Peaceful Societies

A well-known Malaysian sports figure recently spent a day at a Semai village to find out the needs of the people and to highlight a report on the major development issues facing the nation.

According to the Wikipedia, the sports star, Nicol David, is ranked as the world’s number one women’s squash player, and she is considered to be “one of the greatest women’s squash players of all time.” More to the point, she also serves as a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The Star, a Malaysian news service, reported that Ms. David visited Ulu Tual, a Semai village in Pahang state, as part of the forthcoming release of the UNDP report “Redesigning an Inclusive Future,” which will analyze the development of Malaysia. It apparently will focus on issues concerning the minority communities in the nation.

Ms. David was evidently impressed by her reception: “The villagers have been so warm and welcoming,” she said. “They are so open and willing to learn. You can see that they’ve got so much potential and that if we were to just give them a little bit of support, they would then go the extra mile.”

The Semai villagers have been building a community learning center, assisted by the Centre for Orang Asli Concerns (COAC). The learning center, called “cenwey penaney” (shoots of ingenuity), intends to teach the Semai children traditional, useful skills such as making bird snares and basket weaving.

The head of the village, Yok Ek Chantan, indicates that while progress on the new center has not been rapid due to financial constraints, the community is enthusiastic about it since it will focus on continuing the traditions of the Semai. Yok Ek discussed with the reporter the issue of schooling for the children in the village. “We’ve tried sending some of the children off to boarding school but they don’t seem to fit in well with the rest of their classmates. We’ve also had some children who find it hard to ease back into the Orang Asli way of living after they’ve been away for some time.”

The Assistant Coordinator of COAC, Jenita Engi, has been working with the villagers in the development of its cenwey penaney center. She told The Star, “when it comes to the Orang Asli, every tribe has its own customs and cultures. I’ve seen many cases where city folks try to take the villagers out of their comfort zone to try and ‘rehabilitate’ them into one of them. That’s just wrong because we’re not listening to what it is that they really need.”

She adds that the Semai are quite capable of doing many practical things, such as building their own homes or finding sources of income. Outsiders need to assist them in furthering what they already can do effectively. They should support them in continuing their own ways of life as they wish.

The Star article indicates that the children of Ulu Tual have to walk 10 km (6 miles) to school every morning through rain forest conditions. During the rainy season, it is very difficult for many of the children even to make it to school. The news report adds, however, that formal education is often not a high priority for the Semai, since they would rather engage in activities that continue their traditional customs and lifestyles. The Semai children would prefer to “learn skills to enable them to find their living from the land,” The Star writes.

Scholarly researchers do not take such a simple view of the Semai interest in education. Dentan and Juli (2008), which is freely available online, point out that many Semai children face a variety of factors that inhibit them from attending school, such as a lack shoes, clothing, bags, stationery, books, and transportation. Nonetheless, the anthropologists contradict some of the points made in the news report by arguing that Semai families are often enthusiastic about their children getting educated. They will go into debt to afford an education for a child.

Dentan and Juli amplify these issues. While many of the Semai children, supported by their adults, appear to be eager to go to school so they might have more prosperity in their lives, the schools in or near their communities are run by outside authorities appointed by the state and they usually do not include much if any local involvement by the Semai people. The reason, according to an earlier research report (Endicott and Dentan 2004), is that Malaysia is more interested in converting the Semai to Islam than it is to providing the children with modern educational advantages within their own cultural contexts. Within that perspective, last week’s news report is hopeful.

A further issue is that the Semai frequently suffer in their schools from poor instruction, bullying by the majority children, and a lack of quality teachers and relevant materials. Furthermore, the teachers in the state-run schools often do not hesitate to use corporal punishment on the children, a practice which is part of the Malay culture but not that of the Semai. Maintaining the peacefulness of a society is not a concern of the Malaysian authorities (Dentan and Juli 2008).

In schools such as those endured by the Semai, the approaches and curricula transform the kids from “peaceable cheerful Semai children willing to make friends with other peoples who treat them well and eager to learn about the wider world into unhappy, aggressive, cliquish kids under so much stress that it is hard to do their homework, and with such low self-esteem that it becomes an enormous task for them to attempt accomplishing anything,” in the words of Dentan and Juli (2008: para. 66).

So while the news report last week sounds positive in some ways, the background provided by Dentan and Juli prompts the hope that Malaysia will go even farther in respecting the traditions of their peaceful, minority peoples.

Tense political borders in and around northern India have produced regional political stresses that have fostered strains in the traditional peaceful relations between Ladakhis of different religious beliefs. These strains have produced hostilities and divisions among families, friends, and communities throughout Ladakh, and particularly in Leh.

A fascinating scholarly article last year by Sara H. Smith analyzes, from the perspective of a geographer, the complex historical and geographical factors that have produced these newly divisive ways of defining religious identities in the Leh District, part of India’s Jammu and Kashmir State. Hardening religious divisions such as these threaten the traditional nonviolence of the people.

Smith, who has published earlier research on Buddhist and Muslim family relationships in Ladakh, begins her work with a discussion of the way the Line of Control, the cease fire line between Pakistan and India established in 1948, divided the peoples of the region. She writes carefully and thoroughly, though evocatively, throughout her article. “Conflict and uncertainty about the border has become a haunting presence that allows for a particular set of political narratives to take root, even when the border is out of sight,” she writes (p.50).

In sum, the macro-political situation, at the state and international levels, has been a prime factor in helping dissolve the traditional Ladakhi tolerance for differences. Smith captures the problem of growing intolerance by focusing on her own study area, Leh town, the capital of the Leh District and the center of the Buddhist community in Ladakh. She did periods of field research there in 2004, 2007-08, and 2010.

Historically—traditionally—Ladakhis have lived together quietly, intermarrying into families with different religious persuasions without much trouble. While the people of the Leh District are primarily Buddhists, the people of the Kargil District of Ladakh are primarily Shia Muslims. There are significant minority populations of Buddhists in Kargil and Muslims in Leh. Also, because of historic trade and missionary activities, people of other religious beliefs—such as Christians and Sunni Muslims—also live within the two districts.

Marriages between Buddhists and Muslims, especially in Leh, have always been acceptable. Smith found that 83 percent of the Buddhist and Muslim women she interviewed in 2008 had relatives from the other faith, and among 75 percent of those interviewees, the faith divide was at most only one generation back—parents, uncles, aunts. News reports as recently as 2012 have continued to emphasize the harmony, and stability, that has prevailed in Buddhist/Muslim marriages.

But such inter-community marriages are becoming part of the memories of Ladakhis, rather than aspects of their continuing realities. A street brawl between a Muslim and a Buddhist in the late 1980s led to some stone throwing, then gunfire, then police intervention. Since the police forces came from the Muslim-dominated state of Jammu and Kashmir, the Buddhists took strong offense when they imposed a curfew, invaded their homes, and beat up their people.

The Ladakh Buddhist Association called for a boycott of the Muslims, people with whom they had lived as family members, neighbors, and friends for centuries. The boycott from 1989 to 1992 was strictly enforced, and it has led to profound, continuing disruptions in what used to be normal Ladakhi life. The boycott ended when the leaders of both the Buddhist and Muslim communities in Leh agreed that inter-faith marriages should be ended.

Smith unravels the complexities of this continuing situation in Leh as it has affected the people’s perceptions of their community and their fellow inhabitants. For one thing, the monumental religious structures in Leh—the Buddhist temple, the Shia imambara, the Sunni mosque—have been significantly modified in the years since the street fighting and the hardening of the inter-religious divide.

The changes in the structures have been made to emphasize territoriality, the focus of each group on itself—“we Buddhists” or “we Muslims” are strong and in the right. This territoriality in Leh reflects the much larger claims on territory and political boundaries of Jammu and Kashmir, and larger than that, of India and Pakistan.

The author’s analysis of the ways the hardened divide affects the lives of the people of Leh forms the heart of the article. She quotes from her interview with Razia, a Sunni woman, who expresses nostalgia for Buddhists and Muslims who used to live, in Leh’s past, without these artificial borders between their communities, who used to live “like one person (p.53).” Older people told Smith many stories of the ways the Buddhists use to get along with Muslims, and vice versa.

She found that older Ladakhis were not the only ones uneasy about the marriage ban. The feelings of discomfort were shared by young people. Even though they accepted that inter-faith marriages were impossible at the present time, at least in Ladakh, it seemed reasonable to them for such couples to run away and have their affairs elsewhere. However, families often seek to forcefully end such relationships, even when the young couples have moved away.

But the campaigns by the Ladakhi Buddhist leaders have gone even farther than that. They realize that the birth rate in the Muslim community is greater than in their own, so they argue that the Buddhists will soon be submerged in a tide of Islam if they don’t strongly encourage their women to produce more babies. Buddhist leaders and their views have thus invaded the domain of individual family planning and contraception. While women in Leh still have official access in health centers to contraceptives, Buddhist women have to listen to pressures in the temples for them to have more babies.

Smith concludes her article by describing a workshop that she and three others organized for 25 young people in Leh. The participants, between ages10 and 20, were broken up into teams and sent out around the town to produce digital photographs and drawings that would best represent what they felt and hoped represented the past, present, and future of Ladakh.

A few of the teams took virtually the same picture, a scene of the Sunni mosque next to the Buddhist temple. The image conveyed, in the words of one team, the past and the hoped-for future of Ladakh, a future that they saw as requiring a peaceful relationship between Muslim and Buddhist Ladakhis.

Smith, Sara H. 2013. “’In the Past We Ate from One Plate’: Memory and the Border in Leh, Ladakh.” Political Geography 35: 47-59

Millions of Rural Thai children are being raised by their grandparents, a social situation that seems to be producing serious problems for the youngsters, such as increased levels of aggression toward their peers. The Bangkok Post last week published an analysis of the issue based on preliminary results from an academic study plus the paper’s own interviews with rural observers.

The research study expresses concern that many Rural Thai children are being brought up without the benefit of having their parents around. Parents leave their children with their own parents in the country and move to Thai cities to take jobs. This pattern, the investigators are finding, is causing serious problems for the broken families, both for the children and for the grandparents involved.

The four-year study conducted by researchers at Mahidol University, called “The Impact of Internal Migration on Early Childhood Well-being and Development: A Longitudinal and Mixed-Method Study,” has investigated 1,000 Rural Thai children affected by internal migration. About three million children in Thailand are not living with their parents as a result of their parents’ moves to cities, a rate that is more than four times higher than neighboring Laos.

The researchers are using screening techniques to analyze the developmental abilities of the children, such as their language, personal, motor, and social skills, compared to standards for other children their ages. So far, the study has found that such developmental abilities as using and controlling muscles, holding and grabbing things—or even just smiling—appear to be negatively impacted by the migration of parents.

Initial results of the study are showing that 25 percent of the children who live separated from their parents have developmental delays, compared with only 16 percent of children who live with both of their parents. The Bangkok Post article acknowledges that the study does not take into account other possible factors that could produce such delays, such as prenatal and birth issues, nutrition, or living conditions. A better picture should emerge by the time the study is completed in 2016.

The Post suggests the obvious, that the parents have migrated to cities to make more money than they could in the country, with the hope of sending it back to support their children. But the reality is that the funds they send back are never enough for much more than necessities.

Sumid Sopama, the acting head of the Early Childhood Centre in the village of Ban Nong Ao, which is in Nam Phong District of Khon Kaen Province, northeast Thailand, said “all [the grandparents] do is feed the children. But for toys or books that they may find in the market—all the good stuff that could help stimulate development for their grandchildren—there is not a lot of it.” He goes on to say that grandparents tend to be frugal; they will hesitate to buy stimulating things, saving their funds in case of serious needs.

He agreed with what was being turned up so far by the academic study. Sumid has noticed in his kindergarten facility that children who are not living with their own parents may display more aggressive tendencies in comparison to their classmates. They use more vulgar words and play more aggressively. They often have trouble forming friendships.

Sumid speculates that they may learn these behavioral problems in the homes where they are living. “The grandparents just want to get each day over and done with. Once they’ve done their part, they bring the kids here and rely on the childhood centre to take care of the rest,” he said. The Post reasons, in defense of grandparents, that they often do not have the time or energy to properly care for the young children. They must work hard just to put food on their tables.

Thongchai Pokum, the chief of Ban Nong Ao village, admitted to the Post that there are some drug problems among the young people in the community. But, he added, “it’s a good thing that, in our rural society, we can look out for each other. Everyone is not too far away. Even though the parents aren’t around, the family can still give them advice and guidance.”

He also expressed concern about teenage pregnancies in his community, which have the effect of prompting girls to quit their educations. Then, they take laboring jobs in the cities, which is all they are qualified to do, perpetuating the cycle of adults leaving children with their parents. The Post concludes its report by commenting that this is “a problem that is slowly, in the background, jeopardizing the nation.”

Concern in India for the Birhor jumped dramatically six years ago, though sympathy for this peaceful society has apparently waned as memories of a tragedy in October 2008 grow dim. A news story last week implies that official interest in the Birhor people has nearly evaporated.

The Birhor experience presents an interesting case study of the rise and fall of popular interest in a so-called “tribal society” in India. This website started covering Indian news stories about the Birhor 10 years ago, and over the next four years only seven reports about them appeared in the Indian media.

Then tragedy struck. In October 2008, India was riveted by a story about the small tribal group in the northeastern part of the country. Eight people had died suddenly of mysterious circumstances in a single Birhor hamlet one evening, and five more had gotten very sick. Malnutrition? Poisoning? No one was sure.

Major Indian media, such as The Telegraph of Calcutta and the Times of India, covered the story, some politicizing their reports and blaming politicians from parties they opposed for inadequately supporting the tribal group. Since the hamlet in question was within an area controlled by the Naxalites, dangerous Maoist guerrillas, the alleged food poisoning was not adequately investigated by competent authorities.

The result of the tragedy was an explosion of interest in the Birhor as a society. The Peaceful Societies website carried four news stories between October and December of 2008 alone, 11 more in 2009, and many others in following months.

But one interesting story, which began well before the 2008 tragedy, was the interest by officials at the huge Bokaro Steel Plant in the Bokaro District of Jharkhand State in trying to educate some Birhor boys. As reported in 2010, the plant had established a special school in 2001 for a select group of Birhor youths so that they could get good educations and then get decent government jobs after they graduated.

News reports over the next several years spoke about the achievements of the Birhor boys in the special Bokaro school and finally, in 2012, their graduation and hopes for employment. Last year, it turned out, officials in the Bokaro District who had promised to hire the young men had deceived them. They were not being hired after all. Some had taken up manual labor—exactly what their ancestors had been doing, in addition to foraging for food and supplies, for many years.

The only thing different about their situation now is that the news media in India continue to have at least some memory of what has been happening to these people. Their continuing saga is newsworthy. The news story last week indicates that the promises they had been given, the encouragements to get their educations, may all turn out to have been phony.

Nine of the young men from the Birhor society who had graduated in 2012 and had been promised government jobs as a result finally learned that it was not true. They had a meeting with Uma Shankar Singh, the Deputy Commissioner of Bokaro district. They reminded him of the district government’s promise of jobs. The official told the young men in response that government guidelines had been “altered,” as The Telegraph put it, and they were no longer eligible for grade IV jobs in the welfare department.

The newspaper explains that state government policies in 2008 had stipulated that Birhor who passed Class VIII as of that date were eligible for government jobs. The policy was changed in 2014 to increase the educational qualifications. As The Telegraph dryly put it, “a Birhor needs to have matriculated by 2008 to be eligible for a job.” Since they graduated in 2012, four years too late, their chances of gaining government positions have been arbitrarily denied to them.

Mr. Singe appeared to be sympathetic—he was just doing his job, he explained. “I myself feel sad for the Birhors. I will write to the state government, explaining the situation, and I hope the guidelines will change. But right now, as a government servant, I am helpless before the law,” he said.

A news story in June last year reported that Bokaro Steel has offered to help by providing the young people with ITI training at the plant itself. That training program was confirmed again last week. It is not clear how many of them will be offered jobs at the plant after they complete the year of training. Some of the youths may petition the government, while others will give up and take menial laboring jobs.

One young man expressed his upset to the press outside the government office. “We were promised jobs and our names were cleared by the welfare department. And now, this amendment. It’s cheating,” he said.

So over a ten year period, the Birhor revolve from being totally ignored, to being intensely scrutinized, to being cheered on, then to once again being cheated and ignored. As the French epigram goes, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” (the more things change, the more they stay the same).

The new Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, visited his nation’s space facility in Andhra Pradesh on Monday last week, June 30th, to watch the launch of a rocket that put five satellites into orbit. After the successful launch, the Prime Minister addressed the staff at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on Sriharikota Island. He suggested that the benefits of India’s space program should be shared with other developing nations, particularly its neighboring countries.

He delivered part of his speech in English, which drew a lot of attention from the Indian media, since he has been noted for promoting the Hindu culture of his nation. News reports speculated that he wanted to appeal to the international, scientific community and to demonstrate that he was fluent in English as well as in the languages of India.

However, he did not display any familiarity with the Yanadi people, who used to live on Sriharikota Island before they were forcibly removed in 1969 to make room for the construction of the space center. Nor did he express concern about the fact that, several days before the official visit, Yanadi villagers living in the general vicinity of the island were rounded up as a protective measure for the dignitaries.

A week before the rocket launch, on Monday June 23, police began what one report referred to as “combing operations” along the 169 km (105 mile) coastline near Sriharikota Island by removing villagers from their communities. Security forces then occupied the villages. The police also began removing Yanadi who live in the forests surrounding the island, taking them to shelters in Sullurpeta, a town about 16 km (10 miles) inland from the spaceport. The news report indicated that they would be allowed to return to their homes the following week, after the Prime Minister had left.

A few days before the police started rounding up the Yanadi, another news story reported that the tribal people did not hesitate to express their grievances about their poverty to visiting politicians in the weeks before the recent national elections. The Yanadi are frustrated that officials do not provide wells with sufficient water so they can irrigate their crops, and they are not shy about asking.

The Yanadi are also complaining about stray animals getting into their crops and are requesting help in fencing their small plots of land. The politicians apparently listened to their complaints, but whether they will do anything is not clear. It also was not clear whether anyone connects the treatment of the Yanadi 45 years ago with the government’s disregard for the sensitivities of local indigenous people in Andhra Pradesh today.

The central, organizing spirit of the highly peaceful Batek society, at least in the mid-1970s, was a moral commitment to sharing any and all foods with everyone else who happened to be in camp. This “moral unity,” as Karen and Kirk Endicott so evocatively put it, required children to be constantly scampering about carrying meals from one shelter to another, even though the recipients may already have had plenty of the same foods.

The Endicotts, in an article prepared for Ancestral Landscapes in Human Evolution, an academic book that has just been released by Oxford University Press, describe the social and cultural ingredients of the peaceful Batek society nearly 40 years ago. Their descriptions and analysis, which throughout are interesting, informative, and often lyrical, are based on their fieldwork in 1975 and 1976.

They begin by establishing the fact that while the fundamental social entity for the Batek was the conjugal family, their long-term economic unit was the nomadic hunting and gathering camp. They lived then, and still do today, near and to some extent within the world famous Taman Negara National Park, a large tract of unbroken tropical forest in northeastern Peninsular Malaysia. The Batek today number about 1,500 people, one third of whom at any one time live in temporary shelters in the park.

The authors provide a wealth of details that have to be skipped in a short review in favor of a summary of the factors that contributed to Batek peacefulness and, most critically, the ways they transmitted those patterns to their children. One essential element in their nonviolence was that while they prized their individuality, they also cooperated in many social projects and work activities. Furthermore, although they had informal leaders, no one could coerce another to do anything. Leadership was entirely voluntary, and the prohibition of violence was an absolute.

Some of the best parts of the article are the descriptions of the child-raising strategies used by the Batek. One was the fact that fathers played an essential role in raising children from infancy. They held, cuddled, and fondled their babies as much as the mothers did, and with as much obvious enjoyment. Both parents would clean and bathe their infants.

While resting in their temporary camps, fathers would often make things for the children to play with, and would amuse them while holding them in their laps. Other members of the camps would shower affection on the babies as well. The Batek often told the authors that they desired male and female children equally.

As children grew beyond the toddler stage, from about 2 to 6 years of age, they would continue to play, but not be attended to as closely by their parents. The youngsters could chop at trees with knives, build fires, dig for tubers, climb trees, gather sticks, and pretend to cook—in essence, they would imitate in their play what they saw adults doing.

The one job that adults would give to children was to have them take plates of food to other families. Boys and girls would often accompany their mothers when they went into the forest to collect tubers. Sometimes, however, they would stay in camp with other adults who were not planning to go out that day.

Children played completely noncompetitive games. Their play groups tended to be flexible and spontaneous, and no one was excluded. If a child could not keep up with the other children, however, he or she would drop out and find another game to enjoy. Play activities in the groups were initiated by one child or another, according to the whims of the children involved, and the games tended to have no rules.

A typical sequence of play might start with swimming in a stream, shift to jumping off a log, then move to playing tiger chasing Batek, with the kids changing roles as they might. Their games had no winners or losers. This noncompetitive nature of the games was derived from the lack of competition among the Batek adults. As the children grew older, their play activities focused more intensively on the work they would be doing as adults—hunting, fishing, gathering, digging, and so on.

By the time they were adopting the roles appropriate in their society for women or men, they had also absorbed the positive values that the people felt for both genders. The Batek were, as the Endicotts express it, gender egalitarian in that they placed no greater value on the activities of men or women, and neither group controlled the other. The authors found the people to be “self-confident, enthusiastic about their activities, high spirited, and generally satisfied with their work and lives” (p.114).

Perhaps the heart of the article is the section analyzing the ways the Batek socialized their children to be nonaggressive. An essential aspect of their society, in the opinion of the authors, was their complete lack of violence and aggression. Batek children of one year of age, who struck at other children, were separated quietly from the others, though generally without comment by adults.

In general, parents thought that children would grow out of any aggressive, possessive behavior patterns, and lecturing about it might simply call attention to the unwanted actions. Sometimes, though, adults did laugh at children’s aggressions, thus trying to trivialize situations that the youngsters might have felt were serious. The authors sum up the Batek relationships among adults and children as basically those of mutual affection and respect.

For readers who seek ways to challenge human patterns of violence, the Batek provide an excellent example of a possible approach that works, at least for them in their own situation. Their disdain for competition, their gender equality, their enthusiasm for sharing, and their belief in respect—plus, of course, their effective approaches for passing those values on to their children—should be instructive for others seeking to develop peaceful societies. This article by the Endicotts should be an essential addition to the library of anyone interested in peace building.

Endicott, Karen L. and Kirk M. Endicott. 2014. “Batek Childrearing and Morality.” In Ancestral Landscapes in Human Evolution: Culture, Childrearing and Social Wellbeing, edited by Darcia Narvaez et al., p.108-125. New York: Oxford University Press

June 28th marked both the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, an event which triggered World War One, and the 85th birthday of Glenn Paige, who began a movement promoting nonkilling. The media focused a lot of attention on the Great War last Sunday, but more attention needs to be paid to the career of Prof. Paige and the nonkilling concept that he has promoted by founding the Center for Global Nonkilling.

A Wikipedia article on Paige makes it clear that he has produced an important body of political science scholarship over a long, illustrious career, though it does not emphasize enough how profound his writing has often been. For example, at the beginning of his book The Scientific Study of Political Leadership (1977), he asserts that societies create myths about themselves to disguise the nature of their leadership.

But, he continues, those myths have a tendency to distort reality by either exaggerating, or underestimating, the efficacy, potency, and morality of their leaders. The more a society tends to be authoritative and coercive, he believes, the more its myths will exaggerate the effectiveness of its leaders, while the more consensual and representative it is, the more its myths will underestimate the potency of its leaders.

The nonkilling movement really dates from the publication of another one of his books, Nonkilling Global Political Science (2002). The thesis of that work is that a peaceful society, or in Paige’s terms a nonkilling society, really is possible. However, almost all political scientists believe that a nonkilling political science is quite impossible. To demonstrate, Paige relates his experience at a seminar he attended in 1979, where a group of political scientists almost all agreed that such a thing as a nonkilling political science was practically inconceivable.

The reasons were predictable. Humanity is basically violent, scarce resources predispose us to competition and aggression, men have a need to protect weaker females, and so on. Prominent political thinkers from Plato until recent times have advanced this view.

Max Weber in the early 20th century summarily dismissed the notion that politics could be peaceful. The musket fire at Lexington set the pattern for the new American republic, Weber argued—violence was the basis for independence, so violence would be the continuing foundation for the development of the nation and its political outlook. Paige suggests in the book that those philosophers were misinformed.

The 2002 book prompted Paige to found a movement, realized a few years later with the creation of the Center for Global Nonkilling. The website for the center, plus their 2013 annual report, provide an excellent overview of the beliefs, commitments, and effective work of the staff and officers of the group. It is a remarkable story which was inspired by the creative scholarship of the founder.

The vision of the center is stated clearly on the website: “that a killing-free world is possible. It is possible for humans to stop killing each other from homicide to genocide, terrorism and mass murder in war.” A few paragraphs later, the website sets out the center’s mission: “to promote change toward the measurable goal of a killing-free world by means open to infinite human creativity.”

The rest of the website, and the 2013 annual report, display the “infinite human creativity” of the staff and officers of the organization in finding practical ways for promoting peacefulness. The range of programs, projects, and activities designed to build a world free of killing is remarkable.

For instance, in 2013, the CGNK published a number of books. The first one listed in the annual report is Global Media, edited by Joám Evans Pim. That work examines the ways the media may be changed to help promote the values of life rather than killing and death. Another book published by the CGNK last year is Nonkilling Security and the State, also edited by Evans Pim. That publication argues that it is imperative for nation states to promote reverence for life as the essence of civilization, rather than promoting the weapons that could annihilate it. The list of publications in the report is lengthy. Many are available on the center’s website.

Just as impressive is the listing of research events and educational programs of the CGNK. Center Director Evans Pim analyzed nonkilling at a variety of conferences and programs around the world during 2013. For instance, he was featured at a course on nonkilling in April that year offered at the Åbo Akademi University in Finland. The course, part of the Master’s Programme in Peace, Mediation and Conflict Research at the university, was to be titled “Introduction to Nonkilling Studies.”

One of the best features of the past year for the CGNK has been the increasing, and well-deserved, recognition it has gained. The Christian Science Monitor provided accolades for the work of Glenn Paige and the center in a feature article on October 11, 2013.

The article, reprinted on the center’s website, describes the spread of Paige’s ideas into numerous academic disciplines, and it provides examples of the growing acceptance of the concept of nonkilling in the everyday lives of ordinary people. The CSM journalist describes the increasing belief in nonkilling as a way of life in Rwanda and the Congo, countries where alternatives to the horrors of warfare and killing are highly desired.

The Glenn Paige Nonkilling School in Kazimia, a village in Congo, has 200 students enrolled in a program where they can study a simplified version of Nonkilling Global Political Science, translated into Swahili. Bishop Mabwe Lucien at the Pentecostal Assemblies of God churches in Congo said that the concept of nonkilling was “new and revolutionary.” Bishop Lucien indicated that, at a training session for 1,100 participants in his country, “the hands of assassins were lifted to renounce killing.”

“The impact of the teachings of Prof. Glenn Paige is enormous. They have transformed the region,” the bishop added. If a straightforward message such as nonkilling can transform Central Africa, can the rest of the world be far behind? Is more evidence needed that June 28th should focus more on Paige’s birthday than on the murder of an archduke 100 years ago? The one event led to a century of violence. If the CGNK has anything to do with it, the other will help lead to a century of nonkilling.

Storms in New Market, Alabama, did about $100,000 of damage to the farm of Susan Ayers-Kelley early in June, but a large Amish crew from nearby Tennessee helped clean up her property. As neighbors and participants in her Plowboy Produce Auction facility in Ethridge, Tennessee, they were eager to help.

Map showing locations of Ethridge,TN, and New Market, AL According to a news account in The Tennessean last week, an employee at the auction, Janice Martucci, with help from her husband Phil, transported 24 Amish farmers and some of their teenagers 57 miles southeast to Ayers-Kelley’s New Market, AL, farm to spend a day working.

Ms. Ayers-Kelley was overwhelmed by their generosity. “I don’t know why they chose me, but they did. It just warms my heart. … Our relationship was not made overnight, but it is all about relationships,” she said. Ms. Martucci said she was inspired by watching the Amish men and boys working so effectively together.

By lunchtime, the workers had filled four dumpsters with debris to be trucked away. Ayers-Kelley felt that the Amish volunteers accomplished in an hour and a half what an “English” crew might take a couple days to do. They worked efficiently as a team, without much need for instruction or direction.

The lunch was provided by a nearby café—coleslaw, potato salad, barbecued beans and smoked ribs. The Amish teenagers deferred to their fathers to be served first, and then they all settled down in the shade of a tree to eat.

A much longer version of the same story in The Tennessean provided additional information about Ms. Ayers-Kelley. She has been dealing with the Amish farmers in the Ethridge area since the year 2000 when she started buying produce for her farm market in Huntsville, Alabama. She has become well known and liked by them. The Amish around Ethridge established the Plowboy Produce Auction in 2005 and set up a board to oversee the operations of the facility, which opened in 2006.

But in 2013, the manager of the facility resigned, so the auction barn was put up for sale. The Amish turned to their trusted friend Ms. Ayers-Kelley, who agreed to buy it. “When you’re standing in a room of 40 Amish men looking at you, what do you do? Well, what? … I now own Plowboy,” she said. “I feel like I’m not only helping these families, I’m helping generations to come.”

As if in response, an Amish person said, “We … have to keep the auction going to keep our families together. It’s for our future.”

The work party of the group in northern Alabama reflected their values. When the journalist asked the Amish men and boys eating their lunches under the tree why they were helping out this way, they replied simply, “we wanted to respect Susan.” They clearly understand the essence of peace.

A brief journal article published last year describes the ways the Lepchas have attempted to maintain their traditions despite outside domination and internal religious divisions, issues they are beginning to overcome. The article, by Rip Roshina Gowloog, was published in the journal Studies of Tribes and Tribals and is freely available on the Internet.

Gowloog begins by describing Gorer’s study (1967) of the Lepchas as “perhaps one of the most authoritative of all” the earlier works on the society (p.20). She writes that while Gorer exhibited some of the biases toward Lepcha religious beliefs that were characteristic of European anthropologists of the time, they do not necessarily lessen the value of his observations.

She singles out Gorer’s discomfort with the Lepcha way of practicing two, and sometimes three, mutually contradictory faiths at the same time. The author does not see the acceptance of different faiths simultaneously, at least from the Lepcha perspective, as particularly contradictory, and she attempts to explain why. The difference is that Europeans conceive of religious beliefs in a comparative, hierarchical fashion, while the Lepchas view faith from a more holistic perspective.

Gowloog argues that the Lepcha belief systems cannot always be understood in rationalistic terms. They worship a variety of deities simply because they have always done so. They believe that the happiness of the gods and goddesses is essential for preserving the health of communities, cattle, and crops. It is not important for them to explain why they worship as they do. Even asking them why they believe what they do is, in their view, irrational.

The author points out that the Lepcha religion is a mixture of the pre-Buddhist Bon faith and the Buddhism that the Bhuttias brought with them from Tibet when they conquered Sikkim hundreds of years ago. The Lepchas never completely identified with Tibetan Lamaism for several reasons. One is that the Buddhist scriptures are written in the Tibetan language, and the Lepchas have their own script. Another is the fact that the new faith—Buddhism—was identified with the Tibetans, who had conquered them and installed their first king in 1641.

Lepchas believe that their ancestors descended from seven brothers who lived in seven separate huts in heaven. Each was a deity guarding a different crop. Those deities wore traditional Lepcha clothing; they had goiters similar to those that bother the Lepchas today—caused by a lack of iodine in the water. Muns, the female priestesses, and Bongthings, the male priests, Gowloog writes, still practice in contemporary Lepcha communities. This demonstrates that the predominating Buddhism and the pre-existing Bon faith continue to coexist.

Christianity further complicates the religious landscape of Lepcha communities, though it did not take hold during the British administration of India and Sikkim. Christians, in fact, represent a more recent minority group.

Since the Lepchas form only a small minority in Sikkim and Darjeeling, their religious identifications provide important markers of their identity. Attempts to unite them as Lepchas have conflicted with their own identities as Buddhists or as Christians. The latter, the Christians, have exhibited feelings of superiority over the people who identify as Buddhists. To this day, this cleavage hampers those who strive to preserve an overall sense of Lepcha cultural identity.

Gowloog points out that the Buddhist-Christian divide, noticeable in the Darjeeling area of India, is not as prevalent in Sikkim since outsiders have been prohibited from living in, and to some extent even hampered from entering, the Dzongu Reserve. In that more or less closed section of north central Sikkim, Lepchas have cherished their own religious beliefs without being much influenced by Christians or Hindus. In essence, Sikkim has been more closed off to outside influences and westernization than the Darjeeling area of India’s West Bengal state.

Several factors have been promoting a Lepcha consciousness. The Lepcha Association attempted to build ethnic identity by focusing the attention of the people on their own language during the 1971 census of India. They visited villages and urged the people to declare on the census forms that their native language was Lepcha rather than Nepali.

The use of the Lepcha language has not diminished in Sikkim, primarily since the government has recognized it as one of the four official languages of the state. However, Lepchas living in Darjeeling have lacked an official imprimatur of their language.

The author indicates that the divide between Buddhist and Christian Lepchas seems to have begun dissipating over the past 20 years or so. Attitudes of the Buddhist Lepchas toward the Christians are softening, and the Christians are reaffirming their Lepcha identity by participating in traditional events and games, and by wearing traditional clothing during festivals along with their Buddhist colleagues.

Another heartening development is the growing sense of solidarity between Lepchas in Sikkim and those in Darjeeling. Hundreds in Darjeeling attempted to march into Sikkim to show their support for their brethren to the north, who are facing the construction of hydropower dams in the Teesta River basin. Some continue that support through Internet social media.

Concluding her review, the author indicates that she has hope for the future of the Lepcha people. She urges them to strengthen the process of dialog in the face of challenges, especially in the state of West Bengal where the Gorkha movement is tending to marginalize them. The fact that they are overcoming their religious and geographical divisions “has brought a new hope in the Lepcha community (p.23).”

Gowloog, Rip Roshina. 2013. “Identity Formation among the Lepchas of West Bengal and Sikkim.” Studies of Tribes and Tribals 11(1): 19-23

An online atlas of eastern Canadian Arctic trails, published two weeks ago, offers new perceptions about Inuit culture, according to the three authors responsible for the project. The new atlas, called Pan Inuit Trails, was compiled over the course of 15 years by Francis Taylor of Carleton University, Michael Bravo from the University of Cambridge, and Claudio Aporta at Dalhousie University.

Taylor told one news source that the three researchers developed the project from the bottom up rather than from the top down—they paid lengthy visits to Inuit communities, seeking information from their elders as to the locations, uses, and meanings of trails across the land and sea. For the trails represent the stories of the people themselves, and their understandings of their environment.

“The journey is a story of what happened, who you met, who you saw, what kinds of things happened to you on that route. And every story is different,” Taylor said. “These geo-narratives are vitally important in understanding the richness of that journey.”

The importance of the work, he added, is that it should change perceptions by outsiders that the Inuit live in small, isolated communities. Instead, the atlas suggests the interconnections of “a thriving community which has moved and evolved and interacted over the course of time.”

Michael Bravo, from Cambridge, indicated that while the trails may not be distinguishable from the surrounding landscape by outsiders, to the Inuit, their contours and subtle features precisely mark their stories and narratives, a point similar to the one made by Tayor.

A different news source reported that Paingut Annie Peterloosie, an elder from Pond Inlet, provided the researchers with details about trails in her region that had been used for centuries. Bravo, commenting on the precision of her thinking, said that “she had the skill of moving like an Inuit seamstress, except it was across the Northwest Passage.”

He added that the new atlas corrects the typical view of the Arctic as barren and mostly devoid of people with, instead, a sense of the richness of the land as the Inuit perceive it. “While many associate a single, squiggly line with the Northwest Passage, Inuit elders showed us, with great precision, how those trails intersect and join places where people have lived,” he said.

Claudio Aporta, the scholar from Dalhousie, first learned about the existence of trails in the Arctic in the year 2000 when he was traveling with some hunters in Igloolik. The hunters explained that the tracks he saw were trails that they had been using for many years—for as long as they could remember. “And they’re basically flattened-down snow, which melts,” he said, “but [each year] they create the same trails in the same [locations].”

The Inuit have carefully memorized their trails. Aporta said that they could remember specific features of the landscape, such as particular rocks, just by closing their eyes and focusing on the land they so often travel through. The researchers noted that while some of the trails are clearly hundreds of years old, the locations of others may be modified. For instance, changes in climate have affected the formation, and break-up, of sea ice, which may force deviations from traditional routes.

The compilers used many published and unpublished historical documents, as well as the memories of Inuit informants, to assist in the definitions of the trails portrayed in the atlas. One of the purposes of the project was to provide documentary source evidence of historic claims of Canadian sovereignty over the waters of the Canadian Arctic, especially the Northwest Passage.

Peaceful Societies

Peaceful Societies

Schooling for the Semai

Political, Religious, and Community Tensions in Ladakh [journal article review]

Rural Thai Children Threatened by Absence of Parents

Official Concern for Birhor Wanes

Police Remove Yanadi before Modi Visit

Birthday Wishes for Glenn Paige

Amish Volunteerism

The Challenges of Lepcha Identity [journal article review]

Atlas of Inuit Trails

Subscribe to our weekly digest

Subject Listing

Previous News and Reviews