Keeping the Peace

Conflict Resolution and Peaceful Societies Around the World

Graham Kemp, Douglas P. Fry, Graham Kemp, Douglas P. Fry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135937317
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection of ethnographies discusses how non-violent values and conflict resolution strategies can help to create and maintain peace.

I

The Concept of Peaceful Societies

GRAHAM KEMP

In this chapter, Graham Kemp examines the peaceful society concept and suggests a context for thinking about the cultural case studies in the book. Kemp points out that too often peaceful societies have simply become pawns in sterile debates, such as whether violence can be attributed more to nature than nurture or whether the human condition is more Hobbesian than Rousseauan, or vice versa. However, to view peaceful societies in this way is to overlook the most important issue: What can peaceful societies teach us about creating and maintaining peace? Kemp suggests that peace is not a state, but a dynamic process, and that peaceful societies have developed effective cultural technologies for peace. That is, they have developed mores, values, beliefs, and institutions that very effectively minimize violence and actively promote peace.

—DPF

In 1976 David Fabbro presented a paper on peaceful societies to the Programme of Peace and Conflict Research at Lancaster University in the U.K. He later refined this work, and it was published in the Journal of Peace Research in 1978. His paper identified seven peaceful societies from the anthropological literature—five of which he termed traditional and two created. His aim was to produce an article “concerned with the study of peace... via the study of a number of peaceful societies” (Fabbro 1976:40). Fabbro was working within an academic climate of the Programme that placed an emphasis on peace creation. This perspective saw peace as something more than the absence of violence and viewed a study of peace, not violence, as the credible way for Peace Science to move forward (Fabbro 1976:36). It saw a distinction between security—the absence of violence—and peace, which in the words of the Quaker George Fox (1975: emphasis added) is about living in that “life and power which takes away the occasion for all wars.” This issue is explored further by Davies-Vengoechea (this volume). For Fabbro, though, the hope was that through studying peaceful societies, we might find a better path to peace for our own societies (Fabbro 1976:36). He saw his paper as a tentative start, to stimulate debate; but as the editor of the Journal of Peace Research, Nils Peter Gleditsch, commented a decade later, the topic was simply not taken up. Not until 1996 did another paper (Bonta 1996) on this subject appear in that journal, and that remains it. In 1980 Fabbro left the Programme and did no further work on peaceful societies.

In 1982 I joined the Programme, now renamed the Richardson Institute of Peace Studies. The Reader at the time, Dr. Paul Smoker, asked me to look further into Fabbro's work. What I discovered was a difference between what Fabbro had intended in his work and what many people assumed his work was about. This misunderstanding may explain the lack of response Fabbro's article achieved. In proposing this volume, the editors again found the same false assumption being applied to our aim. To understand what is meant here by peaceful societies, we need to begin by examining the nature of this erroneous assumption.

The assumption is that in talking about peaceful societies, we are trying to prove something. For some, the value of locating and identifying peaceful societies has been to help resolve the long-held debate on the nature or nurture origins of human aggression and violence. This was not Fabbro's aim, nor is it the central aim of this work. We need to counter this pervasive erroneous assumption, for it blinds many to the real value of the concept of peaceful societies.

One problem with the nature-nurture debate is that it is not really a scientific one, but the product of a major European political question over the past few centuries—a question that involves the political rights of man, or more specifically, the political rights of all human beings. The debate stems from the works of political philosophy, such as those of Hobbes (1651) and Rousseau (1755), from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

On one side, there was a belief that human violence and evil stem from human nature, and that it is the forces of civilization (nurture) that bring good and peace to the world. This was the traditional view, which essentially maintained the rights of the existing ruling classes, who perceived themselves as civilized. Thus, they possessed the right to remain the sole arbiters of power, law and order, and government. Such beliefs also provided Europeans with a justification for ruling over other cultures as the bringers of civilization to more "primitive" peoples of the world. As a result, humanity was perceived as being essentially of two classes, those properly nurtured (civilized) and those not—the uncivilized or primitive, whose natures ruled them too much, making their lives "poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (Hobbes 1651). The contrary conception, developed in the eighteenth century (Rousseau 1755), was that by nature humanity was good; it was civilization that created evil in the human condition. Thus the breakdown of the established order would free humanity to fully experience the nobility of its nature. In political terms, this perspective supported the right of nonruling classes to rebel, to challenge existing authority, to allow their voices to be heard, and to eventually be trusted to be part of their own government. Such ideas played a role in the growth of democracy and self-determination. Understandably, for people in European societies, there was much political investment in the possible truth of one side or the other. They thus looked to science to help settle the issue. In particular, Europeans were beginning to explore the world. The resulting new sciences such as anthropology and archaeology could not but be motivated to take part in the quest. The aim was to find a true primitive society, that is, one close to nature. This would tell what human nature was truly like.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with a political agenda stimulating scientific study, but there is a problem if it then blinds that science in its work. Despite, for example, the sophistication of native societies of the New World, Europeans were too quick to see them as primitive because they did not bear the same cultural trappings and technology of European societies. The sophistication of the Native American societies can be illustrated by noting that the Iroquois' Great Law of Haudenosaunee underpinned the United States Constitution, the League of Nations, and the United Nations (see, for example, Johansen 1982; Martin 1997; also see a reply to the French by a Micmac leader in 1676 on who is truly civilized in McLuhan 1973:48– 49). Having been identified as primitive, their peaceful actions were soon held forth as proof of the existence of the noble savage; at the same time, their warlike attributes proved that, without the trappings of civilization and order, humanity's nature was no better than that of a brutal savage. This contrary analysis of the same societies revealed the strength of the political agendas over actual scientific observation (Boland 1995).

This political issue remains with us; people are still divided over how far to trust individuals or society (Furnham and Henderson 1983). The Right of our political society blames the individual and seeks greater controls and deterrence, while the Left sees fault in society and its process of socialization and thus seeks radical reform. Scientific studies on the issue of nature or nurture often reflect the current political strength of one side or the other (Eckhardt 1972; Bookin-Weirier and Horowitz 1983).

So far I have stressed the political nature and origins of the nature-nurture debate. Is there not a scientific basis for viewing behavior as based on nature or nurture? The answer is no. The puzzling fact is that the nature-nurture idea continues to prevail against all evidence to the contrary. For more than half a century, ethology (behavioral biology) has abandoned the idea of nature or nurture. Instead it sees behavior as a complex combination of inherited biological propensities and environmental interaction (EiblEibesfeldt 1975; Lorenz 1965; Tinbergen 1973a, 1973b; Ehrlich 2000).

The contrast of the "innate" and the "learned" as mutually exclusive elements is undoubtedly a fallacy.... It is perfectly possible that a particular motor sequence may owe to phylogenetic processes all the information underlying its adaptedness and yet be wholly dependent on individual learning for the "decoding" of this information. (Lorenz 1965:79)

One can refer to the example of sight. Without the inherited biological components and a neurological ability to interpret what we see, we could not see. Yet without interaction after birth with the environment, we would not see. For humans it is not just the physical stimuli of light and color; much of what we see around us has meaning and consequences from social interactions as well as from the physical environment. Sight is a far more complex behavior than any genetically determined or nurtured acquisition (see Purves, Lotto, and Nundy 2002).

The development of behavior is recognized to be even more complex—so complex that at times it is hard to tease out biological propensities and their limitations from the final developed behavior. For example, work on violent human behavior reveals that biological propensities that we might not expect can contribute to terrible human violence (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1971). An analysis of war propaganda would suggest that it is far more an appeal to an inherited propensity toward self-sacrifice—to a group, family, and comrades, that is, our love of those we value—that creates a stronger means of seducing humans to go to war and murder thousands, even millions of human beings than any biological propensity for killing (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1971; Kemp 1988). For example, Spartan society, in developing more effective military units, discovered that if you take adolescent boys from their families, and make their military unit their "family," then their group loyalty makes them fight and kill for longer on the battlefield. For those who have decried warfare as a human invention, the battle of Thermopylae was a black day for humanity.

In addition, when ethologists studied conflict behavior, they found biological propensities in social mammals, including humans, which programmed strong inhibitions against violent outcomes in intraspecies conflict (Schuster 1978). For humans this does not mean that they are either nonviolent or violent by nature, more that behaviorally they have to work with or around that program. For example, the inhibitions towards violence are at their strongest when communication is direct and face-to-face. This has proved problematic for the military. The military has to train its soldiers to overcome those inhibitions, or to work around them, for instance, by using long distance weapons such as bombs, missiles, and artillery, which keep opposing humans from communicating (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1971; Kemp 1987).

Moving beyond nature-nurture gives us a far more complex view of how we should see other societies. It suggests that each society can be seen as a working entity, able to culturally adapt human biological propensities to meet differing social and physical environmental needs. In this we can speak of cultural technology—the "software" of human survival. Anthropology can thus open up for consideration the richness of human ways of organizing society, a spectrum that includes peacefulness as well as the institution of war. This is not the case with the nature-nurture debate, which essentially undermined much of anthropology's work, by seeing human societies in terms of providing proof for a European political issue. Examining societies as sources of new ideas, knowledge, and wisdom was too often put aside.

To take an example, in 1968 Napoleon Chagnon published the first edition of a book on Yanomami society under the title Yanomamo: The Fierce People. Later, Chagnon (1992) was indignant about criticism that his analysis of the Yanomami was simply about countering the nurture argument; this is not what he meant by labeling them the "fierce people." Instead, he wanted readers to see his work as an understanding of Yanomami society. Yet whatever the intention, Chagnon (1992:xiii) opened a more recent work with these words: "The Yanomamo are the last major primitive tribe left in the Amazon Basin and the last such people anywhere on earth." Chagnon's emphasis on the Yanomami as primitive once again relegated them to the role of pawns in the nature-nurture debate. In his 1990 lecture on the rainforest, HRH Prince Charles, in referring to the Yanomami's valued understanding of the rainforest environment, stressed, "For us to call them "primitive" is both perverse and patronising." In publishing this lecture, Survival International featured those words prominently. They also emphasized in their literature on the Yanomami that "The Yanomami are neither saints nor savages. They are people" (Survival International 1990:10). Here lies an essential truth, that no matter where or what a human society may be or call itself, its members belong to the same species the world over. We are all neither saints nor savages, but people. Thus the Yanomami are not intrinsically different from anyone else in the world, nor are the Semai or any of the societies considered in this volume. This volume is not about peaceful people, but peaceful societies. We are looking at societies who have successfully adopted peacefulness. It is what they can teach the rest of us about peacefulness that is important.

Before we can continue, there are two concepts we need to understand. First, peaceful societies need not be peaceful in the absolute. After all warlike societies do not exist in the absolute either. Peace can be found at some level in any society. This does not mean that nonpeaceful societies do not exist either. Misperceiving the concept of peaceful societies as being an absolute is again a legacy of the nature-nurture debate. We can break free of this and see peaceful societies in relative terms. The societies considered here are defined as possessing relatively low levels of violence. Yet there is more to their identification than this. A relatively low level of violence stems from the active minimization of aggression. This suggests a perception of a dynamics of peacefulness rather than an unchanging state. This is the second issue.

Human societies are not static entities; they represent dynamic forces of cultural adaptation and evolution. In other words, what makes up a human society is not just its attributes, but also its sociocultural dynamics (Sorokin 1962; Kemp 1997). Society is not just a social gathering, it is gathering with purpose. It organizes and structures itself to help its members meet changing needs. These structures—made up of cultural values, mores, institutions, and perceptions—form the cultural technology of a society. The cultural technology has allowed us to adapt far more quickly than processes of biological evolution would have allowed. In this light, humans within social groups have long since found that they can promote violent or peaceful behavior depending on their needs. The two often coincide within societies (see Davies-Vengoechea this volume), but peaceful societies can be seen as those that successfully minimize violence and are able to promote peaceful behavior. In other words the cultural dynamics of such a society is toward peacefulness. Thus, in a peaceful society, we can see not simply a society in a state of peace, but a society that:

a) desires to be peaceful and seeks to orientate its culture in that direction,

b) has developed cultural means to achieve this aim,

c) and has achieved success in this aim.

In fact, in identifying peaceful societies, we should consider not only their state, but also their orientation. The fact that violent incidents occur in a society does not necessarily deny that it is a peaceful culture. We need to consider how that culture's orientation deals with that violence. Is it capable of minimizing its impact and its spread, and of preventing it from becoming part of the culture? To illustrate this point, let's take two of Fabbro's societies, the Semai and the !Kung. The reader may also wish to consider this point in reference to Norway (Dobinson this volume).

Some men from the nonviolent Semai culture engaged in particularly violent combat when conscripted into the British Army (Dentan 1968; see also this volume). On this basis, some might dismiss the Semai as a peaceful society, but Robert Dentan (1968), who describes the Semai as nonviolent, sees no contradiction when he recounts this observation. The reason is that Semai society isolated the event as a nonevent and did not allow it to alter their orientation and culture when this unpleasant incident was over. As Dentan (this volume) reveals, Semai society has had violence forced upon it from outside for centuries, yet its members remain true to their nonviolent adaptation.

In reference to the !Kung, now referred to as Ju/'hoansi, anthropologists' experience with this culture was that they were "harmless people." That was until one study showed that they had a homicide rate per capita as high as some U.S. cities such as Detroit (Lee 1979: chapter 13). This caused some to question the previous perception. One problem with simply citing a homicide statistic is that it focuses on victims in a small population, not murderers. Closer examination reveals that the actions of only two individuals precipitated half the homicides and that half of the victims were bystanders, not intended victims. The question is not that these killings occurred, it is how they affected the culture of the Ju/'hoansi. Did their orientation to peacefulness change? Did a high level of homicide become a subsequent norm? Or did the culture, as with the Semai, close ranks to restore the desired aim of peacefulness? Incidents or nonincidents do not necessarily make a peaceful society; after all, some warlike societies have periods of peace. Thus in identifying a peaceful or nonpeaceful society, one should consider the dynamics of a society and not just its low levels of violence. After all, a society is made up of individuals, and, for varying reasons, not all will find it easy to conform to the social norms. Alcohol abuse is mentioned as one problem in some of the societies referred to in this volume. The success of a peaceful society is how it deals with violence, when, for whatever unfortunate reason, it occurs. The same challenge but in the opposite direction may be true of a warlike society. Warlike cultures too find that unwarlike behavior can develop among their members—incidents of nonviolence occur. In a recent work, On Killing, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman (1995) reveals an undeclared problem that militaristic societies face. In engaging face-to-face, a surprisingly large number of soldiers suddenly hold back from killing. Grossman quotes S. L. A. Marshall's (1978) conclusion of a study on U.S. soldiers in World War II, on the actual moment of firing a rifle. " 'At the vital point,' says Marshall, the soldier 'becomes a conscientious objector"' (Grossman 1995:29). The threat of peace breaking out is something a warlike culture needs to attend to in much the same way that the outbreak of violence is something a peaceful culture needs to deal with.

The idea that peaceful societies result from social decisions means that a society can alter itself from warlike to peaceful. For example, Fabbro (1978) referred to two cases he called created societies: the Hutterites and the Tristan da Cunha Islanders. We also have an historical example of societal change toward peacefulness if we compare current day Norway with its Viking past (see Dobinson this volume). Such transitions are liberating and show a lesson that peaceful societies offer the modern world.

Dentan (this volume) argues that peacefulness for the Semai is not the pursuit of a Utopian goal, but rather it is cultural adaptation to help the members of the society survive. For the modern world overall this can also be said to be true. For most of the world's societies—or more accurately, dominant societies—warfare and the use of violence to maintain political positions within a society has long been part of the culture.

Maybe in early history, when civilizations first developed as wealthy but vulnerable societies, other societies on their borders adapted by robbing them. Civilizations, then, with great skills of organization, developed military defense. They found it could be used to further enhance their own position by robbing and conquering others and controlling their own large populations. But for whatever reason, such viol...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• WAR AND SOCIETY
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introductory Note
• 1. The Concept of Peaceful Societies
• 2. A Positive Concept of Peace
• 3. Contentious But Not Violent: The Hopi of Northern Arizona
• 4. Restraint and Ritual Apology: The Rotumans of the South Pacific
• 5. Respect for All: The Paliyans of South India
• 6. Multiple Paths to Peace: The “La Paz” Zapotec of Mexico
• 7. Resolving Conflict Within the Law: The Mardu Aborigines of Australia
• 8. Putting a Stone in the Middle: The Nubians of Northern Africa
• 9. Keeping the Peace in an Island World: The Sama Dilaut of Southeast Asia
• 10. A Model of Peacefulness: Rethinking Peace and Conflict in Norway
• 11. Cautious, Alert, Polite, and Elusive: The Semai of Central Peninsular Malaysia
• 12. Conclusion: Learning from Peaceful Societies
• References
• Glossary
• Contributors
• Index