Ends of War

Due to the bad weather, only three people attended the informal session: Roger Lohmann, David Troolin, and Ryan Schram. We nevertheless had very productive discussions of the abstracts provided by Peter Kanaparo, Glenn Petersen, Paul Roscoe, and Camellia Webb Gannon, who participated in absentia, and a full paper presented by Roger Lohmann. Our session's central goal was to document ways of making peace in past and present Pacific societies and to ask how these methods might be useful in other situations. A general, four-field anthropological perspective on these matters was encouraged. We discussed topics such as:

* how to define peace and war, noting that warfare can be one method of establishing peace;
* the dialectical relationship between war and peace;
* the value of relating specific cases to bigger issues of human nature and ultimate goals of world peace;
* the practicalities and methods of peacemaking that succeed or fail;
* the cultural contexts upon which relationships of both war and peace depend, and how conflicting models of war and peace must be reconciled or worked around when combatants and peacemakers from different social cultures meet;
* how peacemaking is different when warring parties are on relatively equal versus unequal terms, with colonial pacification situations exemplifying the latter;
* the extent to which ideology vs. material conditions allow peacemaking.

We would like to meet again as a Working Session in Honolulu next year, and have received statements of interest to participate from Cato Berg, Terry Brown, Doug Hollan, Ryan Schram, and David Troolin. Anyone who would like to participate in the working session should send a title and abstract of the paper you would like to present to Roger Lohmann by October 20, 2010. Participants will pre-circulate full papers by January 15, 2011.

Roger Lohmann, Trent University, 2000 Simcoe St. N., Oshawa, ON, L1H 7L7, CANADA; <rogerlohmann@trentu.ca>

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