Peaceful Societies

A tragedy this summer involving a pregnant Fipa woman who was denied permission by a fancy resort in Tanzania from seeking medical help and died as a result, continues to merit news coverage in Africa.

The back story is that the woman was traveling with companions along the shore of Lake Tanganyika heading for a hospital when large waves rose up and they sought safety on shore. They happened to land at the property of the Lupita Island Lodge and pleaded for permission to go on to the nearest hospital by land. The lodge has a rigid policy of chasing away all intruders with fierce dogs, in order to protect their wealthy guests. The tourists pay large amounts of money per night to stay in villas with spectacular views of the lake, unimpeded by any walls. The guards chased the travelers away and the woman died, along with her fetus.

Local people were intensely angered by the arrogance of the lodge owner—it appears as if wealthy foreigners mean more than the lives of local people—so they started to protest. A further story in August revealed that a variety of allegations had been made about criminal behavior by the lodge management, such as gun running and trafficking in live animals. The administrator of the Rukwa Region of Tanzania, Ms. Stella Manyanya, said these charges were being investigated.

A news story published at the beginning of last week indicated that local people continue to agitate about the attitudes of the lodge management, and charges of illegal activities at the lodge are still being raised. The latest is that the owner of the lodge, Mr. Tom Lithgow, a Tanzanian citizen of British origin (earlier reports had indicated he was an American), has allegedly been evading taxes.

The Tanzania Revenue Authority in Arusha is investigating. Mr. Philip Kimune at that agency said that whistle blowers in the Nkasi District of the Rukwa Region have reported the supposed tax evasion to the TRA. Mr. Kimune said that he has instructed local TRA officials to visit the lodge and examine their records, and he has told one Tanzanian news source that he will personally visit the Lupita Island Lodge. He indicated he has been in contact with the lodge owner and has been told that the lodge will cooperate with the investigation.

Peti Siyame, the reporter of this story, wrote that he tried to get some clarification from the lodge about the tax evasion charge, but the lodge management refused to discuss the situation with him.

Last month, the national Minister for Lands, Housing, and Human Settlement Development, Prof. Anna Tibaijuka, announced that she was investigating the legal status of the ownership of the lodge facility. She informed the reporter that her ministry considered Mr. Lithgow’s ownership of the property to be illegal since agency personnel had not found any documents indicating that he did, in fact, own it.

Another national official, Aggrey Mwanri, the Deputy Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s office for Regional Administration and Local Government, directed Ms. Manyanya, the Regional Commissioner, to thoroughly investigate the problems at the lodge. Mr. Mwanri ordered officials in the regional government to investigate the allegations of the sale of arms across the lake to the DR Congo. His comments were prompted by local complaints, aired at a public meeting, that the lodge owner was humiliating them.

Mr. Mwanri also announced, at the public rally, that he had banned the lodge from restricting local residents from fishing in the lake near the lodge, or preventing them from going near the property. Ms. Manyanya apparently said that it was too soon to comment about the arms smuggling allegations, though, she said, “this allegation needs serious investigation.” She had said the same thing, of course, three months earlier.

It is clear that local residents, many of whom are of Fipa origin in that area, are not about to easily give up their vendetta against the rich man who owns the elite lodge. His employees kept out the wrong people and caused a tragedy over three months ago.

The Schwartzentruber Amish are finally leaving Cambria County, Pennsylvania, and the local paper, the Tribune-Democrat of Johnstown, is obviously pleased. In an editorial last Friday, the paper presented its law-and-order stance against the Amish violators of local regulations. It indicated that the Schwartzentruber families had refused, for their own religious reasons, to put safety orange triangles on their buggies, to use county-approved outhouses, to follow building codes in the construction of their homes, and so on. They must comply.

The editorial stated that the paper respects people’s rights to practice their beliefs so long as they are not in conflict with public laws and regulations. If they are, the newcomers, who may have different beliefs, still must accept the laws of the new community. “No exceptions,” the paper stated. The editorial concluded with the fatuous statement, “We wish our former Amish neighbors well.” Right.

The Tribune-Democrat carried a news story earlier in the week that reported on the fact that the Schwartzentrubers had finally made the decision to move away. At the height of their numbers a few years ago, 21 families lived in northern Cambria County, northwest of Ebensburg, the county seat, in Barr and Blacklick Townships. Many had bought farms and were dairy farmers.

When they started arriving 15 years ago, they quickly got into trouble with the police for refusing to affix slow moving triangles to their buggies. The bright orange triangles are too flamboyant for the Schwartzentrubers, an ultra-conservative Amish sect. Compromise solutions such as one worked out by the Amish in Kentucky with officials in that state about this same issue appear to have not occurred to people in Cambria County.

The county made the national news repeatedly, especially in the 16-month period from June 19, 2008 through October 22, 2009, over their refusal to follow county regulations about the proper disposal of wastes from their outhouses, particularly the ones at a schoolhouse. The correct construction of their buildings also became an issue. They felt that the regulations violated their religious beliefs, and they were unwilling to compromise. Neither was the county, of course, nor the judge who was in the position of enforcing the regulations.

As a news story in January 2012 indicated, the Amish, and local officials, seem to be much more attuned to working out creative compromises in the southeastern section of Pennsylvania, in Lancaster County and surrounding areas, where they have lived for centuries, and where their presence represents a huge generator of tourist dollars for local businesses.

It is not so much that the people of southeastern Pennsylvania all strive for compromises as that the attitudes of the English, the non-Amish people, are generally positive toward them. In that section of the state, people want them to stay, and value them as neighbors. In Cambria County, they were newcomers, different. Instead of cherishing, or even honoring, their obvious differences, many of the neighbors simply wanted to make sure they would obey all the regulations.

The Blacklick Township supervisor, Joe Sherwood, told the Tribune-Democrat, “they are very honest and hardworking, but you have to comply with the laws of the state.” Other Cambria County residents evidently agreed, to judge by the two reports in the paper last week and the many earlier stories.

The resolution of a minor controversy in Jackson Township, Lebanon County, PA, just north of Lancaster County, in January 2012 highlights the differences. The Amish there wanted permission to build a new schoolhouse but to not connect it to the public water system, as regulations appeared to require. The township solicitor quickly found a compromise. He told the supervisors, “So if the notice is never received from the township, then it wouldn’t be required.” He wasn’t advocating violating the law—just creatively finding a way to not hassle the Amish.

As of Friday, November 9th, the 21 Amish families in Cambria County had shrunk to nine, and the rest are planning to sell and move away soon. The local bishop is tightlipped about his plans, but a young couple, who didn’t want their names used by the newspaper, indicated they had already sold their farm and were moving to rural northern New York state. The man told the paper that they had sold to another Amish family, people with more modern ideas than he had.

County officials and Amish leaders were, in fact, able to resolve some of the issues that had provoked controversy surrounding the construction of two new houses. The regulators objected to the sizes of the windows and the design of the porch railings. But both sides ultimately were able to work out their differences. The judge who had ordered the two homes to be padlocked accepted the compromise solutions at the end of last year, and lifted the order closing them. But by that time, the Amish had already decided to move away from the county, according to one Amish man. A compromise solution appeared to be in the works for dealing with the sewage issues as well.

Donald Kraybill, a prominent Amish expert from Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, had already heard about the migration of the Amish away from the county. He said that the remaining Amish plan to leave in the spring. He indicated to the paper that it is not at all unusual for Amish people to migrate for reasons such as conflicts with local governments.

All of this is reminiscent of a news report last month about the Paliyans. That story indicated that the traditional Paliyan style of dealing with aggression has always been to simply leave the scene, to flee if necessary, to turn the other cheek, as one Paliyan man said to anthropologist Peter Gardner some years ago.

The term “nonresistance,” originally used just for Christian groups such as the Amish and Hutterites who insist on taking the words of Jesus literally—to not resist evil—is just as applicable to folks who retreat hastily into the nearest forest as it is to Christians who abandon a community where they are hassled. Paliyans, Batek, Buid, Chewong, Hutterites, Amish—what’s the difference? Many of the peaceful peoples simply refuse to fight. They are completely unwilling to violate their principles, to contest the will of others. It is best to retreat in the face of conflicts, they feel.

Mexico has doubled its wind power generation capacity during the past year but the Indian people, mostly Zapotec, who live in villages near the industrial projects are none too pleased. In fact, many of them are heatedly opposed to what they feel is the destruction of their environment.

People often think of wind power as being a benign source of alternative energy, but that is often not the case. Some environmental groups, such as one prominent organization in Central Pennsylvania, recognize the harm that the large industrial wind plants can cause to migrating birds, bat populations, and the integrity of the natural environment. Evidently, some of the Zapotec communities in Mexico that have to cope with the massive wind towers feel they are being marginalized, exploited, and their environments and resources severely impacted.

According to an Associated Press report last week, the huge wind farms—the towers and blades are hundreds of feet tall—are being built at a frantic pace along the Pacific Ocean coast of the Isthmus of Tehauntepec. Some of the developments are taking place near the Zapotec town of Ixtepec, about 115 miles east southeast of the city of Oaxaca, the center of Zapotec culture. The temptation to build the huge projects—hundreds of turbines are involved—is great since the Pacific coast in that region receives constant winds off the ocean to the south. There are now 14 completed wind farms on the Isthmus, four are under construction, and three more are scheduled for 2013. From 6 megawatts of installed wind capacity in 2006, when Felipe Calderon became the Mexican president, the country has grown to 519 megawatts today.

The politicians, bureaucrats, and corporate executives assure everyone that the developments will only be good for local residents. People are misled by suits who show up at meetings with small-scale models of the wind towers but don’t explain just how huge, noisy, and destructive the towers will really be.

At a meeting two weeks ago inaugurating the opening of yet another project, President Calderon extolled the rapid wind development. He said enthusiastically, “you can fight poverty and protect the environment at the same time.” He has pledged to cut Mexico’s carbon emissions by 30 percent by 2020, and he praised the added income the projects have provided.

The local people are not buying it. They are protesting, forming barricades, and risking beatings by thugs allegedly hired by corporate interests. Irma Ordonez, a Zapotec activist from Ixtepec, said it clearly: “We are asking these multinationals to please get out of these places. They want to steal our land, and not pay us what they should.” She added, “when they come in they promise and promise things, that they’re going to give us jobs, to our farmers and our towns, but they don’t give us anything.” She, along with other activists, traveled to Mexico City in October to protest.

In recent weeks, major confrontations have occurred at some villages belonging to Indian groups located near a spit of land that bounds a coastal lagoon about 30 miles southeast of Ixtepec. Many people there are fiercely opposed to the development of a 396 megawatt wind project offshore. A tense standoff occurred in late October when proponents of the project blocked a road against opponents who were planning to demonstrate.

Opponents believe that the project would damage a mangrove swamp, the breeding grounds of fish and shrimps which are the economic lifeblood of the coastal fishing communities. “Just when they were doing soil studies, there was a mass die-off of fish,” said Saul Celaya, a farmer who has become an activist. He added that opponents of the project “are being intimidated, they’re afraid to leave their houses, they’re threatened.” Industry sources deny that anyone has been threatened or intimidated.

Part of the problem is the way these projects are developed, which clashes with local Zapotec culture. Much Zapotec land is owned communally. “There is probably no worse place to make a land deal in Mexico,” said Ben Cokelet, the founder of a group called the Project on Organizing, Development, Education, and Research. Furthermore, local leaders are sometimes paid much higher prices than other people for their cooperation, which fosters tensions in the communities.

Promised benefits, such as lower electricity rates to the poor villages, have not materialized. The corporate officials bribe local authorities, sometimes with huge sums of money, to get them to sign away the lands that really belong collectively to the people. So far, those contracts have not been abrogated by higher government officials, most of whom follow the lead of the president and remain in favor of wind development.

In 2011, for example, a local official near the lagoon where the protests have been so active lately admitted he was paid between 14 and 20 million pesos ($U.S. 1 – 1.5 million) for granting, without consulting his village, the right to build a wind farm. When the outraged citizens demanded that he rescind the permission, he refused. Opponents fear that vibrations from the turbines along the coast will harm the aquatic life in the lagoon and, like the environmentalists in Pennsylvania, they realize that the spinning blades pose a serious danger to birds.

The resistance movement, in sum, is growing, despite intimidation and threats by the squads of hired goons who are trying to protect the industrial interests and their spree of construction projects. Leaders of the resistance movements are receiving death threats, and resisters who dare to demonstrate are threatened by gun-carrying thugs and, at times, by the police.

A news story earlier this year reported on the concerns in other Zapotec communities to the devastation caused by gold and silver mining. Two years ago, the news focused on the way some Zapotec comunities carefully manage their forests. The Zapotec people live in a resource-rich area of Mexico, but it is clear that many treasure their lands. They are unwilling to allow the for-profit interests to destroy their resources and their livelihoods.

With all the stresses the Nubians have faced recently in a rapidly changing Egypt, their marriage customs seem to persist, at least in villages in the Aswan area where some of them still live. An article in an English language Egyptian daily paper last week described a wedding in Upper Egypt as “a magnificent and impressive experience.”

Preparations for a wedding begin shortly after the families agree on the proposal for a marriage. The night before the wedding, the two families and the friends of the bride and groom participate in what is called Henna Night. Henna, a reddish orange preparation made from the leaves of the henna plant (Lawsonia inermis), is rubbed on the backs of the bride’s hands by her family and female friends. In a separate room, the family and male friends of the groom rub henna on the palms of his hands and on his feet.

Once the henna has dried, the bride enters the room where her groom sits waiting. His family and friends stand in two rows and greet her, dressed in their white galabiyas. They drum on tambourines, and someone sings Nubian songs. The bride is outfitted in a colorful dress covered by a transparent galabiya. She is adorned with gold pieces.

The bride and groom dance together, surrounded by their friends and families, clapping and swaying to the music. The festivities, which continue until dawn, are broken only by a big dinner. In the morning, the groom slaughters a sheep or a calf so the meat can be shared with the poor.

The festivities begin again later in the afternoon when the male friends of the groom reassemble at his house and resume playing the tambourine and singing. People join in the singing; they process around the village, inviting everyone to come to the wedding that evening.

Meanwhile, the bride and her female friends travel to Aswan to visit a hairdresser and put on her makeup. After sundown, the groom and his family go to the city in a hired bus to meet her. They all go to a photographer to have their pictures taken, then return to the village to continue the wedding celebration. The groom gives his bride the traditional gift of gold jewelry, called a shabka. Her friends and family also give her presents. They continue celebrating much as they did the previous night, including another feast.

In cities like Cairo, visiting the newlyweds in their homes starts on the following day, but in the traditional Nubian villages of southern Egypt, relatives will wait until the seventh day after the marriage to visit the couple. Friends will visit them two days after that.

Michelle Bachelet argues that a much stronger economic and political role for women in India will not only be the right thing to do, it will send an important message to the world. She summarized her thoughts on the subject during a speech in New Delhi at the beginning of October.

The former president of Chile is now the Executive Director of the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (referred to as “UN Women”). Bachelet called for the Indian parliament to set aside one-third of its seats for females, and she argued that the government should develop social protection schemes to improve the health, education, and economic status of women.

Her focus on women in India was quite timely, but the peaceful societies of that nation are well ahead of her. Or at least they have already started trying to develop better rights for women in their own ways. A news story last week indicated that women in the north Indian region of Ladakh have, for centuries, been highly valued in their society. Two other peaceful societies in India were also in the news last week for activities that may, in time, help promote the economic and social equality of their women.

At the beginning of last week, some Yanadi people held a rally in the city of Nellore, in the Nellore District of Andrha Pradesh, to highlight their problems and demand improvements. One of the key demands made by the placard- and banner-holding demonstrators was for the immediate distribution of land to Yanadi women. They said that lands that had been expropriated from their women should be returned to them. Another demand was that the government provide permanent houses for Yanadi women.

Mallika Sailaja, convener of a women’s empowerment organization in the district, said that long standing demands for the creation of new offices that should help Yanadi women have yet to be instituted in the Integrated Tribal Development Agency. The ITDA is an office in the state government established in 2001 to assist the Yanadi people in Nellore and two other districts.

A few days later, on Thursday last week, Sundar Birhor, one of the Birhor boys selected by Bokaro Steel Limited for their new crop of students to attend school in Bokaro, India, where he will receive a free education, gave the press a sad story. He told a reporter what happened when he had to leave for Bokaro City. “When I left my village home in June, my sister Munni asked me when she would join me in school. I had to keep quiet,” the boy said.

Another Birhor boy, Manoi Birhor, chimed in to add that his sisters were also not offered opportunities to get an education. So the 15 boys, all ages seven to nine years old, joined together and agreed to change the situation after they graduate. “We will study hard, get jobs and then open schools for girls in our villages,” Sundar said.

These two brief reports are, of course, just small steps in the efforts to gain more equality for women and girls in India, and that development will take some time. But the news stories, taken as a group, imply that fair treatment for women is a very real issue among at least some of the peaceful societies.

Prominent Inuit sculptor Abraham Anghik Ruben believes that one of the core concepts of his society is that humanity must exhibit reverence for life. That spirit, he says, is often referred to as one of the “ancient Inuit commandments [which] is passed on through the Raven creation myth.”

Some of Ruben’s creations have been chosen to be part of the first solo exhibition by an Inuit sculptor at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Saying that his work reflects his fundamental Inuit beliefs, the artist indicates that he has been working for 40 years to attain this level of prominence.

One of his creations on display is called “Sedna: Life out of Balance.” It portrays, for the artist, the fact that the weather has gone haywire because of the extremes of cold and warmth due to global climate change, especially in the Arctic. The Sedna myth figures prominently in Inuit culture, and continues to be retold at times.

Ruben, who works in bronze, stone, bone, and ivory, was raised in Paulatuk, the Northwest Territories, which is an Inuvialuit community, a subdivision of the Inuit people. He particularly focuses on Inuit mythology and folklore, especially on the prehistoric meetings between the Inuit and the Norse peoples in the eastern Arctic of Canada and neighboring Greenland.

A curator at the Smithsonian, Bernadette Driscoll Engelstad, indicated that the museum selected 23 of Ruben’s works for the exhibition because of the boldness of his contemporary visions and the large-scale format of many of his works. “We were drawn to Abraham, [who] has distinguished himself in many way,” she said. A number of his large works—a carved narwhal tusk is over 1.5 metres long—are filled with many fine details.

Ruben says that the works chosen for the exhibit involve “the inevitable consequences of contact as a way to put forward ideas and stories, images in stone.” He adds that “when two peoples meet and have a relationship that lasts for several hundred years, a lot of things happen including warfare, trade, intermarriage, collective hunting, exchange of cultural ideas and exchange of technology.”

Ruben’s father was a hunter and his mother a seamstress. He studied design at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks and has settled on Salt Springs Island off the coast of British Columbia.

The exhibition of his works, titled “Arctic Journeys/Ancient Memories: The Sculpture of Abraham Anghik Ruben,” opened at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington in early October and will continue until January 2, 2013.

Ian Brown, a native of Tristan da Cunha but now a resident of the UK, paid a visit last month with his wife to the Italian town of Camogli, the birthplace of Andrea Repetto, his great grandfather. Unlike a lot of news reports from Tristan da Cunha that are only of local interest, this seemingly routine story posted last Thursday has broader implications. Repetto family members, particularly Brown’s great grandfather himself, were important figures in Tristan history, people who helped foster its tradition of peacefulness.

The Camogli Link page of the Tristan DC website reported that Mr. Brown has a strong interest in the history of his great grandfather and the community near Genoa where he came from. Ian has fostered in Camogli, an old fishing community and now a thriving tourist town, a recognition of their link with the remote British dependency in the South Atlantic. Not surprisingly, he has also promoted the recognition of Camogli on Tristan.

The Camogli Museo Marinaro displays materials about Tristan, and of course Tristan has the Camogli page on its website. Mr. Brown has furthered the link by repeatedly visiting the community, providing materials from Tristan for the museum and photos for the Tristan website.

The history of the Repetto family, which Mr. Brown promotes, is unique. His great grandfather, the petty officer on the barque Italia, and another man, Gaetano Lavarello, survived a shipwreck on the coast of Tristan in 1892. They both married local women and adopted Tristan as their home. Their descendants still live on the island.

Andrea married a young Tristanian named Frances Green, the granddaughter of Peter Green, a man who had been the informal, de facto, leader of the community on Tristan soon after the death of the founder of the settlement, Corporal William Glass. With the permission of the owner, Repetto and his family moved into a house that was being abandoned by a woman who was moving to South Africa.

Even though the island has traditionally cherished its absolute equality, informal leaders have naturally emerged, and Andrea became one of them. He denied to other Tristanians that he was the leader of the settlement whenever anyone would say that—the mark of a true leader in such a community.

A test of Andrea’s peacemaking qualities occurred while he and Frances were still fairly young. In 1908, two sons of the woman who had abandoned the house to Andrea and Frances, plus a cousin of theirs, returned to Tristan and claimed their mother’s building as their own. The sudden claims on the home of Andrea and Frances posed a crisis for the community.

They lived in a settlement which, at the time, had no government structure, no police, no judiciary, and no formal way of resolving disputes. The visiting British minister and his wife happened to get involved and helped, but when things reached a crisis, it was really Mr. Brown’s great grandfather who solved the problem—in the typically steady, quiet, Tristanian fashion.

After six days of pressing their claims, and trying to get into fights with people, the interlopers decided to force the issue. They climbed onto the roof of the Repetto home and started to repair the thatching. They were physically asserting their dominance over the house. Someone summoned the minister, who told the men on the roof that they really had no valid claim unless they could produce a paper from their mother stating that she wanted the house to be taken back from the Repetto family. They had no such document. He walked away, but the situation remained tense.

Andrea talked to the instigator of the problem and told him he didn’t want to have any trouble—he just wanted to be friends. As they walked around, he tried to soften him up. He repeated to the man that if he had a document from his mother, they would move out as quickly as possible. He then said that he and his wife would be glad to give up their bedroom so he could move in with them.

The visitor thought about these generous offers and protestations of friendship, and soon gave in. He apologized profusely for the way he had been acting. He promised that he would make no more trouble. Repetto had exhibited the Tristan way of quietly resolving conflicts by extending a strong sense of respect to an antagonist.

Andrea’s wife Frances was also a strong person, an influential leader among the Tristanians, particularly the women. Their son Willie Repetto, acting as leader of the Tristan community during their enforced exile in England from 1961 to 1963, became a key figure in quietly, but effectively, convincing the reluctant British government to allow the people to return to their island.

According to Peter Munch’s intriguing book Crisis in Utopia, the volcano that had forced the evacuation had quieted down. Mr. Repetto had been elected to the position of Chief Islander, a position without much real authority. But he was able to convince his fellow Tristanians to work together to ensure that they would return to their homes. In a community without any tradition of people becoming leaders, Willie Repetto understood how to exert understated, but effective and quite temporary leadership.

So Mr. Brown’s genealogical quest has deeper meanings than just family pride. The Repetto story, and the contributions of the descendants of Camogli, form significant chapters in the history of a community that has figured out ways of meeting challenges without giving up its foundational beliefs—respect, equality, and peacefulness.

An Indian news story last Thursday included a paean of praise for the equality that exists between Ladakhi women and men, a situation that is unique in a country where female abortion and infanticide are still widely practiced.

The reporter was clearly impressed upon arriving in Leh, the largest community in Ladakh. “When you first step into this high altitude region, you will be greeted by the wide and candid smiles of the Ladakhi women.” The article develops this theme — of women who contrast with the rest of the subcontinent. Women don’t peep shyly out from shuttered windows, they don’t wear veils. They work out in the fields, full of self respect and confidence, secure in their positions in their communities.

The women’s strength, according to this analysis, is based on their commanding positions in the traditional households, which were, and still are, the center of the Ladakhi economy. This factor fosters their respect in their communities.

Anthropologist R. S. Mann would have concurred with this description of the relative importance of Ladakhi women in their society, but for different reasons. Mann (1986) described the fact that there was no seclusion of Ladakhi women; they interacted equally with men in social situations. He felt that the former institution of polyandry was probably the major factor in helping develop the women’s equality.

Although polyandry is no longer legal anywhere in India, in the traditional polyandrous Ladakhi family, the woman managed the economy of the home. That gave her authority and respect. Furthermore, Mann points out, the Buddhism practiced in Ladakh does not in any way demean the status of women, although certain religious roles are reserved for men only. For instance, widows are discriminated against in some Ladakhi religious functions.

In some ways, Mann argues, women did not have full equality with men. They did not, traditionally, travel as men did. While men recognized that the women frequently worked harder than they did, nonetheless they often treated women as inferior. But the women did have equal rights to divorce, the same as men did, and when they did divorce, they were compensated fairly.

Some of Mann’s descriptions of conditions 30 years ago were confirmed by the analysis last week. For instance, except for the plowing that the men do exclusively, Mann wrote that the women share the field work with the men, help out with harvesting and threshing, cooperate in construction jobs, and carry heavy loads. Women do the cooking and cleaning without the assistance of men. The news report last week more or less confirmed that these conditions still prevail.

But the essence of Mann’s argument was that the practice of polyandry, especially of women marrying groups of brothers, gave a lot of power to the wives in such unions. While the oldest brother had more rights than the younger ones, the woman normally spent equal time with each man. The anthropologist asserted that there was no jealousy among the brothers, and the woman often had an authoritarian relationship with the younger men.

The reasons for the polyandry included limiting the growth of population; allowing some men to stay and care for households while others went up into higher pastures with family flocks; sharing scare resources; achieving order in family units; and, not insignificantly, ensuring the freedom of the women. In sum, the polyandry was a major contributing factor in developing the feelings of confidence and strength among the women, which obviously has persisted long after the polyandrous marriages have ended.

Last week’s news story focused on Self Help Groups, which actively promote the interests of women in the more remote Ladakhi villages. These SHGs, as the reporter called them, help protect the traditional culture, especially the strength and positions of the women.

Women in the villages, especially housewives, complete their daily chores and then join the village SHGs, where they spin wool, dye it in the traditional manners, and knit woolen garments for sale. They still help with heavy tasks in the fields. They earn income from the sale of products such as apricot jam and seabuckthorn juice. In their SHGs, the women make decorative items and winter clothing for sale in Leh.

The reporter interviewed the president of the SHG in the village of Chashut, called the Shashi Self Help Group, started by six women in the community. It has grown to 15 active members now who work to improve the village as well as their own lives.

Amina Khatoon, the president of the group, told the reporter, “after working for five years in this village, we have achieved a lot of improvement not only in our work but in the lifestyle of the villagers.” She described the efforts of the organization to spread awareness of appropriate health and sanitation practices.

In 1991, the women’s Self Help Groups formed an alliance, called the Women’s Alliance of Ladakh, known locally as Ama-Tsogspa. These groups foster input from elderly women, who participate in income-generating projects such as spinning and weaving, thereby sharing their traditional knowledge with the younger people.

The SHGs are having some difficulties recently because of the remoteness of the villages, which makes it difficult for the people to gain access to raw materials. The women are constantly in search of alternative sources of supplies for their craft work.

But despite the hassles of keeping up with altered economic conditions, the SHGs continue to help the women. They foster the continuing strength and confidence of the women, yet also help them negotiate the social and economic changes that are occurring in the region.

How does the Semai community react to visitors, an interviewer asks the headman. His response, given in a new, 14 minute video, is that they are quite used to them. Pointing to a boy nearby, he adds that village children play around them and easily accept them. This was not always the case.

The headman, wearing a blue shirt with the word SEMAI displayed prominently, explains to the camera crew in Ulu Geroh that in other villages, kids are still scared of outsiders. There is even a legend, he adds, of strangers coming into villages and cutting off the heads of children. A woman on the film crew gasps loudly. “That’s why they feel scared,” he adds. He turns toward the little boy to smile, and the child grins back at him. “However, the children here like strangers very much.”

He doesn’t give the background of the legend, but it is based on very real historical circumstances. According to Endicott 1983, the Semai, along with the other aboriginal peoples (Orang Asli) of Peninsular Malaysia, were subject to violent slave raiding by the much more powerful Malay peoples throughout their recent history. While the slave raids have stopped, the Semai and the others are still sometimes subject to exploitative trading relationships, domination, and abusive treatments by the Malay and Chinese peoples living in the valleys.

The generally peaceful, accommodating nature of the Semai can be attributed, at least in part, to their responses to their history and their current social conditions. They have found it more effective, in the long run, to flee into the forests than to fight the far superior forces arrayed against them. Flight meant safety and survival; fighting meant death and enslavement.

Those conditions have had a significant impact on the Orang Asli. The Semai tell stories to their children about strangers coming to get them in the night—bogeys who will cut off the heads of children who misbehave. Used as a means of teaching obedience to the norms of their society, these stories are based on recent history and they still have an impact on youngsters in the more remote communities. Obviously in Ulu Geroh, kids have learned that to be scared of strangers may only deprive them of interesting diversions. They frequently smile and mug for the visitors’ cameras.

The new video provides a lot of insights into Ulu Geroh, the Semai village which has been in the news repeatedly over the past eight years, ever since it opened a tourism business. None of those news stories have offered as much as this new video, uploaded to YouTube on Wednesday last week.

In fact, the tourism promoted by the villagers is barely mentioned. Most of the previous news stories about Ulu Geroh have focused on the villagers taking tourists to see Raffelesia blossoms, the largest flowers in the world, or the rare Rajah Brooke Birdwing butterflies, a CITES protected species that is the national butterfly of Malaysia. Both the flowers and the butterflies may be seen in the forests near the village. The word “SEMAI” on the headman’s blue shirt is an acronym for the name of the local cooperative that runs the tourism business.

Throughout the new video, male and female narrators speak in English. The video provides English subtitles for the comments by the narrators, and it translates the conversations with villagers. The overall subtext of the production is to examine the ways the Semai are adapting to modernity, yet are keeping their traditional ways of life.

Describing a few scenes will give a sense of the whole. The headman is standing outside a building, with three or four quiet, well-dressed kids watching respectfully in the background. He says that in former times, the Semai lived scattered in the forests. While a rooster crows in the background, he adds that they all had to be gathered together and settled in one community because of the communist insurgency in Malaysia during the 1950s. Several questions and answers elucidate this history, and the rooster crows again.

The production mentions the advent of the tourism business in 2004, but it insists that the people continue to subsist primarily on domestic animals and raising local produce. Over scenes of hens and their chicks foraging through the grass, we are told that the villagers sell chickens to middlemen, who sell the meat in the town of Gopeng, which is located in the valley half an hour away.

After some discussion about factors that have an impact on the development of the village, the narrator asks if the Semai want their children to be educated. The literacy rate is below the rest of Malaysia. The video maker interviews some women who are sitting on a floor using a cutting board to chop vegetables, which are held in brim-full containers beside them. Do they want to have their children educated? Of course they do. “We want them to live a modern lifestyle,” one woman adds.

The video makes the point that, because there is a low crime rate in the village, children are free to wander about wherever they want. When nothing else is happening, it shows kids playing around the buildings, near or even in a small river, and just standing about, quietly watching the visitors doing the filming. They wander in and out of most of the scenes.

This new video, published by Kean Yap, a Malaysian, and titled “Semai Community,” provides very little additional information about itself. The opening gives only the title, and the closing credits list some names but no further information about the people who have given us these interesting views of contemporary conditions in a Semai village.

It seems as if Ulu Geroh is firmly committed to keeping its way of life next to the forest. While the Semai of that village are no longer dependent on a nomadic, foraging lifestyle, they clearly still want to wander in the woods. They love to hunt and gather as much as they can, and they enjoy living in the outdoors. The video portrays them not so much to be struggling with modernity, as to be intent on preserving the best aspects of their peaceful lifestyle.

The news report from Tsumkwe last week was stark. Two men, one 25 and the other 29, argued over a woman, both claiming her. Both were under the influence of alcohol. The younger man pulled out a poisoned arrow, fit it to the bow he was carrying, and shot the older man directly in the stomach. He died almost immediately. The dead man was named Jacobs Johannes. The killer was not identified. Police have notified the relatives of the deceased.

The !Kung San: Women and Work in a Foraging Society, by Richard B. Lee The report given to the press by a Namibian police official might seem routine—jealous man kills rival over a woman—except that it raises questions as to how really peaceful are, or were, the Ju/’hoansi. For while the ethnicity of the killer and the victim are not mentioned, most of the residents of Tsumkwe, in northeastern Namibia, are, in fact, from that society. Violence, especially once alcohol became easily available, has been one of the tragedies to afflict them.

Fighting with poisoned arrows is not new to the Ju/’hoansi. Highly regarded scholars have disagreed about how much violence they exhibited, even decades ago before they settled into more or less permanent communities. The brief news report last week revives those older, but still important, discussions. For it is worth an attempt to figure out just how strongly Ju/’hoansi values proscribed violence.

According to Richard B. Lee, one of the brilliant young scholars who did his first field work in the borderlands between Namibia and Botswana in the 1960s, the Ju/’hoansi, then called the !Kung, had a fairly violent society. Lee’s masterful book The !Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society (1979) cited statistics of many recorded killings among the people, but he observed that when fighting did break out, it was normally up to relatives of the combatants to stop it. In all of the fights witnessed by Lee and his colleagues, women and elders usually intervened in time to prevent men in their prime from going for their bows and deadly poison arrows.

The homicides that occurred in the past, according to data the author gathered, were mostly a result of such spontaneous fights, the flashes of anger. Only five were premeditated murders, and only a few resulted from special expeditions to execute people. Lee’s chapter 13, “Conflict and Violence,” p.370-400, carefully analyzes the existence of violence within a fascinating, if not always peaceful, society.

Lorna Marshall, a scholar who did field work among the Ju/’hoansi for a number of years beginning in the 1950s, described in her careful book The !Kung of Nyae Nyae (1976) the process by which Ju/’hoansi hunters made their arrows and applied poison to them. They dug up from deep underground the larvae, in their cocoon stages, from three different species of beetles. They found these larvae under trees infested with the adult insects, and kept them dry in covered horns for future use.

When they were ready to apply the poison, the hunters used an amber-colored fluid that comes out of the larvae and spread it very carefully on the shanks of the arrows. But they did not put it on the tips—that would have been too dangerous. There is no known antidote for the poison, and even a small scratch from an arrow point could well be fatal.

Marshall (1976) presents a different picture of Ju/’hoansi peacefulness from that of Lee. She indicates that quarrels did of course occur, but none of the people that she spoke with had any memories of wars or other types of violence between different bands. Furthermore, their parents and grandparents before them had had no knowledge of such things.

Later in the book, she acknowledges that there had been instances of the Ju/’hoansi using their deadly poisoned arrows in anger. “Men have killed each other with them in quarrels—though rarely—and the !Kung fear fighting with a conscious and active fear,” she writes (p.288). Marshall provides numerous instances, in her book and in her other writings, of the Ju/’hoansi successfully intervening in the tensions and conflicts of others, particularly when they threaten to blow up into real fights. The consequences of fighting with their ultimate weapons were too serious, she observes repeatedly.

The news story last week has, as yet, not had a follow up, so we don’t know what has happened to the man who committed the crime. We do know that the weapon of choice was the poison arrow. Presumably, Ju/’hoansi hunters still have to find beetle grubs under infested trees in the bush and process them for their hunting purposes, since administrators only allow traditional hunting tools—bows and arrows—to be used on the Nyae Nyae Conservancy lands.

One of the points that comes very clear in the anthropological literature about Ju/’hoansi fights was the importance of the closely knit bands in settling their disputes. People sensed when tensions were rising, when two adult men were starting to get very angry. Someone might become angered enough to run for his poison arrows. One should grab and hold the two antagonists, if necessary, until tempers could cool, until reason could prevail.

While the circumstances of the recent killing are not completely clear from the brief news story, there is no mention of a crowd of family members intervening, of nearby people trying to stop the two antagonists from their fight. The one man simply grabbed his poison arrow and shot the other in the stomach.

The tragedy is thus in the circumstances: of people who have not adjusted their lives, their culture, and their society to modernity. They have not yet made accommodations to alcohol, which was mostly unknown to them 60 years ago. They also do not have close kin and neighbors right at hand to restrain them when they do get angry, as the news story indicates. These kinds of fights no longer occur around a campfire in the bush, with many concerned people nearby. When people don’t adjust the basis of their peacefulness to social changes, the results can certainly be tragic.

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