Peaceful Societies

One of the most significant issues confronting students of peace is how, or if, it is possible for a peaceful society to retain its values in the face of violence in the surrounding nation state. That question should be uppermost in the minds of people concerned about the Nubians of southern Egypt, who live in the midst of turmoil after the voting in a second round of elections this past week.

Numerous political parties, including the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, the best known, have been competing for support from Egyptians. News reports have indicated that demonstrators have staged massive, violent street protests against the appointment of the new prime Minister, Kamal Ganzouri, by the interim military rulers of the country. Ganzouri criticized the violence of the protesters, and urged them to concentrate instead on rebuilding the economy and the nation. The protesters fought with police and military forces in central Cairo, and many people claim that protesters have been killed by live ammunition, though officials have denied that charge.

The broader, and better, news from Egypt last week has been that the second round of elections were being conducted across the country. The Nubian community has been actively voting for representatives that might support their agendas. One of many parties contending for support, the Revolution Continues Alliance, is headed by Abdallah Abdel Fattah, a Nubian. However, the Nubian people of southern Egypt appear to be voting for another group, the Egyptian Block, according to an activist and observer from their society, Ahmed Ragab.

Mr. Ragab believes that the Freedom and Justice Party is the second choice for Nubian voters. The Salafi Al-Nour party has also gotten some Nubian support. Ragab felt that Nubians were likely to vote for an independent candidate named Adel Abu Bakr, a prominent advocate for their issues.

Nubians had hoped that they might gain some special recognition when the new voting districts were established before the elections. They wanted their own constituency in order to guarantee that they could have at least one Nubian in the new parliament, but that did not happen. The Aswan Governate, in which most Nubians live, was allocated six seats in the new parliament, of which four were to be elected through the party lists system while two others were single winner seats.

Last month, Nubian protesters returned to the streets of Aswan, repeating their oft-made demands, that they be guaranteed the right to return to at least some semblance of their historic communities near the Nile River, which were flooded and destroyed by the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s. Protests about this issue had become violent in early September. A spokesperson for the Nubian Democratic Youth Union, Yahia Zaied, told the press that Nubian protesters were still making their demands.

They were angered when they realized that their hopes for a voting district of their own had been ignored. The ruling military power in Egypt, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, had in fact promised them earlier that they would have their own independent constituency. The Nubians were also angry because the military and security forces had violently broken up the Aswan sit-in, beating the protesters and removing their tents.

Thus, events have revived the question once again. Can a people who cherish the nonviolent resolution of conflicts retain their values when military and police forces beat and intimidate them? Gandhi’s answers would have been clear on the issue, but the Nubian situation is difficult.

How do scholars and students of peaceful, nonkilling societies overcome the objections of “deniers,” individuals who refuse to admit even the possibility that such peoples exist? The question captivated the members of the Nonkilling Anthropology Research Committee of the Center for Global Nonkilling (CGNK), meeting in Montréal on November 17th. That one word summarized the difficulties in reducing, if not completely eliminating, human killing.

Overcoming skepticism and convincing people of the value of studying peaceful and nonkilling societies is one of the central concerns of the members of the Research Committee—prominent anthropologists and scholars who express a firm belief not only that nonkilling societies exist, but that their examples can be useful to peoples worldwide. The basic agenda for the day was to explore ways of further promoting this message. Thomas Fee from the Center for Global Nonkilling (CGNK)moderated the session.

The first goal of the meeting was to explore the socio-cultural causes of killing and nonkilling. How can we advance research into those causes? A second, and equally important, goal was to probe for ways to develop societies where killing, or even the threat of killing, is reduced and eventually abolished. How can killing societies be transformed into nonkilling ones? Why do some societies change, from one condition to the other, sometimes becoming more killing, sometimes less? What strategies can the committee prepare that will advance the research and dissemination of information about peaceful, nonkilling societies?

Hosted by Prof. Patrice Brodeur at the Université de Montréal, the meeting prompted many suggestions for possible steps that might further the goals of the group. This meeting on Thursday the 17th was a follow up to a successful panel session on nonkilling societies the previous evening at the American Anthropological Association’s annual convention in the city.

The first major topic discussed by the participants was the need to better promote the idea of nonkilling societies, and a nonkilling subfield of anthropology. One suggestion was to foster either the establishment of a section, or of an interest group, devoted to nonkilling anthropology within the American Anthropological Association itself. Several committee members will be looking into that possibility.

A second proposal, quite closely related, was to increase the membership of the Research Committee itself. Graduate students and anthropologists who think they might be interested should contact the CGNK and express interest in the work of the group. Committee members expressed a special need for more women, minorities, and people from developing countries to be part of the Research Committee.

One member made the suggestion that faculty who teach courses relating to nonkilling/peaceful societies could share their syllabi. A model syllabus for courses on nonkilling societies will then be prepared and shared on the CGNK website, along with other suggested readings and materials.

Several participants discussed possible markets for articles about nonkilling and peaceful societies, both scholarly pieces and works written for broader, more popular, audiences, both in magazines and in newspapers. One suggestion, for people interested in placing short, op ed articles in newspapers, was to contact the group PeaceVoice, an initiative of the Oregon Peace Institute.

PeaceVoice, according to their website, tries, usually with considerable success, to place submitted articles about peace related subjects in newspapers and online news outlets throughout the U.S. Articles prepared for a newspaper audience about nonkilling/peaceful societies would doubtless be considered, though PeaceVoice gives priority consideration to members of a partner organization, the Peace and Justice Studies Association. Some of the recent articles distributed by PeaceVoice have been placed in a large number of newspapers. Their website suggests that one of the keys to getting a submission accepted by the news media is for it to be brief and related to a topic of current news interest.

Members of the Research Committee discussed participating in meetings of other closely related organizations, such as the European Association of Social Anthropologists, which is meeting at Nanterre University in Paris, in July 2012. Another suggestion was to consider the Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies (CHAGS), meeting in Liverpool in June 2013. Smaller, regional workshops might be supported by grants from the School for Advanced Research. Support might also be available from the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

Some suggestions were quite captivating. Why don’t we stop genocides? (How does anyone answer that totally valid question?) Why don’t we discuss the violence in sports? Why do the news stories on PBS so rarely include anthropologists among the experts they consult?

Participants suggested other types of media outreach, web site developments, linkages, connections, and outreach of all sorts. As the day wore down, Mr. Fee helped participants summarize the many points that had been made, and secured as many commitments as possible to help address the issues raised.

The CGNK has formed 18 other, similar, subject discipline committees, comparable to the one for anthropology, which include a total of about 600 scholars worldwide. The Anthropology Research Committee has 52 members, of whom 11 were able to attend the Montréal meeting.

This is the fifth of a series of five articles about the Center for Global Nonkilling, an organization that holds very similar views to this website, though it is focused more on the quantifiable goals of killing and nonkilling, compared to this website which takes the broader, but less measurable, perspective of violence versus peacefulness. The other four articles in this series include: first, a review of the book Nonkilling Societies issued by the CGNK; second, a review of Kirk Endicott’s paper on the Batek; third, a review of Alberto Gomes’ paper on the Semai; and fourth, a discussion of Douglas Fry’s summary of the Panel Session of Wednesday evening, November 16, at the AAA convention.

Papers by Kirk Endicott and Alberto Gomes, reviewed here in recent weeks, represented only part of the richness of information about peaceful societies available at a panel session of the American Anthropological Association in Montreal last month. Rather than continue to review the nine additional papers, all of which were quite insightful, it might be best to simply summarize the rest of them. The full list of papers presented at the panel session is still available on the AAA website.

Dougloas P. Fry “Challenging the Legacy of Innate Depravity: The New Tidemark of the Nonkilling Paradigm,” the panel organized by Prof. Les Sponsel and the Center for Global Nonkilling, concluded with excellent summaries by discussants Kirk Endicott and Douglas Fry. A quick summary of Fry’s remarks should serve to best convey many of the essential points made by the speakers.

Instead of reviewing the individual papers, Fry focused on the three major themes, or topics, that he had heard during the evening. Those three topics included, first, our biases about the issue of whether or not humans have an innate tendency to be a killing or a nonkilling species, and how our attitudes about the issue may affect our perceptions of the possibilities of peacefulness. The second topic, he said, was a fundamental question: is a nonkilling society really possible? The third was the logical corollary of the second: how can societies move toward a state of nonkilling?

He began his exploration of the biases relating to nonkilling versus peacefulness by referring to a work by Marshall Sahlins, a prominent American anthropologist. Sahlins recently published a pamphlet that describes how the belief in human innate aggressiveness dates back in Western thought at least to the Greek Cynics. It has continued forward through the ideas of St. Augustine, Thomas Hobbes, and other thinkers to the present day.

Fry discussed the prevalent concepts held by writers who champion this belief. Authors have used such descriptions of people as “the killer ape,” “man the hunter,” “demonic males,” “constant battles,” the “dark side of man,” “the most dangerous animal,” “war before civilization,” and so on. Much of that literature about the supposedly inherent violence in human societies reflects the insidious belief, in the West at least, that people are basically aggressive. It is one of our cherished cultural myths.

The speaker said that these ideas are variations on the same myth, which helps promote the perpetuation of such an erroneous idea. President Obama repeated that myth in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech a couple years ago. Fry argued that there is a lot of evidence against the myth. He suggested that arguments for innate human aggressiveness may be ingenuous, for many people have their own reasons for wanting humanity to appear to be violent.

When he addressed the second topic of the evening, is nonkilling really possible, he distinguished between societies that are internally peaceful and those that are nonwarring. Some societies are both while some are one or the other, an important distinction. He answered the basic question with a qualified yes, nonkilling societies do appear to be possible.

He agreed with a point made by Robert Knox Dentan, that some of the nonkilling societies like the Semai do not identify themselves as being highly peaceful. But others, Fry argued, do have explicit ideals of themselves as peaceful. He used, as an example, the Xingu peace system in Brazil, where people in the communities involved have strong beliefs and constraints preventing warfare among themselves. The Xinguanos have been quoted as stating that they think violence is immoral. They think of themselves as civilized people—they are people who do not fight wars—in contrast to the “wild” Indians outside the Xingu area who go to battle and kill one another.

Among the Zapotec of the La Paz village, a community that he has studied personally, violence is the exact opposite of respect, which is an ideal they cherish. Furthermore, the residents of La Paz view themselves as pacifists (pacificos), a word that they use unambiguously to mean a peaceful people. Fry reasoned that in some societies the people cherish their peacefulness but in others, like the Semai, they may act peacefully but do not clearly espouse such values.

He wondered if societies that are not as secure in the peacefulness of their environments, or are more afraid of aggression from others, may be the ones that develop patterns of frequently reiterating their beliefs in their own nonviolence. As a consequence, they may be the ones to develop strong traditions of respect. He speculated that people whose societies have been peaceful for a very long time may have gotten out of the need for frequently repeating peaceful beliefs.

He provided additional examples of how the prevailing ideologies in the West focus on violence, rather than peacefulness, as normative. He then moved on to his third topic: how to move societies toward less killing and more peacefulness. Fry reminded the audience of an excellent example of a worldwide program which was set up by the United Nations General Assembly to attempt to develop cultures of peace. He quickly reviewed the elements which would be necessary for a culture of peace to take hold, as outlined by the UN resolution, such as peace education, sustainable development, human rights, gender equality, democratic participation, open sharing of information, and so on.

In response to some of the points made by the other speakers, he argued that working for peace needs to take place at all levels, both at the micro scale, in small, peaceful communities, and at the macro scale of international relations. Both are essential to the formation of a peaceful world. To summarize, he said that various speakers had described specific ways that societies work toward peacefulness, such as with effective strategies for avoiding and resolving conflicts. He concluded that enough examples are out there to show that nonkilling societies are truly possible.

This is the fourth of a series of five articles about the Center for Global Nonkilling, an organization that holds very similar views to this website, though it is focused more on the quantifiable goals of killing and nonkilling, compared to this website which takes the broader, but less measurable, perspective of violence versus peacefulness. The other four articles in this series include: first, a review of the book Nonkilling Societies issued by the CGNK; second, a review of Kirk Endicott’s paper on the Batek; third, a review of Alberto Gomes’ paper on the Semai; and fifth, a review of the CGNK Anthropology Research Committee meeting on Nov. 17.

Birhor women are experts in the use of native plants for contraceptive purposes, according to a news story last week in The Pioneer, an English language daily paper from India. In one of three stories about the Birhor carried by the paper during the course of the week, Ashis Sinha wrote that the Birhor avidly continue to use plants for medical purposes.

Karmi Birhorin, from the hamlet of Demotand, told the reporter that she uses one gram of powered gunja seed, boiled in milk for 30 minutes as a contraceptive. About 200 ml of the mixture, taken twice daily during her menstrual cycle, seems to work for her. The gunja is a legume that is native to India. She also advocates the use of unripe custard apples, taken with warm water, as another possible contraceptive.

Sukar Birhor, from Chalkari village, indicated that the Semal flower can be boiled with black pepper to form a mixture which, if taken orally, prevents pregnancies. In addition, Sukar suggested that petals from the palash flower, if boiled in cow’s milk for an hour and then taken three times daily during the menstrual cycle, will also act as a contraceptive. If pomegranates are boiled in water and taken orally, they too have anti-fertility properties.

Sushma Birhorin from Kalichattan said that she cooks the bark from the roots of male papaya plants, along with catfish, to concoct a mixture that will inhibit pregnancies. To restore fertility, she added, “we carry out the same procedure but with the female papaya plant.”

According to Mr. Sinha, the Birhor use parts from other plants to treat colds, skin infections, sexually transmitted diseases, and gastrointestinal ailments. Dr. P.K. Mishra, head of the botany department at the Vinoba Bhave University in Jharkhand, speculated that the potions may work as contraceptives by causing the woman’s body to rapidly expel fertilized ova from the fallopian tubes, by disturbing estrogen balances, or perhaps by causing fetal abortions. Whatever the effects of the plant preparations may be, he suggests that a huge business might be created by developing those plant properties commercially.

The journalist, Mr. Sinha, suggests that the basic Birhor understanding of plant uses needs to be documented before they modernize and abandon their traditional knowledge. Their uses of herbs, for instance, is unknown outside their own culture. He urges government agencies to help preserve Birhor traditional knowledge.

In another story he wrote for The Pioneer last week, Sinha had a less positive impression of Birhor traditions. “It is astounding,” the said, “how the Birhors keep moving from one place to another in search of foods and survive by eating roots, fruits, flowers, leafy vegetables, mushroom and leaves from the forests even in the 21st century.” Perhaps he has not read Gandhi’s autobiography, where he wrote about the way he developed his own diet consisting exclusively of fruits and nuts. The major difference was that the Mahatma didn’t gather the vegetable foods from the forests.

The point of that story was to report that 12 Birhor families in Jharkhand were going to be receiving new homes. About 125 Birhor families still live in traditional dwellings made of branches and leaves which are assembled into cone shaped huts. Dashmi Birhorin was quoted by the reporter as complaining how they “are facing a tough time and have always undergone lot of problems. Life has always been tough and unfair to us,” she said.

A third news report, also by Ashis Sinha, discussed efforts to develop effective uses of cell phones by the Birhor. Babulal Birhor and Somra Birhor, from Dohakatu, told the reporter that cell phones allow them to do various tasks quite effectively. The phones help families keep in touch while some of them are away working at jobs elsewhere, they said. They can be recharged in the villages with solar power. A cell phone is evidently as cheap to purchase as a goat, and its use does not necessarily interfere with their traditional ways.

Shubhranshu Choudhary, a journalist, developed in Chhattisgarh state a cellular network that allows indigenous people to share information and pool it through professional reporters who then feed it back via cell phones to the whole network of villages. Most villages have at least one cell phone. Activists can thus push for changes and be heard widely. The closing of two health centers in the state was reversed after enough participants in the cell networks complained. One of the health centers was reopened.

Cell network enthusiasts look for inspiration at the example of the Maasai people of Kenya. They have been able to share information about the existence of good forage conditions for their herds, saving them from roaming hundreds of miles randomly to find better conditions. They use their phones to seek medical help and to trade or sell their cattle.

Alberto Gomes suggests that new images of social and economic relations are needed, ones which abandon human-centered paradigms and focus, instead, on the interdependence of people with the natural environment. Equality, sustainability, and peacefulness, in the new model proposed by Gomes, are intertwined. He demonstrates his arguments with numerous examples from the Orang Asli (“Original People”), and particularly the Semai, of Peninsular Malaysia.

Alberto Gomes The paper by Gomes, who is from La Trobe University in Australia, explored those ideas at the panel session “Challenging the Legacy of Innate Depravity: The New Tidemark of the Nonkilling Paradigm,” which was part of the American Anthropological Association’s annual convention in Montreal last month. The paper session was sponsored by the Center for Global Nonkilling.

Gomes opened his paper, “Alter-Native ‘Development’: Indigenous Forms of Social Ecology,” by explaining that numerous alternatives to the exploitative capitalist model have been developed over the years, most recently a de-growth theory from several European economists. What is needed, those economists have suggested, is not more proposals for utopian systems.

Instead, they ask for practical examples of existing societies that will offer clues about modifying prevailing systems. Gomes sets out to offer such practical examples from his Orang Asli research, in hopes of promoting economic, social, and environmental justice.

He does not seek a return to some Arcadian past, but he does argue that the indigenous peoples in Peninsular Malaysia do provide a useful contrast with capitalist societies. The Orang Asli offer “a critique of modes of living that bring about and reproduce poverty, inequality, violence and ecological degradation.” Gomes says the prevailing state societies, infused with their capitalist ethics, exemplify the 4-Gs—growth, glut, greed and grievance.

Regarding equality, the first leg of his model, he points out that the Orang Asli villages do typically have leaders, but everyone has more or less equal access to power. Most village decisions are made through consensus. People maintain their interdependence through their firm beliefs in sharing. The speaker observed that during his field work among the Orang Asli, he frequently witnessed people sharing things.

People would not necessarily reciprocate such gifts, relying instead on the certainty that almost everyone readily gives to others. Thus, ones individual gift would be repaid by another, from someone else, in time. Anthropologists refer to this process as “generalized reciprocity.” Children are socialized to share their things with others, and people who do not share properly feel the scorn of the entire community.

Equality is enhanced in Semai society by the fact that the people all have equal ownership of the land, and equal access to its resources. They fish and hunt, cultivate crops and gather forest products, all within a village territory called a ngrii’, which is demarcated by natural features such as ridges and streams. The only exclusive ownership of products within the territory is of crops that individuals have cultivated. But even then, ownership is not really a human-centered conception. Instead, the supernaturals own the land and its resources. People only have the right to use the products from the earth and do not have absolute control over any portion of it.

Leading into the second phase of his model, sustainability, Gomes points out that before the Semai cultivate any land, they will clear a tiny area, perhaps one square meter. They will then announce loudly to the nearby ground spirits (nyani kawul) their intention to grow something. The requestors will then learn, in their dreams, the responses of the spirits to their requests. Good omens, picked up in the dreams, suggest that the requests have been granted, and the farmers can then go ahead with the cultivation, though of course proceeding with considerable care and respect for the land.

The implication is that any destruction of the land could anger the spirits, who might visit their wrath on the people. Gomes does not argue that this kind of belief system would work in many other societies, of course, but the message—basing a human need for food on an underlying respect for the earth—is powerful.

Gomes points out that Orang Asli people such as the Semai, who have an abiding respect for nature, are more likely to live in harmony with it. Many perceive the forest as a benevolent parent. Furthermore, the Semai and the other Orang Asli peoples are not alienated from nature, even though many of them now work at wage jobs and live only on the fringes of natural forest ecosystems. They persist in engaging in their traditional, forest-based, subsistence activities, though sporadically.

Semai religious beliefs help cement their ties to nature. They believe that the human soul, the kenah senlook, is both an integral part of a hunter and is an essential aspect of nature and its laws. Those laws require the human to take only what is needed, and to respect all animals, spirits, and anything else connected with the natural environment. Breaking such laws, like acting disrespectfully toward an animal, or killing more than is needed at the moment, could drive away the kenah senlook. That would lead to bad luck and misfortunes.

The peacefulness of the Orang Asli, the third phase of the model, is fostered by factors the author had already discussed, such as their generalized reciprocity and their egalitarian ethics. He goes on to point out how the Semai effectively settle their disputes through conflict resolution meetings known as bicharaas’. At a bicharaa’, many people from villages affected by a dispute will gather to discuss the problem at hand. The point of the meeting is for the parties to talk out the contentious issue and restore the harmony of the society. Adjudicators will summarize the resolution that appears to have been agreed upon, and perhaps assess small fines.

The Orang Asli are able to generally maintain peaceful relations with outsiders through caution, by keeping a distance, and by flight when necessary. Gomes discusses how they sometimes use what he calls “sly civility”—processes employed by people with unequal access to power. The less powerful Orang Asli will dissemble, feign ignorance, or banter effectively in order to disarm potentially threatening strangers.

Gomes closes by suggesting ways that the anthropocentric view of the world held by neoliberal capitalism can be modified into a more ecocentric approach, as exemplified by the Orang Asli societies. His penetrating paper has been accepted for publication in the journal Third World Quarterly.

This is the third of a series of five articles about the Center for Global Nonkilling, an organization that holds very similar views to this website, though it is focused more on the quantifiable goals of killing and nonkilling, compared to this website which takes the broader, but less measurable, perspective of violence versus peacefulness. The other four articles in this series include: first, a review of the book Nonkilling Societies issued by the CGNK; second, a review of Kirk Endicott’s paper on the Batek; fourth, a discussion of Douglas Fry’s summary of the Panel Session of Wednesday evening, November 16, at the AAA convention; and fifth, a review of the CGNK Anthropology Research Committee meeting on Nov. 17.

Research on the hornbills of the Vazhachal Forest in Kerala, reported 15 months ago, has been so successful that the program has recently been expanded, a credit to the Kadar employees who do much of the field work. According to an article in The Hindu last week, the hornbill monitoring program has been extended outside the Vazhachal region to include the Edamalayar, Nelliyampathy, and Parambikulam areas as well.

Four different species of hornbills are known to have nested in the Vazhachal Forest: the Great Hornbill, the Malabar Pied Hornbill, the India Grey Hornbill, and the Malabar Grey Hornbill, according to the news story. Last year’s report indicated that the Great Hornbill and the Malabar Pied Hornbill are the most likely species to be encountered in the wildlands of southern India.

The forest is an important habitat for the large birds, which are important for overall ecosystem health due to their habits of widely dispersing fruits and seeds. Hornbills are known for having very large casques on their upper mandibles.

The 20 Kadar who are employed to survey the forests near their homes have been trained to note evidence that suggests the presence of different hornbill species, such fecal matter and the remains of food around potential nest trees. Suspect sites are observed at least once a week, and monitored until eggs are presumed to have hatched. According to Dr. Amita Bachan, from the Western Ghats Hornbill Foundation, the forest knowledge of the Kadar is an important ingredient in the success of the program.

The Kadar found 57 hornbill nest trees last year, and they are searching for more. While they move around through the forests on their surveys, they are trained to watch for other key wildlife species, such as tigers and lion-tailed macaques.

The nest monitors write down descriptions of the nest trees, details about the entries of female birds, whether or not the females appear to be in the nest cavities, measurements of the trees, heights of the nest holes, and details about the nearby vegetation and terrain. They also record the hatching of chicks and possible threat factors at the nests.

Dr. Balan has written that hornbills are particularly threatened by any loss of forest habitat, and by factors such as deforestation, conversion of the land to plantation agriculture, clearing for shifting cultivation, or logging.

The season for monitoring the nesting hornbills, which used to be from January through May, has begun in December this year due to climate changes.

Shary Boyle, a visiting artist at Concordia University in Montreal, gave a presentation last week on campus during which she spoke about her three-week visit in the spring to the Inuit community of Cape Dorset. The students may have expected her to focus on her own paintings, drawings, and sculptures, but she chose to discuss the art works of the Inuit, according to an article in the student newspaper.

Boyle indicated that the small town, on the southern coast of Baffin Island, is “the last frontier of the untouched.” She said that despite the isolation, the Inuit of Cape Dorset are able to maintain their strong sense of community. She said, however, that the people have a hard time maintaining a viable local economy, and the traditional subsistence lifestyle is gone. The government does not provide enough assistance, she added.

Most of the people in the town are unemployed and passive. “They don’t fight, they don’t speak about bad things, they don’t have the courage to do it,” she said. Without a lot income sources, the people of Cape Dorset have turned to producing art works for sale. As a result, the town has become a leading center for printmaking and carving.

The Baffin Eskimo Co-op in town, organized in 1959, was the first organization to promote Inuit art in the Canadian Arctic. Today, Cape Dorset has a stone cutting and graphic arts center, a multi-million dollar community business.

Boyle suggested that art works showing the darker side of life in Nunavut—alcohol, drugs, violence, abuse, poverty—simply don’t get sold. Boyle would like to see a museum established in Cape Dorset to show all the unsold works. It would help reveal those hidden facets of life in the north, and contrast the ideals of the Inuit with their more stressful realities.

While she was visiting Cape Dorset, people would come and watch her work, quietly exchanging feelings through the medium of shared artistic expressions. Despite the troubles in the community, the Inuit—and Boyle—epitomize the way artists can articulate the struggles of existence, according to the newpaper.

Kirk Endicott delivered an engrossing paper that described the nature of Batek nonviolence, plus the conditions that foster it, at a panel session on Wednesday evening, November 16th, in Montreal. His presentation was part of the program “Challenging the Legacy of Innate Depravity: The New Tidemarks of the Nonkilling Paradigm,” held as part of the American Anthropological Association’s convention that week. The panel session included 11 presentations, a few more of which will be described in coming weeks.

Kirk Endicott Endicott’s paper, “Peaceful Foragers: The Significance of the Batek and Moriori for the Question of Innate Human Violence,” was of particular interest for this website because of its careful review of Batek peacefulness. He opened by giving credit to Douglas Fry, who had gotten him involved in comparing two different hunting and gathering societies and linking those comparisons with the development of human behaviors.

In his paper, Endicott compared the Batek of Malaysia and the Moriori of the Chatham Islands. Both peoples did not participate in warfare, and both suppressed expressions of internal violence. His paper attempted to ascertain why they are peaceful, and how they maintain it.

His analysis of the Batek, roughly 700 to 800 people, focused on the ones living in the Upper Lebir River watershed of Malaysia. Their economy is, or was in the 1970s, based on harvesting wild fruits, hunting game animals, gathering yams, and collecting forest products, such as fragrant woods and rattan, for sale to traders. They moved about frequently, living in temporary camps for a week or two, each family inhabiting a separate lean to. The families would stay together or split apart, as circumstances determined. Despite the temporary nature of the camps, people were expected to share the foods they had hunted or gathered. They also provided assistance to one another whenever needed.

The Batek had no control over others, since they prized their individual autonomy. Endicott said, “The Batek considered all violence, aggression, and coercion of any kind toward other members of the Batek and toward outsiders as absolutely unacceptable.” Just like the Semai, the Batek believed that violence, and the threat of violence, was a characteristic of children and improperly socialized people. A Batek man indicated that they were prohibited from engaging in war and violence by their ancestors. They even proscribed hitting other people—it seriously violated their moral values.

The Batek believed that violent acts were prohibited by the thunder god, who would send thunderstorms down on the village if the prohibition was violated. An underground deity would be similarly offended by violence and send a flood to dissolve the errant camp. Offenders would also be punished by disease, sent by the creator god to people who acted violently. These prohibitions represent an unusual, “concentrated, sort of supernatural sanction,” the speaker said. Three different Batek gods cooperate to prevent violence. Furthermore, people who do act violently will not have their shadow souls taken to the afterworld when they die, Endicott was told.

The Batek taught their children to act nonviolently, though the youngsters sometimes did fight with one another. Adults believed they would grow out of this behavior, which they felt was normal. Parents would separate fighting children, then laugh to try and minimize the importance of the issues they were fighting about. Adults normally did not use physical discipline. By the time children were four years old, they had learned that, in their society, people just do not fight.

Endicott indicated that adults are able to settle their disputes peacefully. They often aired their conflicts loudly to the rest of the camp, in situations where everyone else could participate. If the dispute was not successfully settled, one or more of the people involved would simply move away to join another group. An individual who was frequently aggressive would be abandoned by the rest of the band, who might even flee from the aggressor, if that was the only way to resolve the problem.

It is significant to note that the Batek approach to controlling violence did, in fact, work most of the time. Endicott related one incident of violence, when two men had a fight about the wife of one of them. An older man tried to intervene, but almost everyone else fled to higher ground, fearful that the deity could decide to cause a disastrous flood.

The fear of being enslaved, or killed, by Malays helped restrain the Batek from acts of violence against aggressive outsiders. They had avoided Malay slavers in earlier times by running away, and were still used to fleeing at the first sign of approaching strangers. They continued this pattern of flight at the first suggestion of trouble during World War II when Japanese soldiers were stationed not far away, and during the Communist insurrection that followed the war.

Endicott argued that the Batek have developed elaborate controls on internal violence in order to maintain their close relations with one another. They depend on each other for survival. They realize that fighting could destroy their society. The absence of several factors in their communities may help militate against violence. Since they do not compete for scarce resources, they do not have that motive for fighting, he said. They also have no groupings that could lead to feuding behavior. Also, they have no leaders, whose ambitions could lead to conflicts. Furthermore, they have no beliefs in sorcery or witchcraft that could lead to violent, retributive punishments.

Endicott turned to discussing the reported peacefulness of the Moriori, a society that used to exist on the Chatham Islands, 500 miles away from New Zealand. After describing the relatively peaceful Moriori, who were decimated by invading Maori from New Zealand in 1835 and either killed or enslaved, Endicott provided some interesting comparisons between the peace systems of the two peoples.

For instance, both groups lived in relatively isolated locations, protected more or less from attacks by outsiders. Both were immediate return foragers who depended on one another for their subsistence. Thus, in both groups, people had similar motivations—survival—for maintaining harmony with others in the community. In both, people believed that superhumans would react against those who fostered violence. Both societies had decided, quite consciously, to control aggression and violence, both internally and externally. In sum, both societies devised effective ways of resolving disputes and living peacefully together.

This is the second of a series of five articles about the Center for Global Nonkilling, an organization that holds very similar views to this website, though it is focused more on the quantifiable goals of killing and nonkilling, compared to this website which takes the broader, but less measurable, perspective of violence versus peacefulness. The other four articles in this series include: first, a review of the book Nonkilling Societies issued by the CGNK; third, a review of Alberto Gomes’ paper on the Semai; fourth, a discussion of Douglas Fry’s summary of the Panel Session of Wednesday evening, November 16, at the AAA convention; and fifth, a review of the CGNK Anthropology Research Committee meeting on Nov. 17.

Over the past four months, several news reports about Malapandaram hamlets in Kerala have been published by The Hindu, a major paper in India. One appeared just last week.

Map of Kerala On August 2, the newspaper reported that workers at the Kudumbasree Mission, an organization in Kerala dedicated to wiping out poverty by empowering women, had given some relief supplies to a Malapandaram colony at Chalakkayam, to another nearby hamlet at Attathode, and others. All are near Sabarimala.

The temple complexes to the Hindu deity Lord Ayyappa in Sabarimala, and associated nearby communities, are visited by about 40,000,000 pilgrims every year. It is probably the most visited pilgrimage site in the world. The annual pilgrimage season to the places associated with Lord Ayyappa began this year on November 17th. The Malapandaram, and other tribal groups, live in the forests and in colonies not too far away from the temple complexes.

Mr. G. Murukan, from the Kudumbasree Mission, visited the colonies to supply food and provisions to the tribal families. He reported to The Hindu that the organization had set up self-help groups in the hamlets to help the women. They are being trained to make artificial ornaments and to do tailoring work. He added that a number of girls in the colonies are anemic.

A few weeks later, another story in The Hindu reported that the Malapandaram women of Chalakkayam, spelled “Malampandarom” by the newspaper, live in constant fear of sexual harassment, both by outsiders and by other residents of their community. The article quotes a young mother as saying, “we seldom sleep at night, fearing sexual harassment.” A tribal youth, she said, had made threatening calls to her. Another tribal man had been arrested four months earlier for sexually harassing two females, according to a middle aged Malapandaram woman.

That same woman said that a number of girls have become mothers in Chalakkayam. Some are as young as 12 to 14 years old. An education volunteer in Attathode said that underage mothers are quite common in the area. He added that three communities, Chalakkayam, Attathode, and another have about 10 mothers who are minors.

The news story reports that the Malapandaram still eke out a living through the sale of products that they gather in the nearby forest interiors. When conditions become difficult for collecting in the forests, such as during the rainy season, the people depend on government handouts, mostly just rice and salt, for their survival.

An article last week in The Hindu reported that the tribal people in Kerala’s Pathanamthitta District, where Sabarimala and the Malapandaram hamlets are located, would be the beneficiaries of a new “Knowledge on Wheels” initiative. The program, similar to the bookmobiles used in rural areas of numerous other countries, intends to develop technical know how among young tribal people by providing periodic access to computers. The computerized bus will visit their colonies from time to time.

Mr. Pazhakulam Madhu, Chair of the Education Standing Committee of the District Panchayat, said that a funding agency, the Global Foundation, wanted to support a project that would develop computer literacy among the underprivileged children. The bus, with its state of the art equipment, will be visiting the Attathode colony in January.

Mr. T.K.A. Nair, an Advisor to the Prime Minister, visited Attahode in the Sabarimala forests last week to attend a function inaugurating the computer bus initiative. He distributed clothing to the tribal children gathered for the occasion. He promised that he would continue to visit Chalakkayam, Attathode, and other nearby colonies in the future.

The Center for Global Nonkilling (CGNK) was created to promote the measurable goal of fostering a world free of killing. One of its research programs is to study societies that are reasonably free of killing, a close match-up in interests with this website. As part of that commitment, the CGNK organized an Exploratory Colloquium on November 16 – 17 to coincide with the American Anthropological Association’s 110th Annual Convention in Montreal.

Les Sponsel from the University of Hawaii organized, as part of the official AAA program, a panel of 11 speakers on Wednesday evening, November 16, focusing on nonkilling. Thursday the 17th, the CGNK held an all-day meeting of the Nonkilling Anthropology Research Committee, one of its research groups, at the University of Montreal. Both meetings significantly advanced the understandings of participants about the possibilities developing nonkilling societies.

Joam Evans Pim The best way to begin alerting visitors to this website about the work of the CGNK is through a review of the book Nonkilling Societies, edited by Joám Evans Pim, which was released on the center’s website last year. It is an effective contribution to the study of the social conditions in peaceful (nonkilling) societies that promote peacefulness. (The book is available for free download in a 1.5 mb PDF, or for purchase in paper copy). In weeks to come, additional reports will cover a selection of the papers and discussions held during the two very significant meetings.

Evans Pim provides a foreword which explains that the basic term “nonkilling societies” may seem a bit odd, but it dates back to Glenn D. Paige, a political scientist in Hawaii, who used the term in his book Nonkilling Global Political Science. Paige asked the critical question, “is a nonkilling society possible?” This book, and in a larger sense the Center, is dedicated to searching for the answer.

Evans Pim traces earlier uses of the term “nonkilling” in the anthropological literature, and he argues, quite justifiably, that killing and nonkilling are measurable concepts—they are clearly quantifiable. Homicide, after all, is an act that is hard to confuse with other types of violence, and it is normally counted the same way, wherever it occurs.

Leslie E. Sponsel writes the introduction, “Reflections on the Possibilities of a Nonkilling Society and a Nonkilling Anthropology,” which reviews a vast amount of literature in the field with a masterful touch. Sponsel argues, in answer to Paige’s question, that nonkilling societies do, in fact, exist, so future nonkilling societies are certainly possible.

He points out that, although numerous scholars are apologists for violence, they are incorrect in many respects. They willfully ignore the arguments and scholarly evidence that do not mesh with their Hobbesian views. He does not mean to denigrate the work of anthropologists who sincerely focus their research on warfare, but the ones who openly deny the evidence from the literature about peaceful—OK, nonkilling—societies “are in effect apologists for war (p.21).”

Several chapters in the book deal with the basic issue of whether or not it is reasonable to claim that peaceful societies even exist. After all, humans are supposedly warlike—it is an adaptive, evolutionary advantage. Human nature is basically aggressive. We are territorial beasts. Men need to dominate women. Chimpanzees are demonic killers, and humans are therefore the same. History is dominated by wars, murders, and aggressive acts. Killing is the norm, and nonkilling the aberration. The arguments seem endless. The facts are supposedly irrefutable.

Except that a number of the essays in this volume demolish these preconceptions with facts that the apologists for violence do not want to consider. Among the chapters that focus on these themes are “Gentle Savage or Bloodthirsty Brute?” by R. W. Sussman and Dona Hart; “Not Killing Other People,” by Piero P. Giorgi; and “Nonkilling as an Evolutionary Adaptation,” by Douglas P. Fry. Most of the essays deal with these issues in one way or another.

Much of worth in this volume will have to be skipped in order to touch on the articles that discuss peaceful societies that are also covered in this website. Robert Knox Dentan, in a lengthy essay “Nonkilling Social Arrangements,” makes some very interesting observations about the way the East Semai teach their children to be peaceful. He says they don’t. Several times, he writes, he has asked adults how they teach social skills to their young people. Each time he asks, they deny teaching anything to their kids. The children simply accompany adults and learn by imitating their behavior.

Dentan adds that Semai adults don’t talk much about children who are older than babies, or even pay much attention to them—unless they show signs of losing their self control. Kids learn the skills of peacekeeping, “not because their parents teach them, but because their parents for the most part do not (p.144).” The children learn to be peaceable from older playmates—how to have elaborate play battles in which no one gets hurt, with the big kids showing the little ones how to hold their “swords” to avoid hurting others. Their play teaches them the differences between violence and posturing.

The Paliyans also receive attention in an essay by Peter M. Gardner, “How Can a Society Eliminate Killing?” The author characterizes Paliyan society as warm, with a lot of joking and teasing during work projects. People smile a lot when they are dancing, and they are able to calm one another through quiet speech.

Gardner notes that most extramarital affairs among the Paliyan do not result in big problems, simply because the men do not think of their wives as objects that they own. The spouse is independent and can do as she chooses. One man, informed of his wife’s infidelities, responded simply, “it is not my business (p.189).” Similarly, parents never act as if they own their children, who start making decisions about their lives when they are still quite young.

A key Paliyan concept is tarakkoravaa, which roughly translates as disrespect. Except for the infirm, the aged, and children, people are always held at the same level, with no one over another, no one a burden on others—all in order to avoid disrespect. The conflicts that people experience could perhaps be best phrased, in Paliyan terms, as instances of disrespect.

Gardner’s analysis of the Paliyan approach to respect and conflict resolution—people refuse to argue, they walk away from conflicts, they de-escalate strife—is profound. He says that we must look at the matter from the Paliyan perspective. When everyone handles their conflicts peacefully, he argues, no one interprets walking away from a problem as “backing down.” In their society, “there is no cost; there is no humiliation…. The Paliyan style of walking away from conflict within their own egalitarian society has an altogether different quality; it is an unambiguous act of strength, strength in controlling oneself (p.192).”

Gardner’s thoughts are characteristic of a lot in this volume. Alberto Gomes gives us a fascinating essay about an Orang Asli society, the Menraq, that has lost a lot of its former peacefulness due to changing conditions in which they live. Evans Pim gives an overview of peacefulness in island societies—the Ifaluk, the Tristan Islanders, and the Tahitians. This book, filled with many convincing observations and analyses, is a rich, rewarding, work to download to ones hard drive, to study carefully, and to read for enjoyment.

This is the first of a series of five articles about the Center for Global Nonkilling, an organization that holds very similar views to this website, though it is focused more on the quantifiable goals of killing and nonkilling, compared to this website which takes the broader, but less measurable, perspective of violence versus peacefulness. The other four articles in this series include: second, a review of Kirk Endicott’s paper on the Batek; third, a review of Alberto Gomes’ paper on the Semai; fourth, a discussion of Douglas Fry’s summary of the Panel Session of Wednesday evening, November 16, at the AAA convention; and fifth, a review of the CGNK Anthropology Research Committee meeting on Nov. 17.

Evans Pim, Joám, editor. 2010. Nonkilling Societies. Honolulu: Center for Global Nonkilling

Peaceful Societies

Peaceful Societies

Police Intimidation of Nubians

Nonkilling/Peaceful Anthropology

Summary of Evidence for Peaceful Societies [Panel Presentations, part 3]

Birhor Contraceptives and Cell Phones

Peaceful Societies Exemplify Ecocentric Living [Panel presentations, part 2]

Kadar Involved in Hornbill Research

Inuit Artists in Cape Dorset

Center for Global Nonkilling [Panel Presentations, part 1]

Malapandaram Colonies in the News

Center for Global Nonkilling [book review]

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