Peaceful Societies

“Lepcha was the language spoken in the Garden of Eden,” thought G. B. Mainwaring, the British general and scholar who published in 1876 a comprehensive grammar of the Lepcha language. Geoffrey Gorer provided that quote on page 39 of his book Himalayan Village: An Account of the Lepchas of Sikkim.

Gorer criticized Mainwaring’s Lepcha grammar and his subsequent work on a dictionary of Lepcha, which was only published after his death. But his negative opinions about Mainwaring’s works are clearly not shared by three Lepcha scholars who published articles about him in the current issue of Lepcha Aachulay Magazine. Issued on Friday, October 4, these three articles provide quite positive assessments of Mainwaring’s work and his influence on Lepcha studies.

While not overlooking the weaknesses inherent is some of Mainwaring’s approaches to lingusitics, they all indicate that his publications strengthened the Lepcha language, culture, and society. Lyangsong Tamsang’s article “General G. B. Mainwaring, Champion of the Lepchas” provides a concise overview of the scholar’s life and work. Most helpful of all, Tamsang indicates that “Mainwaring” is correctly pronounced “Mannering.”

Mainwaring, born in India of British parents in 1825, joined an army regiment in 1842, while still age 16. He served in different campaigns, evidently distinguishing himself because he rapidly rose through the ranks. But he was particularly noticed by his superiors for his skill in languages. In 1857, he served as an interpreter for Hindi and Urdu. In 1867, he was sent to Darjeeling to work on a grammar of the Lepcha language.

He settled in what is now West Bengal state and lived there for over 20 years. He spoke Lepcha fluently, dressed in Lepcha clothing, and, according to one report, married a Lepcha woman. He would even wear his Lepcha garb when he had to travel into the cities for official business.

He studied Lepcha for many years under the guidance of a Lepcha priestess named Mun Dey Mem. His 1876 Grammar of the Lepcha (Rong) Language has been frequently criticized because it analyzed the language in terms of the structure of Latin rather than describing it as it actually exists.

His subsequent Dictionary of the Lepcha Language, edited and published in 1898, five years after his death, has also been criticized for its failings, although Lyangsong Tamsang describes aspects of that work that are worthwhile.

He writes that Mainwaring bought about 80 acres of land near the communities of his beloved Lepcha friends, and he left the property to his mentor, Mun Dey Men, on his death. She died without having children of her own, so the land has passed down through the children of her sister. One of the great grandsons of the sister now owns the land, and preserves a 27 acre tract of woodland for its natural values.

Lyangsong Tamsang concludes by writing, “it is the General who said that the Lepcha language is one of the most ancient languages of the world. This remarkable man who loved the Lepcha language and respected the Lepcha ways of life, living, culture, traditions and heritage tried very hard indeed to protect as well as to promote, the Lepcha language and succeeded in doing so. Today the Lepcha language is alive and well.”

Another article on Mainwaring, “A New Beginning in Rong Sukdum,” by Kachyo Lepcha, concludes that their language, while threatened and suppressed for generations in Sikkim and northeastern India, has been staging a comeback in recent decades. The language was officially introduced in the school curriculum of Sikkim in 1975, and in 2001 it was introduced into the graduate levels in the government colleges of Sikkim. In 2012, it was included as an honors subject at the graduate level.

D. C. Roy’s contribution to the current issue, “George Byres Mainwaring: A More Lepcha than Most Lepchas,” is the most comprehensive account of the three on Mainwaring’s life and work. Roy quotes Mainwaring extensively on Lepcha life, culture, and language. For example, his quote from Mainwaring’s grammar of 1876 deals with the peacefulness and character of the Lepcha people:

“Of the language I cannot speak too highly. The simple and primitive state in which the Lepchas lived is admirably shown by it. It has no primary word (beyond the words for gold and silver) to express money, merchants or merchandise, fairs or markets. Their peaceful and gentle character is evinced by their numerous terms [for] tenderness and compassion, and by the fact that not one word of abuse exists in their language.

“Nevertheless the language itself is most copious, abounding in synonyms and possessing words to express every slightest change, every varying shade of meaning, it admits of flow and power of speech which is wonderful, and which renders it capable of giving expression to the highest degree of eloquence. The language also [attests] the astonishing knowledge possessed by the Lepchas.”

Roy goes on to write his own opinion, that “General G.B. Mainwaring is … more Lepcha than most Lepchas of today.” He indicates that the general always dressed in the Daampraa, the traditional costume of Lepcha men, including the Thyaaktuk, the Lepcha hat. By learning the language, Roy argues, Mainwaring became a true Lepcha—he loved the Lepcha people and their culture, and lived the way they did.

He expressed his attachments to Lepcha ways in his writings. Though his words may strike cynical outsiders as overly sentimental, they reflect the spirit of a sensitive Englishman who enjoyed living among the Lepcha people of the Darjeeling area. As quoted by Roy, Mainwaring wrote:

“Their religion was particularly simple; they believed in one Good Spirit, and in innumerable evil spirits; to the former they conceived their worship was due, and to Him they offered their prayer and thanks giving; the latter they considered prowls about, and haunt[s] every spot; to them they attributed whatever sickness or misfortune befell, therefore [they] deemed it requisite to propitiate them, which they did by offerings of rice &c. The first fruits of the season were always offered to the Good Spirit.”

One of the best features of the 1980 film comedy “The Gods Must Be Crazy” was the way Xi, the Ju/’hoansi hero, was valued for his ability as a tracker. Tracking skills continue to be important in that society. According to an interesting news story last week, three Ju/’hoan trackers from Namibia have recently been engaged by some German scientists in a project that is trying to track the ways of early Europeans.

Some famous caves in southern France preserve prehistoric rock art and, less well known, human footprints which have not hitherto been analyzed by individuals skilled in interpreting them. Tilman Lenssen-Erz from the University of Cologne and Andreas Pastoor from the Neanderthal Museum, also in Germany, invited the three Ju/’hoan men from the Tsumkwe area to visit France and see how they would interpret the evidence about what the ice-age Europeans were actually doing in the caves—in addition to painting on the walls.

They brought /Ui Kxunta, /Ui Ga!o and Tsamkxao Ciqae to Europe with the basic research premise that while scientists can analyze and measure many things, people with skills in interpreting human movements based on their tracks could provide invaluable insights into what the Europeans 17,000 years ago were actually doing.

For the Ju/’hoansi, tracking used to be, and to some extent still is, an important aspect of their hunting, though today the three men mostly use their skills for tourists and trophy hunters. The Ju/’hoansi hunt large animals such as various species of antelopes with poison arrows. They have to be able to follow the footprints of the wounded animals across the bush for many hours until they finally drop to the ground and die. Human survival for eons has depended not only on their skill in shooting animals, but also on their ability to track them and retrieve the meat.

That incredible ability extends to tracking humans and interpreting what they have been doing, a skill which, in fact, helps foster their famed peacefulness. In 1960, Lorna Marshall pointed out an interesting observation she had learned from her friends. Everyone has unique footprints, the Ju/’hoansi told her, and they could normally distinguish which individuals made which tracks. It was thus impossible to conceal what one had done, which helped prevent stealing.

A few months ago, the European participants in the project met the three Ju/’hoan trackers in Namibia to get acquainted. They took some trips into the bush near Tsumkwe, the town at the heart of the Nyae Nyae Conservancy of the Ju/’hoansi, where the Ju/’hoan men demonstrated their tracking skills to the other project participants. They also visited a cave in northern Namibia, to familiarize the trackers with the environment they would be encountering in southern France.

They then visited a couple petroglyph sites in Namibia, one of which includes depictions of animal tracks. After a press conference in Windhoek, the group left for Europe.

They visited the zoo in Cologne to give the three trackers the chance to observe bears, animals they were not familiar with and whose tracks they needed to be aware of. Then they drove to southern France to visit four different caves. At the cave of Niaux, they inspected 24 footprints and the Ju/’hoansi men concluded that the tracks were made by a girl of about age 12. They rejected the opinions of some archaeologists who had identified them as having been made by several people doing a ritual dance.

At the Pech Merle cave, archaeologist had identified a group of footprints as having been made by one or possibly two people, but the San trackers identified five different individuals as having walked over the area in question. At the cave at Fontanet, they found that the tracks of 17 different people had been preserved. Some scholars had thought that the prints of a shoe were visible, but the trackers found toe marks, which discredited the assumption that at least one of the early Europeans may have worn shoes in the cave.

One area in the last cave they visited, Tuc d’Audoubert, contained a maze of dozens of footprints—but the tracks seemed to include only heels. The tracks are located on the side of a pit. Archaeologists had identified it once again as a possible site of a ritual dance. The Ju/’hoansi trackers said no, they were the tracks of a man and a boy who had walked twice into the pit to extract clay. They showed the scientists where the people had knelt down, with their bare knees pressing into the earth—showing, incidentally, that the cave visitors had not been wearing pants at that point in time.

The scientists were impressed that the Ju/’hoansi trackers did not speculate on what they were seeing. Instead, they relied entirely on the facts that they saw in the tracks. Assistants recorded in their entirety the discussions among the three trackers held in their own Ju/’hoan language for subsequent transcription by the Ju/’hoan Transcription Group in Tsumkwe.

A TV filming crew accompanied the project participants, both in Namibia and in Europe, with the intention of producing a 90 minute documentary for the French-German TV channel Arte in 2014. Project leaders also plan to prepare an English language version, so the Ju/’hoansi themselves will be able to show it in their villages in the Tsumkwe area.

The Indian Army has attempted for years to put a peaceful face on its mission in northern India, but the Ladakhi—and the rest of the people in the state of Jammu and Kashmir—still decry the military presence.

A journal article in 2008 explained that the army tries to generate support from the people of Ladakh through its Operation Sadbhavana, which means, literally, “goodwill among people.” Similarly, at a military exhibition in Ladakh in 2011, the army enthusiastically displayed its hardware, hoping, in the words of the commanding officer in the region, to spread the word “that we love the people of Ladakh and we really want to salute them.”

According to a report in the Indian press last Friday, many people in Ladakh, and the rest of the state, are still skeptical that the army plays a beneficial, peaceful role in their affairs. Although local officials appear to appreciate the Rs. 40 crore (US$6,380,000) that the army spends annually on development and social programs in the state, locals maintain that the money will not erase the memories of brutal incidents that have occurred.

Army personnel maintain that programs such as Operation Sadbhavana are the best way to get people to accept the fact that army personnel need to do such things as search women and children, perform traffic checks, and examine curfew passes.

A register at the headquarters of one brigade in the Kupwara District of the state shows that between 10 and 15 people visit the facility every day to talk with army officers about development concerns. However, an assessment made by the army itself last year indicated that 46 percent of the people in that same district still do not trust the military.

A college student, Abdul Latif, also from the Kupwara District, told the reporter about a search operation by the military in a couple villages in 1991 during which troops allegedly raped some women. The perpetrators were not brought to justice. The “building of a few schools and bus stands or for that matter providing ration[s] to the needy does matter, but would certainly not encourage people to forget the unforgettable atrocities,” he said.

More recently, three civilians were assumed by the army to be foreign terrorists and were killed, an incident that prompted massive protest demonstrations. Moreover, some of the development projects instituted by the army have not been well built—such as roads that crumbled soon after completion.

M.M. Ansari, one of the interlocutors appointed to attempt to develop a blueprint for peace in Jammu and Kashmir in October 2010, argues that only the development of local and state civilian administrative bodies can forge a lasting peace in the state. Having the army assume such duties is an inappropriate way of achieving such peace, he maintains.

Others warn that when funds allocated to the military for civil works projects disappear without explanations, the army’s supposed peaceful image is further harmed. Sheikh Showkat Hussain, a law professor at Kashmir University, warns that problems such as missing money undercut the deceptive appearances of peacefulness. He blames the problems on vested interests, which he describes as people who harvest everything in order to defend the status quo and who then brand everyone else as a militant or a stone thrower.

Women are taking the lead in a struggle by the peaceful Indian Birhor people to prevent huge coal mines from devouring more of their villages. They are joined by women from other neighboring tribal groups—specifically the Gond and the Kanwar societies—in Chhattisgarh state in their vocal opposition to the mining.

An environmental hearing scheduled for Wednesday last week in the remote village of Tiklirampur, in the Tamnar block of the Raigarh district in the state, was the focus of the protests. An article in The Hindu the day before the hearing indicated that the mines in the district feed the needs of a Jindal Steel and Power, Limited, plant. The Birhor and the other tribal peoples have already lost several villages, so their approach last week was to try and prevent the hearing from even taking place.

The Hindu quoted Kaniram, a 72-year old Birhor man, who pointed out to the reporter where his mud and thatch hut had been, though it was swallowed up some years ago by the gaping gorge of a coal mine. The hearing on the 25th was to consider the application by the company to strip mine another 350 hectares of land. Kaniram said that the Birhor were not aware that there was so much coal under their villages. He added that he “wished there was less coal in the hills.”

He went on to say that when his land was condemned for the earlier mining, he was given about Rs. 1.5 lakh for his 12 acres, or about US$200 per acre. “The money has disappeared and the land price has gone up, coal has killed us,” he said. The father of a family of eight said that their water has turned black, and noise from the blasting in the mines at night has become a nightmare.

The local villagers are protesting to try and save themselves from the same fate. The meeting on Wednesday was organized by the state government, but the national Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) in New Delhi will decide whether more tribal people will lose their homes in the insatiable need for power.

“Our cause is to stop coal mining in Gare 4/6 block, so that at least half a dozen villages of Tamnar can survive,” commented Harihar Patel from Gare, a community threatened by the proposed coal mining. The Birhor, Gond and Kanwar women are holding public protest rallies in the six villages which will be affected by the project.

The mining protests have not always been peaceful. A similar public meeting held in 2008 for a permit in the same block, Gare 4/6, resulted in a considerable amount of violence. According to the newspaper reporter, villagers, including women, were beaten up by the police, and men were arrested, then tortured.

A prominent environmental activist at that violent hearing, Ramesh Agarwal, was shot through the thigh, allegedly by employees of the coal company, but Jindal denies any involvement by its people. As a result, Mr. Agarwal is paralyzed from the waist down, and the alleged attackers are free. He expressed apprehension about the chances of success on Wednesday. “The outcome of the public hearing is not important anymore as the MoEF cannot stop any coal-based project,” he said. The land will be consumed for the coal, “devoured by power companies.” He did not plan on attending the hearing on Wednesday.

Fortunately, The Hindu carried a follow-up news account on Thursday about the hearing the day before. Tiklirampur, the location of the hearing, was overwhelmed on Wednesday by hundreds of SUVs driven by people demanding that Jindal be allowed to carry on with the mining. Some of them admitted to the reporter that they were asked to participate in the meeting. Some appeared to be drunk, and they squabbled with local people who were opposed to the mining.

Subran Sai Rathia, who is from one of the villages that will be affected if the proposal is approved, denied that he had been paid anything for his support for the mining permit. But he did say that he knew of others who had been compensated for their supportive testimonies.

The reporter talked to one group of men who, on condition of anonymity, admitted that they had been paid by a contractor for Jindal to appear at the hearing and testify for the proposal. A farmer named Tushar Patel said that “hundreds of contract workers of Jharkhand and Bihar” had been paid by contractors to speak in favor of the mining. “They were kept close to our village and were assured a job if they support the mining project in public,” Patel said.

However, a representative for Jindal denied those statements. “We have not arranged transport to bring project supporters to the hearing venue, it does not help us,” he said.

The tribal women from 6 different villages made it very clear at the hearing that they were strongly opposed to another coal mine. There are already three open-pit mines in the Tamnar block and, the women said, they would “sacrifice lives to stop mutilation of Gare again.” Shantibai, from Gare, explained their stance: “Our land, our livelihood has been taken away, now you are here to take away lives. Jindal is devouring Raigarh.”

According to the reporter, others complained about the difficulty of getting to the meeting and about technical and legal issues that arguably could invalidate the whole application. On the other hand, senior officials from Jindal described welfare efforts the company has undertaken, though they refused to share their statement with the reporter from The Hindu.

Last week the Washington Post carried an Associated Press story about how wireless communications are developing in an isolated mountain Zapotec village in Mexico.

Until this year, placing a phone call in the village of Talea de Castro, in Oaxaca state, has meant walking to a central community telephone booth and paying a lot of money for a few minutes of landline connection with the outside world. The caller had no privacy, and international calls would cost more than US$1.00 per minute. An incoming call would require someone to try and find the person being called.

But the initiative of the residents and their community government, plus available Internet technology, has changed all of that. Using inexpensive, easily available technologies—radio receivers and a laptop—the community has established a mini-telecom company. It can handle 11 calls simultaneously, for a fraction of what the people used to pay.

Keyla Ramirez Cruz, a resident of Talea who coordinates the new telephone system, told the AP reporter, “This has been a project that has really worked in keeping people in touch. Before, people couldn’t talk much because it cost so much.” Local calls placed with off-the-shelf cell phones on the new system are free if the subscriber has signed up for a monthly plan, and calls to relatives in southern California cost about 20 centavos (US$0.015) per minute. The monthly plan cost 15 pesos (US$1.12) per month, a cheaper rate than telephone subscribers pay in Mexico City.

An antenna (see photo above) captures calls onto a base radio that is controlled by software, and the system links with Skype and the rest of the world through the Internet. Free, open-source software receives, routes, and bills the calls.

The residents of the village of about 2,500 people had lobbied unsuccessfully for years for Mexican telecom companies to install telephone service in their homes. Israel Hernandez, a local resident, said that the telecoms required communities to have at least 5,000 people before they would respond. “But in the mountains of Oaxaca, there aren’t many communities of over 5,000,” he said.

The Zapotec people in Talea were disgusted and held a traditional assembly meeting in March 2013 in the town square. Residents voted to invest 400,000 pesos (US$30,000) of community funds to cover the costs of the base radio, antenna, and development of the system.

A member of the town council, Alejandro Lopez Canseco, commented that “it’s very convenient. The calls are good quality.” In fact, according to the AP story, the system has had some problems. Some outlying homes have had poor reception, and there have been momentary interruptions to the Internet service.

But the new system, which now, six months after it started, has 720 subscribers, has been very popular. So popular that the town council voted to restrict calls automatically to five minute durations to preserve access for everyone.

Some observers think the Zapotec community could serve as a model for small, isolated indigenous communities around the world. David Burgess, CEO of Range Networks, a California company that has provided most of the technology to build the Talea network, is enthusiastic. He told the AP that the approach advocated by his company would provide service to small communities, relieve pressure from government agencies on the big telecom companies, and expand the global communications network.

Rhizomatica, a nonprofit that has been facilitating the effort in Talea, is pleased with what they have helped achieve. The mission of the group, according to its website, “is to increase access to mobile telecommunications to the over 2 billion people without affordable coverage and the 700 million with none at all.”

According to Peter Bloom, a leader of Rhizomatica who was quoted by another news report about Talea, “there have been a lot of communities that have been declared no-go zones by the companies, mainly because they can’t make any money there. So the question is: How do you get these communities connected?”

According to Ramirez Cruz, the people of Talea “are very happy because they no longer have to wait in line or go out in the rain.”

On Friday the 13th, Botswana’s High Court rejected an attempt by the G/wi and some other San people to regain unrestricted access to their traditional lands in the Kalahari Desert.

In the 1990s, the government of Botswana started forcibly removing the San from their homes in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) and relocating them to resettlement communities outside it. The G/wi and their allies began a court process to regain their rights. Despite their finally winning a major court decision in 2006 that appeared to allow them to return to their lands, the government of Botswana has since restricted that right to only 189 San adults and their children younger than age 16. All other people at this point who want to enter the CKGR must be related to those 189 permitted adults. Even if they are, they are only granted one month permits to enter the reserve.

The San believe that the government’s policies are designed to slowly reduce the number of people living on their traditional lands. They all live in constant fear of overstaying their permits, and of repression by police and wildlife agents.

The government claims that its policies are only designed for the benefit of the San people themselves, though the former president of Botswana openly admitted that the primary concern of his government was for unrestricted access to wealth from diamond mining in the CKGR. The San people won their rights to return to their lands in 2006 with the critical support from British attorney Gordon Bennett.

The government did not give up. It sought to restrict the G/wi from having access to water. Another court decision in 2011, again with Mr. Bennett as lead counsel, gave them the right to drill new bore holes for water. Then the San—also called Bushmen or Basarwa—decided to try and regain what they felt they had already achieved with the November 2006 decision: unfettered access to their homeland.

As the San appeal to overturn the government’s restrictive policies was nearing a hearing this year, the government used a different strategy. At the end of July, it prevented Mr. Bennett from entering the country. Without having the benefit of his counsel, the San lost their appeal in the High Court on the 13th, mostly on the basis of technicalities raised by the government.

Jumanda Gakelebone, a prominent San activist, commented that “the high court ruling does not look at how much the Bushmen love their land. It gives a clear picture of the Botswana government and how it uses oppression. But it’s no surprise to us and it’s not the first time. We will fight for our rights until we get what we are looking for.”

Survival International, the London-based NGO that champions the rights of persecuted indigenous minority peoples, has condemned the decision of the High Court. The director of the organization, Stephen Corry, said, “The High Court has dealt a cruel blow to the Bushmen, but the battle for their land won’t stop here. Survival will not rest until the tribe’s rights are restored—the wheels are in motion for a full-blown international campaign once again.”

For their part, the San are not about to give up either. Sara Quilter, an attorney at the Botswana firm of Duma Boko and Company, indicated on Monday last week that they expect to present papers in court by the end of this month which will initiate litigation to secure the rights of the San to their lands, without restrictions by the government.

Ms. Quilter described some of the technicalities raised by the government that caused the court to reject the suit on Friday the 13th. They included such issues as the fact that some of the San did not properly sign affidavits—because they are illiterate, it turns out.

Malaysia’s Orang Asli believe that life must be based on nature in order to properly satisfy human needs, according to Anthony Williams-Hunt, a Semai lawyer. An article last week argued that, for the Orang Asli, the forest is their workplace, their shopping mall, their cultural provider, their playground, the source of their utilities, and the center of their religious observances.

Many Orang Asli—the term means “Aboriginal People” and includes the Semai— would prefer to leave modernity and live in or next to a forested environment if they possibly could. Even those raised most of their lives in a modern, Malaysian, urban setting feel that way. The problem is that many have signed away their rights to their ancestral lands and have accepted modern homes provided by the government. They don’t have forest lands of their own to return to.

Orang Asli families are often uprooted with cash settlements handled by the Rubber Smallholders Development Authority and the Federal Land Consolidation and Rehabilitation Authority, agencies that give the people nice homes in exchange for their lands. The lands are then converted into plantations. The families may live on the plantations, perhaps near their former forests, but they no longer have free access to them.

Williams-Hunt, who is a scholar as well as a prominent attorney based in the city of Ipoh, says that the Semai and the other Orang Asli societies stand to lose even more land. The government wants to amend a 1954 Orang Asli Act and hand out two to six acres of land per Orang Asli family. He fears that the proposed change would convert even more forests to plantation settlements. “We could lose hundreds of thousands of acres of our ancestral lands,” he says.

Aboriginal activists have been protesting the proposed government move. They have been using modern tools such as GPS systems and topographical maps, as well as traditional sources of information such as histories and documents in their homelands to bolster their cases.

The blog of a man named Simon Thong Wee Hing, called “weehingthong,” provides further information about this proposal. The blog quotes part of last week’s news story, and it provides more detailed information in earlier posts from July this year. Evidently, a couple of Orang Asli groups claim that the proposed Malaysian law, Act 134, which would amend the 1954 act, represents an attempt to steal 60 percent of their ancestral lands.

The essence of the act would be to allow the government to assign Orang Asli land titles to individuals, which would have the effect of breaking up the communal lands that those groups have cherished for millennia. One Orang Asli individual, Shafie Dris, told reporters in Kuala Lumpur, “these are the lands where our ancestors are buried and the fruits from which have been jointly shared and used to sustain our way of life.”

Tijah Yok Chopil, a prominent Semai activist and coordinator of the Peninsular Malaysia Orang Asli Villages Coalition, added her voice to the protests. She claimed that the government had not contacted the Human Rights Commission or the Bar Council about the proposed amendment. She pointed out, during a July 12 press conference, that the government had not as yet even provided a text of the proposed amendment.

She urged the Rural and Regional Development Minister, Shafie Apdal, to meet with all the stakeholders and discuss the implications of the proposed act before trying to implement it. Only a few selected individuals had been invited to a meeting to review the matter. “How about the rest of us as well as the Bar Council and [the] Centre for Orang Asli concerns that have not been invited,” she complained.

“The government must hand over a copy of the amendment now, otherwise when they bring it to Parliament we wouldn’t even know its contents,” she argued. For his part, Shafie Apdal has defended the proposed act. It would supposedly improve protection for the Orang Asli. The commissioner for the Human Rights Commission said that the proposal had not yet been reviewed with his agency.

“We are now in the midst of planning a signature campaign to oppose the amendments,” Ms. Chopil said. And if the amendment is presented to parliament, she and the other activists plan to go there and beg for their rights.

A group of Mbuti have left their forest homes and taken refuge in a primary school in Oicha, in eastern DR Congo, where locals resent them for interrupting classes for the kids. The 60 or so Mbuti fled their forest homeland due to the depredations of the Allied Democratic Forces—National Army for the Liberation of Uganda. The ADF-NALU is one of the 20 rebel groups roaming the countryside in eastern Congo.

The problem for the Mbuti, according to an article last week in Deutsche Welle, the major German international broadcaster, is that they are disliked everywhere they go when they have to flee their own forest. People are repelled by their small stature and by the novelty of their forest-based, net-hunting, subsistence style of living. In Oicha, a girl tells journalists that she and the other students will harass the Mbuti until they leave their community. “Either we’ll make a lot of noise or we’ll throw stones,” she says.

Ulrich Delius from the Society for Threatened Peoples indicates that the Mbuti have been the target of discrimination by other Congolese people for generations. He says that the Congolese do not respect them, despite the fact that they are particularly knowledgeable about their forest habitat. “But what can they do when they are forced to leave? They have to start again from zero,” he told DW.

Their problem, he says, is that they are persecuted on all sides. The Mbuti are the weakest society in the DR Congo, so they are harmed by the army, by the rebel groups, and of course by deforestation.

The rebel group M23 garnered international news headlines when it occupied Goma, the capital city of North Kivu province, but it is by no means the only group to terrorize the local people in that part of the DRC.

President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda confronted other African heads of state, meeting in his capital of Kampala recently, with the realities of the other groups that are disrupting life in the region. People flee from the attacks of such groups, often seeking refuge in school buildings across the border in Uganda. “These refugees are suffering,” he said.

A Congolese Pygmy aid organization is now working in the DRC hoping to help. An international humanitarian emergency organization based in Germany, Diakonie Katastrophenhilfe, has been working with that group, both hoping to erect emergency shelters for the Mbuti refugees.

The plague of gang rapes in India has spread to a peaceful Birhor village in the industrial district of Ramgarh, in northeast India’s Jharkhand state.

According to an article last Thursday in The Times of India, an unnamed 18-year old Birhor woman was visiting her uncle in Banji, a small hamlet. On Tuesday, four men forcibly took her into a wooded area and gang-raped her. The men threatened to kill her if she said anything to her uncle.

She defied the threat, reported the incident to him, and he contacted the police. The officer in charge, Balmikee Singh, said on Wednesday that the police had arrested two of the men, one of whom is a Birhor. The other two men who participated in the crime had escaped.

International news last week focused worldwide attention on the trial in an Indian court of four men charged with gang raping and murdering a New Delhi woman back in December. They were convicted and sentenced to be hanged. The Indian media has been analyzing national cultural and social forces that may arguably foster rapes in their country. That culture of violence appears to be spreading even to Adivasi (tribal) societies such as the Birhor that are, or at least until recently were, quite peaceful.

Last week, a young American posted on his travel blog numerous pictures, a video, and an interesting narrative describing a cockfight he attended in rural Thailand. Bradley, who describes himself as “a 25 year old dude from California,” lives and teaches English in the rural northeastern part of the country.

He explains that he was at first hesitant when he was invited by a couple of his colleagues to attend the cockfight with them. His narrative of the events at the fight gives his perceptions of cockfighting and the ways the Thai react to such violence. His description, photos, and video portray the scene quite effectively.

The facility, called “the farm,” consists of a large, metal-roofed structure housing a rink which is surrounded by four rows of concentric, stadium-style seats. Fluorescent lighting above the main pit adds to the clean, wholesome impression of the place. A restaurant is on the premises, and beer and alcoholic beverages are available. Bradley indicates that there are four smaller side pits on the periphery of the main arena.

About 200 local Thai people—mostly men to judge by the images, though there are some women and children—converge on the arena each Sunday for the contests. The owners of the fighting cocks often remove the spurs from the legs of their birds, which are then replaced by small metal knives before the fights begin. They are securely attached to the birds’ legs by strings and tape, and the cocks are inspected by judges before each contest.

The contests consist of as many as five, 20 minute rounds, with 20 minute breaks between each round. The birds fight with one another until one of them is severely injured—or killed—or until a contestant runs away. If a cock runs away three times, the contest is over.

The winner of each match, or rather the owner of the winning bird, takes away a purse after the fight. The winner of the largest fight during the day of Bradley’s visit took home a purse of 200,000 Bhat, which the author indicates was worth US$6,666. The video that Bradley includes shows a bit of fighting between cocks, but he was clearly more interested in the passionate cheering by some of the spectators in the stands, who at times appeared to be getting rather heated in their emotions.

Bradley says that betting is at the heart of the experience for the spectators, and while cockfighting is still legal in Thailand, the gambling is not. But, he writes, the presence of police in the crowd reassured him that there would not be any trouble. There were no bookies at the event—people placed their bets with one another at the individual contests through signals. The men we see screaming from the sidelines during the video presumably have placed large wagers on cocks fighting in the pit.

Bradley’s photos show spectators holding pens and notebooks, where they have written down their bets. He writes that some spectators make several bets during the contests, and they often modify them.

He was obviously of two minds about the experience. He expected that there would be a lot more chicken blood spilled in the arena. In fact, there was only a little. He observes that an Ultimate Fighting Championship match in a North American city “makes this look like a kindergarten class.” He also noted that the Thai people appear to love violence.

In his 2005 book Very Thai: Everyday Popular Culture, Philip Cornwel-Smith includes a chapter on “Animal Contests,” in which he writes that staged fighting between animals is quite popular in Thailand, even though they are limited by law to a couple arenas in each province and many Thai are opposed to them. Yet contests between Hercules beetles, fighting fish, cocks, or bulls are widely popular anyway.

Cornwel-Smith explains that the popularity of these blood sports is not easy to reconcile with Thai Buddhist beliefs in compassion. However, he argues, the Thai people frequently do contradictory things. The aim of the contests, he writes—and as Bradley also hints in his blog description—is not so much to kill as to see which of the animal contestants will have the nerve to survive. In southern Thailand, bull fighting is popular, but none of the bulls are killed. The contests pit one beast against another, both snorting and pawing, until one simply turns and runs.

In his famous 1972 essay “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” (1), Clifford Geertz describes details about cockfighting on Bali that differ somewhat from rural Thailand. Geertz indicates that the Balinese put very sharp steel spurs on their cocks, and the birds frequently kill or seriously injure their opponents. It is a much bloodier sport in Bali than in Thailand.

Geertz also described the Balinese cockfight as a chaotic mob scene, a sharp contrast to the normal reserve of the Balinese people and, certainly, to the controlled crowd that Bradley depicts on his video, which shows only a few men gesturing angrily.

But there are also some similarities. Betting is an essential aspect of the experiences in both places. Some of the observations by Geertz perhaps would also apply to rural Thailand. He notes that the cockfights and betting on Bali are more focused on gaining status than on money. He felt that the fights affirm the social ranks of the participants and the betters, and that the contests symbolized rural alliances and competitions.

The cockfights, at least in Bali, serve to safely allow the expressions of inter-personal and inter-village hostilities and rivalries. They allow people to express their tensions and aggressions in a safe fashion. The Balinese rarely confront trouble if they can turn away from it, and they tend to handle social relationships with indirection, dissimulation, and obliqueness. Thus, the slaughter of cocks, in Bali, is an imaginative representation of how things might be among men.

Bradley does not analyze his cockfighting experience nearly as effectively as Geertz did, but he provides a start to understanding the rural Thai approaches to peacefulness.

(1) Geertz, Clifford. 1972. “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight. Daedalus 101(1): 1-37. Reprinted in his book The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Also reprinted in Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, edited by Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson, p.239-277. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

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