WHAT ARE MY REASONS FOR INVOLVEMENT IN
THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF PEACE AND NONVIOLENCE?
Many of the reasons for my academic involvement in the anthropology of peace and nonviolence are related to my personal history. I never knew my maternal grandfather, he was killed in France during WWI. That is why his wife and their two daughters, one my Mother, moved to the US from Germany afterward to start a new life. They were war refugees. One of my uncles had only one arm, he had lost the other when his plane was shot down during an allied bombing run over Germany in WWII. My best friend in the neighborhood where I grew up in Indianapolis never knew his father who was killed in the Korean War. My Mother disliked any television programs on war or violence. Also, even though far removed from WWII, as a German American I have long sensed guilt over what the Nazis did to Jews and other people during WWII. Early on I was thoroughly repulsed by racism and other injustices.
During my first period of graduate work in anthropology which was at Indiana University in 1965 to 1968, late in the Vietnam War period, I was even more politically naive than now and didn't get involved in any antiwar demonstrations on campus. I had my nose in a book as usual, always being something of a cloistered scholar. However, on my own I did explore whatever was available in the library on the anthropology of war which was not much at the time. Eventually I discovered works such as the book War: The Anthropology of Armed Conflict and Aggression edited by Morton Fried, Marvin Harris, and Robert Murphy in 1968. At IU David Bidney was a great professor and undoubtedly influenced my concern for humanistic and normative aspects of anthropology through his courses and his classic book Theoretical Anthropology (1967). During that period I was lucky enough to have a draft deferment from military service, a heavy cloud hanging over the head of many university men at the time.
Basically I am a pacifist. Most of all this is just a deep gut reaction against killing another human or being involved in "modern" war which I view ultimately as systematic, high-tech, state-sanctioned, mass murder, this regardless of the cause. Recall the "shock and awe" bombing campaigns over Baghdad? Imagine the multitude of innocent civilians terrorized and victimized by this attack. The corresponding philosophy and religion of pacifism came many years later through books such as Paul Christopher’s The Ethics of War and Peace (1994, 1999). Nevertheless, in general I respect those who serve honorably in the military, although less so since the draft is no longer operative and many individuals elect the military as an economic opportunity when they have other choices. I am not sure how that differs from being a mercenary, whatever their patriotic rhetoric might be.
At Cornell University in the early 1970s I was most fortunate to enjoy an NIH Traineeship in Biological Anthropology with Kenneth A.R. Kennedy as my advisor and guru. For various reasons I won't burden you with here, I ended up doing my doctoral dissertation on the behavioral ecology of Yanomami hunting. When as a graduate student I first read Napoleon Chagnon's Yanomamo: The Fierce People (1968), I thought that the Yanomami were the last society I would ever want to visit. Yet I was attracted to work in the Amazon from previous field experience in Colombia, and now in the country of Venezuela in particular where I had contacts from IU and Cornell, Venezuelan anthropologists Gustavo Eskildsen and Nelly Arvelo-Jimenez, respectively. They informed me that the Yanomami would be the most appropriate indigenous group for the questions I was interested in researching. Jacques Lizot, a French anthropologist who had lived and worked extensively with the Yanomami for about a quarter of a century, opined that, although serious violence certainly occurs now and then, it was greatly exaggerated and distorted in Chagnon’s ethnography. Once in a Yanomami village in the upper Erebato River region in 1974-75, I quickly found out that the Yanomami there were not the "fierce people" by any stretch of the imagination. They were just humans, and as in any society, this included aspects of nonviolence as well as violence, although I witnessed very little of the latter. Quite independently, Kenneth R. Good, who worked in the same general area as Chagnon and for far longer, more than a dozen years, also affirmed that violence and war are not ubiquitous, as have the great majority of some three dozen other anthropologists who have ever worked with Yanomami. (See Good’s book, Into the Heart, 1991).
As I finished my dissertation in 1981 I was quite lucky to actually find a regular job to practice anthropology, and of all places, at the University of Hawai`i. There I soon met Glenn Paige, a professor in Political Science, specializing in nonviolence. (See his web site http://www.globalnonviolence.org where you can find free books on the subject to read or download). Eventually he invited me to organize a faculty research seminar on nonviolence. I did so for three semesters in 1984-85 with more than a hundred guest speakers sampling most of the academic disciplines from art to zoology and much in between as well as some outside non-academic professionals from the local police about family abuse and so on. However, although the guests were specifically asked to speak directly about nonviolence and/or peace, actually most concentrated on the opposite, violence and/or war, as if suffering from some mental or cultural blockage (cf. Fry 2006 on cultural beliefs). That seminar led me to become involved in the establishment and development of the Spark M. Matsunaga Institute for Peace at UH during its first decade as one of its founding members. In turn, this background fed into the development of my course ANTH 345 Aggression, War, and Peace which I have been teaching most spring semesters for many years. (See syllabi and other information under Courses on my homepage).
In 1988, I co-organized a session at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association with a former teacher from Cornell, Thomas Gregor, and eventually this resulted in the co-edited book The Anthropology of Peace and Nonviolence (1994). Gregor kindly invited me to a small Guggenheim conference in 1990 in Charleston, South Carolina. The conference was titled “What We Know About Peace.” This led to his own edited book, A Natural History of Peace (1996), in which I have a chapter by that title. With my permission he borrowed the book title from my chapter title. (The chapter is now readily available online in Bruce Bonta’s website: http://www.peacefulsocieties.org). However, I was very disappointed that most the dozen or so participants at this conference focused on war instead of peace, except for Kenneth Boulding and Johan Galtung. Subsequently, in 1999 I co-organized with Kenneth R. Good a session called “Does War Have Any Future? Insights from a Century of Anthropological Research” at the annual meeting of the AAA. We had hoped to eventually develop a joint statement on the anthropology of war comparable to the UNESCO Statement on Violence, but it proved impossible for the panelists to reach any agreement (see Sponsel and Good 2000).
Another source of my interest in peace as an anthropologist was my service as Chair of the Commission for Human Rights and subsequent Committee for Human Rights of the AAA during 1992-1996. As Doug Fry relates about the Zapotec of Mexico, peace is honoring human rights. I was particularly impressed by the serious devotion to human rights as well as the experience and expertise of fellow committee members, something that encourages me to recall whenever I am depressed by some developments in anthropology.
In 1985, I married a Thai woman, Poranee Natadecha, and our wedding was held in a Buddhist temple here in Honolulu. That together with various conversations and readings about Buddhism and fieldwork in Thailand led me to become a Buddhist, although eventually I realized that in principle I was actually a Buddhist in some ways long before I started to really study and practice Buddhism as such. A pivotal concern of Buddhism is to reduce suffering, and essential to this is pursuing nonviolence, compassion, and loving-kindness. I try hard in spite of human shortcomings. Buddhism provided another connection with pacifism. It also provides a world view and set of values which undoubtedly influence my science and scholarship as an anthropologist including my interest in peace and nonviolence.
Contrary to Keith Otterbein's ornithological label in our exchange in the American Anthropologist (December 2000), I am not simply a dove. While a pacifist, I am not an absolute pacifist. I do believe in the possibility of a just war in terms of both cause and means, but I am utterly opposed to any war if it is not absolutely the last resort for defense. By now it should be obvious that the current war in Iraq is not just in any sense as attested by former President Jimmy Carter among many others in various published statements since spring 2003 including his book Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis (2005).
I realize that part of the conceptual and perceptual underpinnings of war are ideas about human nature, human evolution and prehistory, and human territoriality and aggression. Here is one role where anthropology is of some social significance as most convincingly demonstrated by the recent book by Douglas P. Fry titled The Human Potential for Peace: An Anthropological Challenge to Assumptions about War and Violence (2006). I discovered that significance early on as one of my favorite authors since late in highschool was Ashley Montagu, who, throughout his long career, pursued socio-political issues like the nature versus nurture controversy over the origins of human aggression and associated pseudoscience. (See my entry on Montagu in the recently published Encyclopedia of Anthropology edited by H. James Birx, 2006).
Throughout my own career I have specialized in exploring the interfaces between disciplines (anthropology, ecology, peace studies, comparative religion, Buddhist studies) and subdisciplines (biological and cultural anthropology) as well as their corresponding phenomena with my primary interests being ecology, religion, and peace. I find this productive, rather than being confined to a single narrow specialization, even if that would be more manageable and comfortable. Although stretched thin, I enjoy pursuing the interrelationships between peace and ecology, between religion and peace, and between religion and ecology, the latter increasingly the focus of my teaching and research which I call spiritual ecology. (I organized a session on spiritual ecology for the 2004 and 2005 AAA conventions).
Obviously all of these interconnections, and others as well, are behind the plight of contemporary humanity not to mention our national addiction to oil and recent obsession with terrorism. (See, for example, Michael Klare's book Resource Wars, 2002). When I taught the 345 course in the spring of 2003, I anticipated a US invasion of Iraq which was so obvious with all the rhetoric in the media. Therefore I focused much of the course on providing anthropological background and insights on the Middle East region as well as discussions of just war theory and the like.
I really respect the work of war scholars like Brian Ferguson, Carolyn Nordstrom, and your colleague Keith Otterbein, and of peace scholars like you, Doug Fry, and Bruce Bonta (see http://www.peacefulsocieties.org). However, increasingly I have been inclined to distinguish between war studies and peace studies as in my reply to Otterbein a few years ago. What usually goes under the heading of peace studies is actually overwhelmingly war studies following the negative concept of peace as merely the absence of war. I think that nonviolence and peace today need far more attention than ever, and anthropology has a lot to contribute to that in many different ways such as demonstrated in the aforementioned book by Fry and in several of my own publications. Some of this mutual relevance of anthropology and peace studies I discussed in the introductory chapter to The Anthropology of Peace and Nonviolence. Paige (2002) emphasizes examining in specific cases the conditions and processes which generate the transition from peace to war, and also the converse, something I think is most important.
In conclusion in the final analysis I am interested in the anthropology of peace and nonviolence because it is highly relevant in so many ways, including personally, academically, and politically. War and peace are surely among the most pressing issues facing humankind along with others like the ecocrisis and global warming, and religious intolerance and fanaticism. Moreover, such issues may interact synergetically progressively making everything even worse. Radical rethinking and revisioning is the only hope for a better world.
References Cited
Bidney, David, 1967, Theoretical Anthropology (Second Augmened Edition), New York, NY: Schocken Books.
Bonta, Bruce D., 2006, Peaceful Societies website:
http://www.peacefulsocieties.org
Carter, Jimmy, 2005, Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis, New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.
Chagnon, Napoleon A., 1968, Yanomamo: The Fierce People, New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Christopher, Paul, 1999, The Ethics of War and Peace: An Introduction to Legal and Moral Issues, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall (Second edition).
Fried, Morton, Marvin Harris, and Robert Murphy, eds., 1968, War: The Anthropology of Armed Conflict and Aggression, Garden City, NY: Natural History Press.
Fry, Douglas P., 2006, The Human Potential for Peace: An Anthropological Challenge to Assumptions about War and Violence, New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Good, Kenneth R., with David Chanoff, 1991, Into the Heart: One Man’s Pursuit of Love and Knowledge Among Yanomama, New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.
Gregor, Thomas A, ed., 1996, A Natural History of Peace, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.
Klare, Michael, 2002, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict, New York, NY: Harry Holt.
Paige, Glenn D., 2002, Nonkilling Global Political Science, New York, NY: Xlibris.
Paige, Glenn D., 2006, Center for Global Nonviolence Website:
http://www.globalnonviolence.org
Sponsel, Leslie E., 2000 (December), “Response to Otterbein,” American Anthropologist 102(4):837-840.
Sponsel, Leslie E., 2006, "Ashley Montagu," Encyclopedia of Anthropology, H. James Birx, ed., Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications 4:1620-1622.
Sponsel, Leslie E., and Kenneth R. Good, 2000 (February), “Anthropologists Debate the Future of War,” AAA Anthropology News 41(2):19-20.
Sponsel, Leslie E., and Thomas A. Gregor, eds., 1994, The Anthropology of Peace and Nonviolence, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers.
For other publications on war and peace see CV and also Publications on my homepage: