It is our system of values that sustains us, both as persons and as societies. It is adherence to our value systems that leads to and ensures our continuance. . . . The Comanche have always been keen students of human nature and paid great attention to constructing social spaces that reduce conflict. . . . Maintaining a certain level of social harmony kept everyone’s energy focused where it needed to be focused, on the continuation of the community into the future.
One of the key concepts that emerges from an examination of the value orientations with regard to peace and violence both cross-culturally and across the indigenous-modernity divide is the need to sustain and recover community when it has been broken. In the indigenous model, human relationships are primary, and therefore great emphasis is placed on avoiding the disruption of relationships to begin with and on restoring them if they do become strained or damaged. Most indigenous societies where people are highly interdependent are more cooperatively oriented than are modern postindustrial societies. An emphasis on maintaining relationships makes sense under such conditions of interdependence. Conflicts threaten the smooth functioning of the social group and so indigenous cultures have a variety of ways to minimize the negative impact of discord and strife while maximizing community harmony and prosociality as reflected in the four Rs.
Reciprocity
Not only is reciprocity one of the four Rs and therefore soundly represented across indigenous societies, but more generally, reciprocity is a central principle of social life, whether in an indigenous or a modern context (Mauss, 2000; Sahlins, 1965; Westermarck, 1924). This observation is of utmost relevance to the modern world because conceptions of justice are intricately interwoven with the reciprocity principle.
Reciprocity can manifest itself in exact paybacks, or it can be elaborated via inexact judicial mechanisms and cultural meanings into patterns of apology, compensation, fines, or ordeals. In all cases, the intention is to restore the balance. The key point is that conflict resolution and judicial procedure, across diverse social contexts, share common foundational elements in the manifestation of the principle of reciprocity. Justice and resolution involve making a balance, which may be done, for instance, by a payback, compensation, punishment, or apology and forgiveness.
In its simplest form, the reciprocity principle is fulfilled through exact equivalents. We could call this the eye-for-an-eye approach. Here are some examples. When a man from Lesu in Melanesia hit another man, the bystanders urged the recipient of the blow to strike the assailant back to put an end to the matter (Powdermaker, 1933). Among the Nama of southern Africa, a man convicted of murder will be executed in exactly the same manner that he killed his victim, for instance, stabbed if he had stabbed, shot if he had shot, and so forth (Schapera, 1930). This reasoning also is applied by the Suku of Africa, as a description by Kopytoff (1961, p. 63) makes clear: “Reciprocity is also maintained by balancing an action with a similar counteraction. A theft is wiped out by an answering theft, an insult returned effaces an insult given, a murder is compensated by a reciprocal murder; in these cases no further settlement is necessary.”
In contrast to this literal reasoning, many societies are more flexible as to how to balance the scales of justice; we can refer to this type of payback as inexact equivalents. A very common way to resolve a dispute is through the payment of damages. In a recent study of indigenous village courts among the Enga of Papua New Guinea, pertaining to cases involving homicide, rape, assault, and property issues, the vast majority of cases (69 percent) involved compensation (Wiessner and Pupu, 2012). Of the Garo of India, Burling (1963, p. 252) writes that “compensation should end the dispute and clear the air. To pay compensation is to acknowledge guilt formally, and grant satisfaction to the other side.” Some societies have indemnity scales that specify the amount and type of payments that are required to compensate the plaintiffs for particular kinds of crimes, such as blinding someone, raping a woman, accidently killing someone, or deliberately committing murder.
Another path to justice through inexact equivalents is restoring the balance through the administration of punishment. In different cultural contexts, the guilty may be beaten, whipped, verbally humiliated, fined, or jailed. Among the Nama, for example, the convicted may be flogged, fined, have property confiscated, or even be killed (Schapera, 1930). As a variation on this punishment theme, some societies rely not on humans but on supernatural beings to mete out punishment. Eminent justice is believed to occur, for example, by Rotuman Islanders of the Pacific and among the Konso of Africa.
Revenge homicide, a form of self-redress, is another widely prevalent example of justice seeking that accords with the reciprocity principle. Revenge killings occur in about half of the societies in the Standard Cross Cultural Sample of 186 cultures from around the world (Ericksen and Horton, 1992). Whereas revenge killing is an example of exact reciprocity, many cultures have implemented the practice of paying restitution in the form of blood money, a practice that fits the second, more flexible, inexact application of the reciprocity principle, which balances the initial crime in terms of equivalents rather than exactitudes. One broader implication is that exact systems, which can be quite violent, have been replaced in some instances by mechanisms of inexact payback, as in cases where blood revenge of the past has been supplanted by blood money, as among the Iroquois, Otoro Nuba, and Azande (Fry, 2012).
There is a major practical reason for highlighting reciprocity as a foundational principle behind justice seeking and conflict resolution. In the twenty-first-century, global pluralistic society consisting of approximately two hundred nation-states, numerous ethnic groups, and a multitude of religious orientations, which can be conceptualized as constituting a plethora of interactional borders (Souillac, 2012), transborder conflict behavior is definitely affected by the principle of reciprocity. Despite the fact that effective, nonviolent conflict resolution mechanisms are well developed at the micro group and intragroup level (e.g., in the form of mediation moots, courts of law, supernatural sanctions, and so forth), judicial and resolution processes are only poorly manifested or even absent at the global level. The powerful and ubiquitous principle of reciprocity can be harnessed in the creation of inexact conflict resolution systems and mechanism at the global level just as balance restoration using inexact equivalents has been implemented repeatedly at lower social strata as alternatives to the exactness of violent revenge.
Peace Systems
A final set of indigenous insights for conflict resolution, peace, and justice comes from the study of peace systems. A peace system is a group of neighboring societies that do not make war on each other and sometimes not with outsiders either (Fry, 2006, 2012). For example, the aboriginal inhabitants of the central Malaysia Peninsula, the Inuit of Greenland, the Montagnais, Naskapi, and Cree bands of the Labrador Peninsula, the societies of India’s Nilgiri and Wynaad Plateaus, the tribes of the Upper Xingu River basin in Brazil, the Iroquois of North America, Australian Aborigines generally, but especially those groups of the Great Western Desert, and even the European Union (EU) exemplify peace systems (Fry, 2006, 2012). The existence of peace systems such as these not only contradicts the assumption that war is inevitable but also may provide insight into how to create a global peace system.
Common features of active peace systems include an overarching social identity that spans the member subgroups, interlinkages among subgroups (e.g., trade or kin relationships), interdependence (e.g., ecological, economic, or defensive), nonwarring core values, ceremonies and symbolism that reinforce peace and the overarching common identity, and effective conflict management processes and institutions (Fry, 2012). Regarding the last point, sometimes familiar and effective conflict resolution mechanisms that were already present at lower social strata are recreated at new higher social levels. For example, the individual nations that were to unite into the Iroquois Confederation had a long history of handling disputes in village and tribal councils. When the original five neighboring nations
of the Iroquois Confederation unified and gave up internally warring with one another, they also created a new governing institution, the Grand Council, which consisted of fifty chiefs appointed by matrilineal matrons and representing all five tribes (Dennis, 1993). The Mohawks and the Senecas sat to one side of the Grand Council fire and the Oneidas and Cayugas sat on the opposite side (Wallace, 1994). The Onondagas were the official Keepers of the Fire and mediated the discussion from a central position (Dennis, 1993). If a consensus emerged from the discussions, the Onondagas ratified the decision; if disagreements were voiced, the Onondagas might refer the matter back to one of the subcouncils for further consideration. With the formation of the Iroquois Confederation, the seeking of violent revenge within and among tribes was outlawed and replaced with the payment of compensation by the perpetrator to the family of the occasional homicide victim. The abandonment of revenge killings, feud, internal warfare, and cannibalism accompanied the creation of the Iroquois peace system (Dennis, 1993; Wallace, 1994). The unity and peace within the confederation were maintained for over three hundred years (Fry, 2012).
The fact that people have created and maintained nonwarring peace systems in various quarters of the globe demonstrates that alternatives to the war system are in fact possible. Culturally diverse examples of peace systems in conjunction with the regional EU peace system should combine to stimulate our imagination about how to create a global peace system. Global interdependence exists. This reality parallels an indigenous conception of relationship and interconnectivity, among humans and also with nature, and can provide the rationale for why cooperation and new institutions of governance are necessary to address common concerns such as global warming, oceanic pollution, population growth, and loss of biodiversity. Safety and security under current global circumstances require unified action among all the parties. Because the peoples of the world today are interdependent in numerous ways, just as are members of any given society, they must meet common challenges with cooperative strategies, not with individual strife.
Reflections
Every society has ways of dealing with conflict. Some entail violence, but most do not. Our current postindustrial, Western value orientation contains significant omissions in its development of a legal and normative framework to organize international society. While important advances have been achieved in terms of the recognition of the interdependence of states and societies, and war-related violence as well as the abuse of human rights have been delegitimized at the level of international law and norms, this is clearly insufficient. A global peace system that reinforces the wide array of conflict prevention, conflict resolution, and conflict transformation processes and norms is needed but has not been created. With power, authority, competition, and materialism at its cultural and social core, the modern, postindustrial value orientation remains accepting of and even conducive to the waging of war. Our global community rests on a social and cultural complex of values that is evolutionarily recent, and of which its many blind spots with regard to the inevitability of war, violence, and conflict are an aberration. This observation raises the question as to the global sustainability of such a complex of values and the practices they support. However, there is another reason to question the long-term sustainability of the modern, postindustrial Western value orientation. Until recently, societies have persisted through the cooperation, sharing, and caring for their members as reflected in the four Rs. At this juncture in human history, all people on the planet are in many ways part of the same interdependent social-economic-ecological system. We suggest that an indigenous caring, sharing, cooperating value orientation, which has served human societies well for millennia, is needed at the planetary level. Our very survival as a species requires us to take a huge step toward this ancient ethos, that is, back toward an ethos fostering relationship, responsibility, reciprocity, and redistribution, in order to develop a new sustainability with the environment and with ourselves. Concordant with this shift in values would be the creation of a global peace system to provide collective human security for the entire interdependent planet. We can develop further ways of harnessing collective wisdom in a way that is grounded in cultural reflexivity on all sides to accomplish this transition.
HARNESSING OF COLLECTIVE WISDOM FOR GLOBAL CONFLICT RESOLUTION, JUSTICE, AND PEACE
In 1963, a UNESCO study (Lowie, Métraux, and Morazé, 1963) of indigenous approaches to conflict resolution pointed out that the usual dualistic comparison between an industrialized society governed by the rules of reason and traditional societies in which mystical affect played a large part crumbled in the face of the observation of conflict resolution practices. The report emphasized how anthropology, in the beginning period of decolonization, led Western powers to question their own assumptions about society, rationality, and ethics, thus noting, for example, that “modern man will not always obey pure logic without giving way to the irrational” (Lowie et al., 1963, p. 178). The UNESCO study remains limited by its binary interpretation of a more “violent archaic world” in the prohibition of the deviation from ritual, for example, and of a “rational and innovation and truth seeking West.” Nevertheless, this early inquiry can serve as a reminder of how careful observation of indigenous societies around the globe can serve not as a means of further reinforcing a Western perspective on concepts such as conflict resolution but, rather, as a lesson in humility and in the deconstruction of dominant historical narratives in which the common elaboration of values, whether through ritual, practice, beliefs, or rational discussion, takes its rightful place.
The observation that practices such as conflict resolution may have been an integral part of a society’s ethical existence and survival, rather than a mere means to an end, can shed light on the limitations of theory or practice that continues to frame conflict resolution as a response to momentary crisis rather than as a consistent ethical approach to human and cultural survival. Conflict resolution approaches that are built into a culture’s ethos, or way of life, can provide a powerful claim for the need to build bridges across the traditional divide between indigenous and modern perspectives. As we have seen from ethnographic considerations, reciprocity is inherent in conflict resolution and justice mechanisms. Achieving justice, theoretically and in practice, involves exact or inexact means of restoring a balance. A conflict resolution and justice philosophy that asserts the nonexclusiveness of methods and concomitantly embraces the idea of inexact reciprocity, as well as the inclusion of indigenous perspectives and practices, provides a knowledge and resource pool from which to draw on to create viable justice and conflict resolution mechanisms needed by humanity in the short- and long-term future. This inclusive creative process can include careful weighing of the pros and cons of the competition-driven, win-lose, power-based orientation in comparison to a four Rs, cooperatively focused, win-win ethos in the globalized and interdependent twenty-first-century world.
A central observation is that conflict resolution and justice mechanisms that are relevant to particular societies need not remain limited in their application to these particular societies. Instead they could become part of the pool of shared meanings and resources used for managing conflict and addressing issues such as climate change, species and habitat loss, nuclear proliferation, providing true human security, and other concerns that cross borders and are fundamentally nothing less than urgent matters related to human survival.
Consideration of conflict resolution, justice-seeking, and peacemaking processes all emerge as common and even sacred endeavors, from both historical and anthropological perspectives, to link peace with life, ethics with justice, and, successfully or less successfully, to keep the excesses of power and human violence at bay. The modern, postindustrial emphasis on debate and rational discussion in the public sphere in which peacemaking, conflict resolution, and mediation find their place can be powerfully combined in practice and intervention with a sense of ethical responsibility to alleviate the burden of violence and aggression
that potentially threatens all human societies.
There are clear variations in the Western history of ideas that underlie modern concepts at the heart of our global conflict resolution techniques and of our conceptions of peace with justice, such as human rights and the goals of democracy (Souillac, 2005, 2011, 2012). Nevertheless, these general orientations lead to different perceptions and practices regarding conflict and peacefulness that can supplement and enrich contemporary global models of conflict transformation and peace with justice.
A process of pooling and integrating indigenous and modern knowledge and practice about peacemaking and conflict resolution requires a two-pronged strategy. The first is a value-based approach. It entails emphasizing normative and ethical components of knowledge and practice to construct a peace-based value system. Thus, whereas it makes sense to analyze these procedures across different systems, highlighting what is culture specific, it is also enlightening to consider cross-cultural normative or ethical components to these procedures—that is, values—as they can be inferred from observation of the practices and discussion with the participants.
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