Margaret Paxson writes:

Let’s just say that suddenly you are a social scientist and you want to study peace. That is, you want to understand what makes for a peaceful society. Let’s say that, for years in your work in various parts of the world, you’ve been surrounded by evidence of violence and war. From individual people, you’ve heard about beatings and arrests and murders and rapes; you’ve heard about deportations and black-masked men demanding your food or your life. You’ve heard about family violence and village violence and state violence. You’ve heard these stories from old women with loose, liquid tears and young men with arms full of prison tattoos.

There were men on horseback calling the boys to war and long black cars arriving to steal people away in the dead of night; there were girls who’d wandered the landscape, insane after sexual violations; there was the survival of the fittest in concentration camps; there were pregnant women beaten until their children were lost and bodies piled up in times of famine; there was arrest and exile for the theft of a turnip; there were those who were battered for being a Jew or a Christian or a Muslim or a Bahá’í.

Let’s say that, in the world of ideas that swirled around you, approximations were made of how to make sense of this mess: the presence of certain kinds of states; the presence of certain kinds of social diversity; the presence of certain kinds of religions. And let’s say that the shattering stories had piled on over the years and at some point you just snapped. And you wanted to study war no more.

As it turns out, it’s harder to study peace than you might think.

Or it has been for me. I’m an anthropologist who spent years living among country people asking basic questions about how memory works in groups. I thought I had some ideas for how I might start a search for peace. After all, even though the stories of violence were many, for the most part people seemed occupied with other things in life: they were working in kitchens or fields, hauling water, making decisions about what to do based on the weather, eating with guests, cleaning up after livestock. In normal times, even if they bristled sometimes, people faced each other day-to-day with working problems and working solutions. There was love and there were revelries and heartbreaks. And in spite of what they’d seen in life or what their very own hands might have wrought on their worst days, people saw themselves as basically decent, and expected basic decency back from the world.

Surely, there had to be ways of looking for that kind of eye-to-eye decency. Surely, there were ways to study its power and its limits, particularly when people were faced with tempestuous times. Were there communities out there that were good at being good when things got bad? In my research on memory, I’d studied practices of resistance and persistence. Could there be communities that were resistant to violence, persistent in decency? I didn’t know exactly what I was on to, but I knew I wanted to study it. In shorthand, I called it peace. [Continue reading…]