officials—Chandra Prakash Choudhary, Minister for Water Resources, and Ramkumar Pahan, a member of the legislative assembly, accompanied the Chief Minister to the Birhor village.

The birthday celebration was obviously a political event, and it was not clear from any of the news reports how the Birhor themselves reacted. Doubtless they appreciated the blankets and gifts of food. One has to wonder if they organized one of their own traditional celebrations after the luminaries left.

Kujur and Topno (1999) provide a detailed description of Birhor celebrations and dances, an important way, they write, for the people to cement the bonds of their community lives. They argue that festivities help the Birhor maintain the integrity of their society. Their dances help them relax when the work of the day is over, but the celebrating also “very concretely express[es] their philosophy of life, that life is a celebration for them,” despite all the suffering and struggles that they have to put up with every day (p.44–45).

The authors describe the synchronization of music, song and dance that characterize all Birhor celebrations, which are inseparable parts of their lives. Kujur and Topno point out that everyone dances the night away on festive occasions. They describe, in their essay, the different elements of the celebrations: movements, places of dancing, musical instruments, and so on.

A YouTube video shows a celebration taking place in a Birhor village, with three and then four people dancing and singing, surrounded by their fellow villagers. At the end of over five minutes of singing and dancing, the camera pans around the village to show the houses surrounding a large central square plus numerous villagers gathered to observe the singing and dancing.

It is unfortunate that the press so often focuses on the ways politicians celebrate one another rather than on the ways real people celebrate life and peace.

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Tristan Parties in the New Year

A Successful Amish Enterprise

A Birhor Celebration

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