Nonkilling Societies

Nonkilling Societies Edited by Joám Evans Pim Center for Global Nonkilling CREATIVE COMMONS LICENCE Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 You are free to share, copy, distribute and transmit this work* Under the following conditions: Attribution. You must attribute this work in the manner specified by the author/licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform or build upon this work. * For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. * Any of the above conditions can be waived if you gain permission from the copyright holders. Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the Authors’ moral and legal rights. Parts of this volume have been released under GFDL and Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 as part of Wikiversity’s School of Nonkilling Studies (http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/School:Nonkilling_studies). The Center for Global Nonkilling does not necessarily endorse the views expressed by the authors. Also available for free download at: http://www.nonkilling.org © The Authors, 2010 © Center for Global Nonkilling, 2010 (this edition) First Edition: September 2010 ISBN-13 978-0-9822983-4-3 ISBN-10 0-9822983-4-X ____________________________________________________ Cataloging in Publication Data (CIP) Nonkilling Societies / Edited by Joám Evans Pim ISBN 978-0-9822983-4-3 1. Nonkilling 2. Peace. 3. Pacifism – Nonviolence. I. Title. II. Evans Pim, Joám, ed. lit. CDU - 172.4 : 327.36 ____________________________________________________ A catalogue record is also available from the Library of Congress. Center for Global Nonkilling Post Office Box 12232 Honolulu, Hawaiʻi 96828 United States of America Email: [email protected] http://www.nonkilling.org “Anything that exists is possible.” Kenneth Boulding “A nonkilling global society is possible.” Glenn D. Paige Contents Foreword 9 Joám Evans Pim Introduction Reflections on the Possibilities of a Nonkilling Society and a Nonkilling Anthropology 17 Leslie E. Sponsel Chapter One Gentle Savage or Bloodthirsty Brute? 55 R. W. Sussman and Donna Hart Chapter Two Not Killing Other People 83 Piero P. Giorgi Chapter Three Nonkilling as an Evolutionary Adaptation 101 Douglas P. Fry, Gary Schober and Kaj Björkqvist Chapter Four Nonkilling Social Arrangements 131 Robert Knox Dentan Chapter Five How Can a Society Eliminate Killing? 185 Peter M. Gardner Chapter Six Into the Heart of Darkness 197 Leslie E. Sponsel Chapter Seven Menraq and the Violence of Modernity 243 Alberto Gomes Chapter Eight James Bay Cree Respect Relations within the Great Community of Persons 271 Richard “Dick” Preston Chapter Nine Ending Violence, Changing Lives 293 Laura J. McClusky Chapter Ten You Can’t Be Nonviolent Without Violence 325 Michael I. Niman Chapter Eleven Peaceful Islands 343 Joám Evans Pim Chapter Twelve Nonkilling and the Body 363 John Clammer Chapter Thirteen Toward a Nonkilling Society 385 Matthew T. Lee Foreword Joám Evans Pim Center for Global Nonkilling This volume arises from a crucial question formulated by Professor Glenn D. Paige, a political scientist, in his seminal work Nonkilling Global Political Science (2009 [2002]): “Is a Nonkilling Society Possible?” Paige de- fines this form of society as “a human community, smallest to largest, local to global, characterized by no killing of humans and no threats to kill; no weapons designed to kill humans and no justifications for using them; and no conditions of society dependent upon threat or use of killing force for maintenance or change.” (2009 [2002]: 21; See also Paige, 1993, 1996, 2002, 2005, 2006; Abueva, Ed., 2004; Bhaneja, 2006, 2008; Paige and Evans Pim, Eds., 2008; Evans Pim, Ed., 2009; Evans Pim, 2010.) The term “nonkilling” may sound odd to some readers, but it is certainly not foreign to anthropological literature. For example, in his essay Our Kind, Marvin Harris (1990) actually uses it in the title of three of the chapters (“The Nonkilling Religions,” “The Origin of Nonkilling Religions,” and “How the Nonkilling Religions Spread”). Following a cultural materialist approach, Harris explains how nonkilling religions emerged, in a confluence of brutal and costly wars, environmental depletion, population growth and rise of cities, food shortages, widespread poverty and rigidified social distinc- tions (1990: 444). A scenario that certainly resembles our own. Even before that, Houar used the expression in his 1984 article “Non- violent societies and non-killing warfare,” describing a form of battle pre- sent in various North American Indian societies who practiced the “count- ing coup,” where “[t]o touch an enemy, to enter battle unarmed and take an opponent’s weapon or horse was the highest feat of bravery one could accomplish” (Houar, 1984: 50). Not to mention much earlier works that without using the term explicitly tackle the problems associated to it. (See Sponsel’s “Introduction” for a revision of the literature of the field.) Even if the term itself is not new, Paige provided “a way to think about the issue in a systematic way,” through the simple but far reaching question set above (Urbain, 2009: 90). Paige’s approach, characterized by the meas- 9 10 Nonkilling Societies urability of its goals (killing and nonkilling can be quantified and related to specific causes) and the open-ended generative systems nature of its realization (appealing to infinite human creativity and variability), trespasses the limits of an ideology for social change entailing a new scientific model based on the refutation of killing-accepting science and the societal premises rooted in the widespread acceptance of lethality (in all of its forms) and le- thal intent. As Collyer reminds us, the “familiar word, nonviolence, is al- most comforting in its generality” while nonkilling “confronts and startles us with its specificity” (2003: 371), urging us to take concrete action. Even if written from the stand point of political science, an explicit re- quest is directed to other fields to bring about a “disciplinary shift to nonkilling creativity,” through a four-part logic of analysis focused on the causes of killing; the causes of nonkilling; the causes of transition between killing and nonkilling; and the characteristics of killing-free societies (2009 [2002]: 73). The fourth item in this framework implies the need to understand existing killing-free societies, setting an appeal to anthropologists, sociologists and others. Recalling Kenneth Boulding’s so-called “First Law” (“Anything that exists is possible”), Paige (and much of the evidence brought forward in this book) reminds us that nonkilling societies do exist in spite of having passed largely unnoticed to most in the scientific community. To counter the “historic and current systemic bias of the disproportionate amount of attention given to violence and war” (Sponsel, 1996: 113-114) peace, nonviolence and nonkilling need not only be held as legitimate subjects of research but must be considered seriously, systematically and intensively. As Sponsel points out: “you cannot understand or achieve something by ig- noring it” (1996: 14). Readers have probably realized that what is being said here is not in any way a revelation. Most authors who are contributing to this volume have been repeating the same crucial fact for decades: nonkilling societies, as those imagined by Paige in his book, are not a utopian dream; they are a genuine, real actuality that is currently in existence and has been so for millenia. It can probably be said louder but not more clearly. This volume provides firm evidence that the only feasible answer to Paige’s question (“Is a Nonkilling Society Possible?”) is undoubtedly affirmative. In the following pages the reader will find examples of such nonkilling societies as the Semai (Dentan), the Paliyans (Gardner), or contemporary “autonomous zones” (Niman, Dentan), described with some detail. Many other societies are mentioned and an extensive bibliography featured in the various reference sections. Certainly not all chapters deal with societies where killing is absent. Gomes and Preston examine the cases of societies Foreword 11 with peaceful values (Menraq and Cree) where conflict has erupted as a consequence of disruptive external influence. Niman’s account on the Rain- bow Family gatherings presents a similar dynamic. McClusky brings the vi- sion of a society seeking to reduce normalized (domestic) violence, the Maya of southern Belize, and Sponsel challenges the long-held assumptions of the Yanomano as the canonical example of fierce Hobbesian savages. As expressed in the Introduction, a nonkilling anthropology must not focus ex- clusively in societies that can be considered “peaceful” or “killing-free” but must scrutinize the still prevailing Hobbesian view of humans as inherently violent beings and provide a firm basis for the realization of nonkilling societies through revised socio-cultural heuristic models. Besides the above-mentioned studies which deal with particular societies, the first five chapters of this volume are aimed at questioning killing- accepting assumptions providing examples from diverse cultures and new insights on contemporary anthropological problems. In his Introduction, Sponsel sets out to reply to the questions “Are nonkilling societies possible?” and “What are the possibilities for a nonkilling anthropology?” A wide range of aspects are covered including the involvement of anthropologists with the military establishment and some proposals for a revised curriculum. Sussman and Hart criticize the “Man the Hunter” theories on innate human violence, linking them to a set of Western ethnocentric values con- ceived in the frame of Judeo-Christian cultures. The authors establish that the dominant social tool among most primate societies and individuals is cooperation and not aggression. Giorgi further expands this argument stat- ing that killing among humans is a cultural aberration that came into being during the last 7,000 to 8,000 years.

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