Peaceful Societies

Last month, the Nubian people were not discussed during the celebrations in Egypt marking the 50th anniversary of the construction of the High Dam at Aswan, even though the reservoir destroyed much of Old Nubia. Haggag Oddoul, a prominent Egyptian Nubian writer who lives in Alexandria, told a reporter from the Web-based news source Al-Monitor that the “lack of any talk about the rights of Nubians during the celebrations marking the anniversary of the High Dam is a strong indicator that this issue is being ignored again.”

Oddoul has been a forceful advocate of the Nubian right to return to new villages on the shores of Lake Nasser, the reservoir created by the impoundment of the Nile. He was one of the 50 members of the committee last fall that drafted a new constitution for Egypt after the military ousted former President Mohamed Morsi.

Reviewing the work of the committee, he said that he and the other Nubians had been successful in adding article 236, which “obliged the state to return Nubian residents to their original regions within a period of 10 years.” He added that article 53 outlawed discrimination on the basis of skin color or race, an issue that Nubians in Egypt have constantly had to contend with.

But guarantees written into the constitution mean little unless they are implemented, Oddoul said. He believes that there are major interests in Egypt that want to derive economic benefits from having access to the lands along the Nile, to which the Nubians feel they are entitled.

Abdel Daim Azzedine, a Nubian activist in Aswan, argued that the state needs to talk with their young people to prevent them from protesting about being ignored. “If the policies of ignoring us continue, we intend to take to the streets to demand our rights,” he said. In other words, the traditional peacefulness of the Nubians will not continue indefinitely.

He pointed out that the government of Egypt has earned billions of Egyptian pounds off of revenues from the High Dam, especially from the sale of electricity and from tourism. He added that the Nubians “are the only losers in this project, and what is happening with us is nothing other than attempts at ethnic cleansing.”

Mr. Azzedine told the Al-Monitor reporter that the resettlement housing provided by the government in the 1960s before the dam was finished was far from the Nile, in the desert, without any nearby sources of livelihoods. “We saw this as a kind of marginalization,” he said. He added, “we are not seeking to secede or take up arms and violence. … The illusion of separation is only in the imagination of the Egyptian security apparatus. But the continuation of policies of marginalization has prompted Nubian youth to resort to violence.”

Al-Monitor spoke with activist Nayef Hamid from Sudan, a Nubian who indicated that the Nubians in his country also suffered from displacement caused by the High Dam. Their cause in both countries is a single issue, he said, and the government of neither country has dealt with what he referred to as the marginalization and ethnic cleansing of the Nubian people.

Mr. Hamid said that the Nubians of Sudan were strongly opposed to the construction of two additional dams, which their government has proposed. Their protests have not been entirely peaceful, as fighting between state forces and protesters on June 30, 2008, left four Sudanese people dead.

Out of 6,872 children living on the streets of Sumbawanga, well over half, 52.4 percent, are girls, according to a report a week ago from that municipality in southwestern Tanzania. Many of the people in the small city, located in the heart of the historic Ufipa territory, are of Fipa ancestry. The interest in the report is to see if the problem is based on the social structures of traditional Fipa society.

Tanzania has an estimated total of about 437,000 children living on the streets of its cities. The focus on Sumbawanga was provided by James Biseko, a social development officer for the municipality. He reported during a speech that the numbers of children living on the streets have been growing steadily during the past twenty years.

Mr. Biseko noted that the municipal council is planning to pass an ordinance that will penalize parents who can be identified as having abandoned their children. He said that children from the ages of 10 to 15 live on the streets due to the fact that their parents and guardians no longer want to take responsibility for them. The legal action will attempt to cut back on the numbers of street children.

However, Jesse Mkumbo, acting director of Sumbawanga, said the city lacked sufficient local institutions to effectively cope with providing for the welfare of children. Also, it did not have enough funds to handle the situation. He discussed various local institutions, programs and initiatives that are trying to help ameliorate factors that contribute to the tragedy of children living on city streets.

Kathleen Smythe’s book Fipa Families (2006), suggests some possible historical antecedents to the issue of homeless children in the course of an examination of the history of the family in Fipa society. While there are of course many contemporary causes of child abandonment, the historical patterns described by Smythe may give useful clues about the roots of the problem.

Smythe indicates that in the traditional Fipa family, quite young children, ages six to seven or sometimes even younger, would move in with their grandparents. The reason was that the people believed living with grandparents would be an effective way of preventing incest in the home.

Smythe focuses on the role of the Catholic missionaries from Germany, evangelists in that part of Tanzania who were strongly opposed to this practice, which conflicted with their own values favoring the nuclear family as having the primary responsibility for raising children.

When Fipa children reached their teenage years, they normally moved into separate buildings adjoining the family compounds, called intuli. These facilities were designed for sleeping and socializing, but not normally for cooking and eating. The young people could socialize as they wished with their age mates, then pair off when they were old enough until they were ready for marriage.

Needless to say, the Catholic fathers opposed this practice, strongly believing in sexual abstinence until marriage. In contrast, the Fipa viewed socializing in the intuli by boys and girls as an essential aspect of their growth. In order to stamp out those traditional beliefs, the missionaries founded boarding schools and did all they could to keep their resident students from returning to their homes, where they might be tempted to stay, marry, and reject the discipline that the Christians had imposed.

Smythe’s book explores many aspects of Fipa childhood and family relations, but its historical scope covers only up through 1960. It thus does not allow readers to form definitive conclusions about possible connections between traditional Fipa ways of raising children and the contemporary problem of street children in Sumbawanga.

Readers might suspect that the practice of building intuli may have helped produce a climate of opinion where removing children from their homes and abandoning them on the streets is now socially acceptable, but such a conclusion would not be supported by the available evidence. Furthermore, the ways Fipa traditions were subverted by Europeans may or may not be related to today’s social issues. One can only hope that additional field research will help answer these questions relating to Fipa society.

Last Thursday, Katiushka Borges uploaded to Youtube an effective video she produced about a Piaroa community and their upcoming huarime festival, to which visitors are cordially invited. Ms. Borges gives her email address and welcomes contacts from viewers who are thinking of attending. The video is clearly intended for a widespread audience, for comments made in the Piaroa language are supported with English subtitles, and a narrator provides additional information in English.

The video opens with an explanation that the Piaroa, a name given to them by missionaries, see themselves as people who are born to live in the forest—and die in the forest. “They are the lords of the jungle,” the narrator says. They live in the community of Alto de Carinagua and are led by an elderly shaman named Bolívar and his wife Elena.

The video shows the old man, Bolívar, now over 100, working at his daily tasks while a pot simmers over a fire and a green parrot calls from a tree overhead. The video makers focus on the shaman as he speaks about their traditions. One tradition has been that elderly leaders, the shamans, must pass along their knowledge to the younger generations at the proper times.

A younger man says that grandfather does not appear to be growing older. We see the old man chopping the end of a pole with his machete. “He is a living example of an integrated vision of life, which translates into tolerance, unity and integrity,” we are told.

Next we are introduced to his son and successor, Rufino Conare, who will be directing the local huarime (also called “warime”) festival this year. He says that the festival is all about sharing. The purpose is to “meet new people, friends, to share, to exchange new necklaces made of beads, to wear ‘guayuco’, [to] dress up in our costumes, and to bring joy and entertainment to the people, to the communities” he tells viewers. The narrator adds that the Huarime festival is an extremely important event for the people, during which they celebrate their harvests through song, dance, and myth.

Another man, identified as Rafael López, continues to discuss the festival along with Mr. Conare. They show a book with illustrations of some masks and point out the significance of each one: a huarime mask, a primitive man mask, and a monkey mask. These masks evidently play important roles during the festival.

The speakers describe in detail the feasting that takes place during huarime of large quantities of meat, fish, and other types of foods. Their drink, called Yarake, is consumed until it is vomited, so the body is thoroughly cleansed. After that, the participants continue eating and drinking. Furthermore, the yucca plant induces visions.

The shaman sings in the evening to prevent the bodies of the participants from being badly affected by the drink. “Because if some of the liquid stays inside the body, people can feel drunk,” López says. He and Conare, who are sitting side by side on a log, both smile. The narrator makes it clear that the festival tests the leadership skills and organizational ability of the shaman as well as his wisdom and spiritual talents.

A woman finally makes an appearance. Ana Cégilla Arana says that visitors “are all welcome to join us, to come here and to share with us.” She quotes her grandmother, who is sitting across the table from her making comments in Piaroa, that it is important to bring food offerings and to make a contribution.

Mary-Ann Kirkby, author of the best-selling I Am Hutterite, has come out with another work on Hutterite culture, particularly their cooking, which she has been promoting during a recent book tour in Alberta.

Kirkby spent her early childhood in a Hutterite colony in Manitoba but in 1969, when she was 10, her father had serious conflicts with the head minister. He chose to leave the colony with his wife and their 10 children. The family moved to Saskatchewan, where she felt lonely. “Ignorance of the culture by the outside world was breathtaking,” she said as she discussed her childhood feelings of alienation from the majority culture.

But the news reports about her new book make it clear she has continued over the years to feel close to her Hutterite roots. She still speaks Hutterisch, a dialect of German used in the colonies. While she does not live at a colony, she gets her food staples from one an hour’s drive away from her home in Saskatchewan.

In response to a question by one interviewer, she replied that the thing she misses the most about her roots is the strong sense of community, which she felt keenly when her son was born. She reflected how a new mother in a Hutterite colony is pampered, with food brought to her that includes and emphasizes all her favorites. Someone is assigned to assist the mother and the baby. The new mother doesn’t return to colony work for four months. Kirkby also reminisced fondly about the way the elderly are well cared for in the colonies.

But the articles about her focus, quite naturally, on her new book, Secrets of a Hutterite Kitchen: Unveiling the Rituals, Traditions, and Food of the Hutterite Culture. For food, and the communal feeding of 100 or so people in the colony, is a central element of Hutterite society. The thrust of the book is an exploration of their food culture.

She visited a dozen colonies in the Prairie Provinces of Canada and Montana where, she discovered, “the Hutterite culture is a cooking culture.” They have rituals surrounding foods and eating that are quite important since they reflect the values of the Hutterites.

She points out that the Pleasant Valley Colony, west of Red Deer, Alberta, goes through enormous quantities of food for each meal. Duck, geese, chicken, beef, pork, turkey, sheep, fish, and so on appear on the menu. Many of the foods they consume are the same as the ones their ancestors ate in 16th century Moravia, such as roast fowl, breads and buns. Typical meals, like those from Germany and Russia, are put together with flour, dairy products, eggs, and pork.

They also eat modern foods such as cream cheese and pizzas. They buy ready-made items from grocery stores—cereals, chocolate candy, and other junk foods to feed sweet teeth—but most of what they eat is grown and raised at their own colonies. They eat specific foods on special occasions, such as for weddings or funerals.

When she visited colonies while doing research for the book, she participated in the women’s work, particularly in the colony kitchens. Kirkby joined in with the women, helping them peel perhaps 100 pounds of potatoes for a meal, but in the process, picking up gossip and stories that the others shared with her.

“I wasn’t nearly as quick as they were when it came to plucking ducks or peeling potatoes,” she said, “and I was teased endlessly about my methodical way of doing things, but still I enjoyed it more than I even thought I would.”

In answer to a question about the secret to good Hutterite cooking, she replied that they use primarily organic foods that are straight from their own gardens, cream from their own cows, and meat from their own backyards. “It’s food that doesn’t need a lot of spice but tastes really delicious,” she maintained, even though it does not have a lot of sauces or seasonings.

The journalist asked her how her roots as a Hutterite have affected her own cooking. She replied that the Hutterites eat lots of soups. She extolled the ingredients that go into making exquisite soups at home—bits of chicken, some onions, and salt. She simmers her soups for a long time. She adds some parsley or dill just before serving, and perhaps dumplings.

She tells the journalist that her “comfort soup of choice” is her Nuckela soup, the recipe for which appears in the book and in one of the articles about it.

A massive industrial wind project is under construction in southern Mexico near the city of Juchitán de Zaragosa, and the local indigenous farm families, mostly Zapotecs, are unhappy about it. Using the Zapotec name Biío Hioxo Energy, the developers are seizing lands in the name of alternative power development.

The project, reported recently from the state of Oaxaca, is one of numerous comparable industrial wind parks being built across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The isthmus is well known for having average sustained wind speeds of between 20 and 30 meters per second (44 to 67 miles per hour) from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.

The farm of Don Celestino Bartolo is one of the ones affected by the construction. From the farmyard, his son Rosalino Bartolo points to the nearest wind tower, which is quite close to where he is speaking with a reporter. It is located where the family used to fish. Rosalino argues that people living closer than one kilometer away from wind towers may be subject to harm from magnetic fields, but “we see that there is one right here less than 150 meters away,” he says.

A recent article about the project, published by Truthout.org that was reprinted from a report posted on the website of the Americas Program of the Center for International Policy, cites, and disputes, numerous points made in an environmental impact study (EIS) of the project. The EIS was prepared by the URS Corporation Mexico for the developers. For instance, the study stated that waste oil has to be frequently removed from the turbines. It will have to be stored at the project site in Juchitán until it can be transferred to a hazardous waste facility.

The EIS argued that “the project will not generate an impact on indigenous peoples, their communities or their homes. Nor on their existing archaeological, paleontological, historical, religious and cultural resources within the project site.” Indigenous groups dispute those assertions.

Carlos Sanchez, from the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Juchitán, maintains that the wind developers ignore the communal property rights of the indigenous peoples. “Of the 15 parks already built on the Isthmus, 10 are on communal land, a total of 68 thousand hectares. In the Biío Hioxo Park alone there are seven sacred sites in 2000 hectares of communal lands,” he said.

The EIS also predicted hopefully that the project would not have an impact on the local groundwater. Sanchez expresses skepticism about that. He also said he was concerned that many of the indigenous farmers only know their native languages, and are not able to understand the Spanish used in the contracts that wind company representatives shove in front of them to sign. The farmers have been signing away their lands without understanding what they are doing.

The recent article describes the harm that industrial construction poses for the natural environment, such as the fact that the massive towers kill birds and bats, they fragment the landscape, and they disrupt the foraging and sheltering needs of all wildlife. The article discusses the visual pollution produced by the towers jutting up into the relatively flat landscape. It also points to the high levels of noise that the spinning turbines produce.

The EIS reminds readers that industrial developments such as these require high voltage transmission towers, cables, and pylons—“visual pollution on the scale of big cities.” The environmental impact of the wind projects will be “significant, unavoidable and cumulative across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec,” it indicates. Over half of the projected 28 wind industry sites have already been built.

Earlier news stories have already reported on the controversies these projects generate within the Zapotec communities in the paths of the strong winds. Clearly, the problem is not going away.

A recent journal article reports that, due to sweeping social changes, high school students in Thailand witness nearly as much violence as young people in the United States. The study, by Penchan Sherer and Moshe Sherer, was published in the May 2014 issue of the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology.

The authors open their piece with a thorough review of the social conditions prevailing in traditional Thailand that fostered peacefulness, especially among the Rural Thai. The Thai people cherished their Buddhist religion and its emphases on compassion, harmony, and caring for others. Teenagers respected their elders as well as their religious beliefs.

But the authors cite numerous scholars who have described the changes that have been sweeping Thai society. The population is aging, the fertility rate is declining, industrialization is increasing, and more and more people are accepting urban values. Young people are attending institutions of higher education, and many are leaving rural areas for jobs in manufacturing industries.

Economic prosperity, which has led to westernization and urbanization, has fostered the erosion of the traditional Thai extended family and the values it represented. As a result, the authors write, “traditional Thai values are undergoing dramatic changes, and Thai society is becoming more independent, egalitarian, aggressive, confrontational, litigious, and competitive (p.568).” As the traditional order has deteriorated, social norms have become more accepting of aggressiveness.

These changes have prompted Thai young people to become less diffident and less docile than they used to be. With opportunities for work and education, girls have become more independent economically than they were decades ago. But despite their new opportunities, the youth remain somewhat confused because of the conflicts they feel between retaining their traditional behaviors and their desires to emulate what they perceive to be western ways.

Despite the changes in Thai society, many traditional elements still prevail. The family is still the source of behavioral norms and ethical values. Young people still take care of their elders as they age. The youth still respect elderly people, especially in rural Thailand. Core values emphasizing family responsibilities, based on the acceptance of Theravada Buddhism, remain quite strong.

In an effort to explore how these changes have affected the perceptions of violence, as well as its reality, the authors decided to investigate the witnessing of violent incidents by young people in rural and urban Thai high schools. Sherer and Sherer cite studies that report how witnessing violence by teenagers prompts increased levels of their own violence as a result. Studies have shown that boys in particular who have been exposed to aggression and violence then become involved in fights themselves—more so than girls.

The authors write that rural Thai youth have not attained comparable educational or economic levels as their urban counterparts. Thus, since rural Thai communities are more traditional, and their community leaders are still highly respected and influential, the authors expected that school students in those communities would not witness as much violence as their urban peers. They also expected that traditional Thai values would still inhibit acts of violence, especially in the rural high schools.

Their research suggests that their expectations were misplaced. With the full support of the government, the authors randomly selected rural and urban districts, then schools within those districts, and then 7th through the 11th grade classes in those schools to receive their questionnaires. The students freely participated, or were free to opt out of the study. The researchers sampled the experiences of witnessing violence among 2,897 young people, 38.2 percent of whom were males and 59.4 percent of whom were females.

The results were surprising. The majority of the participants had witnessed violence. They answered in the affirmative to questions, in Thai of course, such as “have you ever witnessed hitting, punching, [or] slapping among youth in your school?” Over 61 percent of the participants answered yes to that question. Over 46 percent had witnessed violence in their communities.

While these results, according to the authors, are not as high as the reports of violence in schools in Western societies, they are still quite significant. The most frequently reported act of violence, by about 61 percent of the respondents in the Thai schools, turned out to be hitting and punching. One study done in the United States found that the same type of violence had been reported by 80 percent of high school witnesses.

The authors term the rate of violence witnessed by the school students as “alarming”. Perhaps even more alarming, they write that the Thai people now accept violence and the witnessing of violence among their youth as normal. This pattern of acceptance may lead to “less emphasis on measures to tackle this phenomenon,” they write (p.582).

Perhaps most surprising of all, Sherer and Sherer’s results indicate that there was no significant difference between the results from the rural schools and the urban ones. They suggest a couple possible explanations, the most likely of which appears to be that, although rural Thai communities are more traditional in some ways than urban ones, they are becoming more aggressive and confrontational. In essence, they conclude, “differences of violence between rural and inner-city settings are becoming blurred (p.583).”

The reasons for this spread of violence into the rural Thai culture may include the fact that the media in Thailand affect the rural youth as much as they do urban teenagers. The authors suspect that young people in Thailand, like youth everywhere, are highly affected by violence in the media. That influences their behaviors and provokes the acts that the young people witness in their schools, communities, neighborhoods, and homes. One of the additional points Sherer and Sherer make in their conclusion to this fascinating study is that the culture of male supremacy in Thailand, “lends some support to youth violence (p. 585).”

Sherer, Penchan and Moshe Sherer. 2014. “Witnessing Violence among High School Students in Thailand.” International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 58(5): 567-589

Susan Spano described a scary incident that occurred on Huahine, one of the Society Islands located 100 miles northwest of Tahiti. A former travel writer for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, she was interviewed by the L.A. Times last week regarding a new book she has published about her career.

She relates that she was by herself on the rural island looking for a stone shrine in a little park when a dog approached her and started snapping. Then another came toward her, and still another, all threatening. She grabbed a stick to try to fend them off, but more and more dogs approached. About 80 were surrounding her by the time someone whistled from a distance, perhaps from a nearby farm field, and the dogs all dispersed. She says she didn’t at all enjoy the shrine.

A travel article by Craig Platt published in early April in the Sydney Morning Herald gives a very different impression of Huahine, one that reflects to an extent some of the earlier writings about Tahitian society. Platt was on the island to experience a travel destination, not to study its people and their culture, but he does provide some interesting impressions of the place. For one thing, fortunately, he was not attacked by any dogs.

Unlike Tahiti, Bora Bora, and Moorea, the most famous islands in French Polynesia, Platt found Huahine to be mostly devoid of tourists. He had the entire beach to himself. When he visited two of the three modest resorts on the island, they appeared to be almost empty. He was the only patron in a large restaurant—which served him an excellent fish dinner.

He writes that the name “Huahine” can be translated approximately as “woman”, not due to any allusion to the Tahitian women of olden days who hosted European mariners in ways they would later rhapsodize about, but for the shape of the island’s prominent mountain, which supposedly looks like a reclining human female.

Platt was told that the reason the island has so few tourists is that the local people, numbering about 6,000 residents, are simply not interested. They enjoy their peace and quiet, their fishing, and their small scale cultivation—in essence, their traditional lifestyle. He blames their independent streak on their history. The rest of the Society Islands became a colony of France in 1880, but the residents of Huahine resisted until 1888.

Platt discusses briefly the myth that French Polynesia is some sort of paradise. He was told by Paul Attalah, an anthropologist and tour guide on Huahine, that French Polynesia was never really a utopia, since in the past there were human sacrifices, wars, and, as Platt expresses it, “other unsavory acts.”

That may be generally true, but one of the mutineers from the Bounty, who remained on Tahiti rather than continue on to Pitcairn Island with Fletcher Christian and his cohorts, James Morrison, kept a journal that provided details about life and culture on Tahiti in the early 1790s, after the mutineers had left. Morrison described Tahitian society as relatively peaceful, with only sporadic warfare and occasional fights between villagers. While he was writing about Tahiti, his characterizations of that island would have fit the people of Huahine just as well.

Morrison wrote that disputes were almost always settled with the help of neighbors; the person whom public opinion decided was in the wrong almost always apologized, which settled conflicts quickly. He indicated that “private disputes between men relative to themselves only seldom produce a blow” except on occasional circumstances (Morrison 2010, p.183).

The former sailor described the culture of caring that characterized the Tahitians of the time. He wrote, “should a brother or one who is an adopted friend become poor or lose his land in war, he has nothing more to do but go to his brother, or friend, and live with him, partaking of all he possesses as long as he lives—and his wife and family with him, if he has any. If any relation or friend, though not in immediate want, comes to the house of his friend, he is always fed while he stays, and is not only welcome to take away what he pleases but is loaded with presents” (Morrison 2010, p.179).

The foremost 20th century anthropologist to study the rural Tahitians, Robert I. Levy (1973), described a society that had been seriously affected by misadventures, missionaries, and modernization for nearly 200 years. But Levy’s observations, based on his field work in a village on Huahine from 1961 through 1964, confirmed those of Morrison 170 years earlier.

Levy saw very little conflict, open hostility, or aggression. The people exhibited a gentleness and lack of anger toward one another and toward visitors. Children, similarly, played without aggressiveness and conflicts. On occasions when disputes did arise, the parties would move to defuse them. During the two major festivals of the year, people would drink, but there was no more violence than when everyone was sober. However, he noted, sometimes people who drank at home or returned home drunk would hit a family member.

Levy also studied a neighborhood in Papeete, the large town on Tahiti that is the capital of French Polynesia, where he witnessed some strife, but he found the Tahitians living on Huahine to be just as peaceful as Morrison had described them in the 1790s. The anthropologist did not portray Huahine as a paradise, or the Tahitian people as gifted with the ability to form a utopian society. Instead, he attributed the relative peacefulness of the small island in part to its conservative, isolated ways. The people like to retain their traditional culture, he observed. To judge by Platt’s account last month, the Tahitians, at least on Huahine, still do.

Morrison, James. 2010. After the Bounty: A Sailor’s Account of the Mutiny and Life in the South Seas. Edited and Annotated by Donald A. Maxton. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books

Officials in eastern India solicited the help of some Birhor youths in an attempt to get rid of some angry bees, which have killed one man and injured others. The Birhor have, so far, been unsuccessful in their attempts to remove the insects, but they plan to try again.

On March 13, the bees attacked two men at the Bokaro & Kargali colliery of Central Coalfields Limited, which is located in the Bermo block, Bokaro district of India’s Jharkhand state. They killed one, Mohammad Israfil Ansari, and injured another. Since then, numerous other people have been stung, six of whom have been seriously injured. The beehives threatened a nearby school and residences as well as the employees of the colliery.

According to a news story in the Telegraph of Calcutta, officials are reluctant to just cut down the tree in which the bees are swarming in order to destroy them, even though local residents are making repeated pleas for help. The problem is that the bees reside in a large, magnificent, red silk cotton (simal) tree.

So officials made the unusual decision to contact local Birhor groups for help, since they are well known for their dedication to gathering honey. In his book, Kumar (2004) confirms that the Birhor gather honey between the months of March and May every year, and again in October and November. The job is usually done by young Birhors, he writes, and he adds that the first person to spot a beehive has the right to the honey. If two see it simultaneously, they will share the harvest.

Evidently, officials in the Bokaro District know this, for they contacted a local Birhor community for help. In asking the Birhor youths to come out at night and destroy the beehives, the officials offered to pay them Rs. 17,000 for the job (U.S. $291).

The Birhor tried to dispose of the bees during the evening of May 14th, the night of a full moon, but they were unsuccessful. They agreed to try again on Wednesday night, May 28, during the new moon. Their elders have said that the new moon would be a more propitious time to do it.

In the meanwhile, local residents have had to keep their windows mostly closed, despite the summer heat, for protection from the bees. Officials urged both children and adults to not throw stones at the dozens of hives in the huge tree, telling them it tends to provoke the insects to attack.

Kamleshwar Singh, the Block Development Officer of Gomia block in Bokaro district, said that attempting to clear out problem bees with the help of the Birhors was a novel approach. He had been asked to contact the group living in the Tulbul area of his block.

The bees “have to go,” Mr. Singh said, “but we are trying to save the simal tree.” The Telegraph writes that there are numerous beehives in that tree. The Times of India reported that there are an estimated 40 beehives in the area.

Rats are a major problem for nesting sea birds on Tristan da Cunha but the Tristanians have developed a unique way of coping with the introduced mammalian plague. The islanders have a holiday every year during which they compete to eliminate the most rats—and have a great party in the process.

In her account of her six-day visit to Tristan in 2006, Cathrine E. Snyder describes the plague of rats on the island, which were introduced by passing ships in the days of sail. The rats are a particular problem for the albatrosses and the Northern Rockhopper Penguins that nest there. Recent research shows that the Northern Rockhopper Penguins, a distinct species from the widely distributed Southern Rockhopper Penguins, nest exclusively in the Tristan da Cunha group. Their population has declined 90 percent since the 1950s and it is now designated as an endangered species.

Snyder mentions some possible ways the islanders could help the nesting sea birds and cut back on the rat populations, such as by managing their local trash dumps more effectively, but she points out that the people do not see the rat problem as critical enough to warrant such measures.

Accounts on the island website, however, depict the ways the islanders do seek to reduce the destructive rat populations—and have fun in the process. Each year they celebrate “Ratting Day.” The Ratting Day this year was held on May 2, and an account of it, plus a bunch of pictures, was posted to the website on May 13.

At 6:00 in the morning that Friday, Ian Lavarello, the Chief Islander, rang the fishing gong to announce the commencement of the celebration. The weather was rainy and windy, but things cleared by 9:00 and some of the participants caught rides out to the Potato Patches, a relatively level area a few miles from the Settlement where the islanders maintain their vegetable gardens. The account by Tina Glass emphasizes that the events of the day were exciting for everyone, especially for the children.

When they arrived at their camping huts at the Patches, the ladies had breakfast for all the participants; then they visited during the morning while the men and children were out ratting. They prepared a sumptuous lunch for everyone later in the day. Ms. Glass enumerates the dishes they made—stews, curries, roast beef, chicken, plum pudding, and milk tarts. After feasting, the men and children participating in the ratting returned to pursuing their quarry. The rats.

The ratting teams are named after different areas of the Patches—Johnny’s Patch, Below the Hill, Twiddy Patch, Daley’s Hill, Old Pieces, Red Body Hill, and so on. By 6:00 in the afternoon, everyone had returned to the Settlement for the climax of the celebration: examining and counting the tails of the rats that participants in the different teams had caught.

The three judges, who examined the rat tails submitted by the teams, announced their decisions during the dance and prize giving ceremonies at 9:00 pm. The Bill’s Hill team won the prize for most tails collected, and Below the Hill team won first prize for the longest tail—28.8 cm (11.3 inches), a monster rat indeed!

The total number of rats killed this year was 564. Ms. Glass’s 2013 account, which immediately precedes the current report on the website, adds additional details. She indicates, in that earlier report, that the island dogs are an important part of the rat hunting parties. She also enumerates in it the numbers of rats killed year by year, and it appears to vary: 2013, 837; 2012, 1009; 2011, 553, and 2010, 426. The highest yearly total was 1105 in 2006.

The photos that accompany this intriguing account show the people preparing and setting the rat and mouse traps, working on the hillsides, holding up their trophies, and lounging about with their dogs. The last picture of the 2014 account shows a group of perhaps a dozen large rat tails exhibited on a table, presumably the longest specimens secured that day. The image, while it might not be attractive to some visitors to the website, would resonate with anyone concerned about animal overpopulations and the resulting unbalance of natural ecosystems.

To people familiar with wildlife magazines in the U.S., the frequent photos of large deer racks and proud hunters with their trophies are quite similar to an image this year of Tristanians holding up rats by their tails. Huge cervid racks or long rat tails—both symbolize the success of the hunter and the urge to take a notable specimen. Whether overpopulations of white tails in the eastern U.S. or of rat tails on Tristan, in both cases the animals cause severe environmental degradation.

In the eastern U.S., rare and endangered wildflowers, such as the Turk’s cap lily, can be significantly impacted by too many deer, according to a study by Fletcher et al. (2001). The control of deer overpopulation is therefore just as essential in the eastern woodlands of North America as the control of rats is for the Northern Rockhopper Penguins on Tristan. But U.S. deer hunters, and wildlife management agencies, might learn something from the Tristan way of turning rat hunting into a local celebration.

Fletcher, Darl J., Lisa A. Shipley, William J. McSheac, and Durland L. Shumwaya. 2001. “Wildlife herbivory and rare plants: the effects of white-tailed deer, rodents, and insects on growth and survival of Turk’s cap lily.” Biological Conservation 101 (2): 229–238

The Amish are starting to leave Lancaster County, according to an article published last week in the daily digital magazine Ozymandus (or “OZY” for short). The piece, written by Chris Scinta, indicates that the tourism industry, which has blossomed in the county, is so badly affecting the lifestyle of the Amish themselves that some have left, or are threatening to move away.

The typical tourist images of Amish country—horses plodding along country roads pulling buggies filled with Amish families dressed in their quaint clothing—may become self-defeating, the author suspects. The very factors that have prompted the rapid growth of tourism have led to rampant development that destroys the peace and quiet. Land prices have gone up so high that the Amish themselves can no longer afford to buy farmland for their children. They have the option of giving up farming or leaving Pennsylvania to find cheaper land, and quieter environments, in which to settle.

According to one research study conducted at Kutztown University in eastern Pennsylvania, the situation is serious—at least for the tourism industry in Lancaster County. “The commercialization of the Amish lifestyle has grown tremendously in recent decades, so much so that it actually threatens the viability of the very tourism industry it created,” the study reports.

Mr. Scinta quotes Samuel Lapp, an Amish man who quit farming and sold his farm near Intercourse 25 years ago. He told the writer that none of his sons wanted to go into farming themselves—they had seen others take paying jobs, earn money, and lead lives that did not involve so much hard work. Mr. Lapp decided that he did not want to continue milking the cows by himself.

Donald Kraybill, a prominent expert on Amish life, said that the conversion of Lancaster farmland into suburbs has put a burden on the Amish farming community. “It’s too many babies and too few acres,” he said. “The big danger is that the Amish here become so assimilated they end up not being Amish,” Kraybill added. They constantly deal with their non-Amish neighbors, their children interact with technology, and they start conversing in English rather than Pennsylvania Dutch, all of which weaken their commitments to their own culture.

But Mr. Scinta interviews one Amish man who has no plans to leave. Amos Bieler, who raises vegetables to sell at his store, Bluegate Farm Home Grown Produce, east of Lancaster City on route 30, told the author, “we like it here.” He said that the local government is trying to zone the area exclusively for rural life, in order to block suburbanization and development.

Although 25 years out of date, Donald Kraybill’s classic Riddle of Amish Culture (1989) still provides a lot of essential background to the story of possible Amish migration out of Lancaster County. He points out that the original settlement in the county has spawned many new congregations, both elsewhere in Pennsylvania and out of state.

The most basic question Kraybill addresses is that of Amish demography. He makes it clear in this book that the Amish will absolutely not consider limiting their population growth. “The Amish perceive birth control as reckless interference with God’s will, an unforgiveable attempt to play God” he writes (p.194). So as their numbers grow, their options have been to subdivide their farms, take factory jobs, take up other forms of work—or migrate to other areas. He explores those options carefully in the book.

It is clear from the brief quotes in the magazine article last week that Kraybill continues to monitor the patterns of the Amish, to see if they can cope with the constant pressures to join the mainstream, and to see how they can retain the many conditions that foster their peaceful society.

Peaceful Societies

Peaceful Societies

Nubians Waiting for Fair Treatment

Homeless Fipa Children

Soups and Such from Hutterite Kitchens

Zapotec Affected by Wind Project

Reports of Violence in Thai High Schools [journal article review]

Traditional Ways on Huahine

The Birhor and the Bees

Rat Hunting Holiday on Tristan

Lancaster County Amish Consider Leaving

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