Ends of War

We had lucky 13 people in the room for our session throughout the day, with very productive discussion from those summarizing papers as well as audience participants. Our discussant Polly Wiessner identified several themes in the papers. First, she noted frequent mention of Christianity and challenged us to answer the question of why Christianity promotes peace in some cases but not in others. She suggested that it might in part be a matter of scale, being more effective in smaller populations. Noting that pastors can promote peace, she also observed that in some areas they are known to be corrupt, which would diminish their moral authority. She also challenged us to consider how it works when it does, and to pay attention to the emotional influence of ritual performance in maintaining peace. As capitalism becomes stronger in places where Christianity was established first, she challenged us to consider, will wars resurge over money? Second, Polly observed that our papers contradict the popular understanding that tribal peoples are more warlike than others. In fact, war and peace are intertwined in broader exchange patterns as “gifts and blows.” We can emphasize that the societies we study, including their remembered pre-contact past, illustrate that the past of human warfare was not typically a time of violent anarchy. War is not necessarily over resources in our part of the world, but about relationships. Third, Polly noted that the papers rightly stress agency in war- and peacemaking. People respond to incentives and to force in these matters, and we should explicitly describe these processes of individual action and decision-making in making peace happen and stay. Fourth, Polly reminded us that war does solve problems when and where it is resorted to, and we need to understand what these problems are and how people solve them without recourse to war. In light of these themes and our discussions throughout the session, we agreed to revise our papers to address the general theme of how each case provides insight into how war can be abolished and peace sustained indefinitely. We are pursuing publication together as a theme issue of a journal under the title “Ending War and Sustaining Peace: Pacific Means.”

Roger Lohmann, Department of Anthropology, Trent University, 2140 West Bank Drive, Peterborough, Ontario K9J 7B8, CANADA; rogerlohmann@trentu.ca