Some Trouble with Cows. Beth Roy

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      Introduction

      In a remote village somewhere in South Asia, someone's cow ate someone else's crop. Within two days, tens of thousands of men were ranged against each other, armed, hostile, righteous.

      Who those men were, how they chose sides, the symbolic choreography of their fight, were all particular to that village. But an inclination to confrontation is widespread. Social conflict is a durable fact of life throughout the world, from the back alleys of Belfast to the urban canyons of New York City, from the dusty pathways of Israeli settlements to the public squares of Lithuania.

      The need to understand why some groups of people define others as Other, how enemies are made, why conflicts often turn so brutal, is not politely academic. As, I suspect, with most enduring questions of scholarship, the personal and the political merge urgently in these questions. Born an American Jew during the Holocaust, reared on the Korean War and the McCarthy hearings, come to adulthood in a segregated southwestern city during the first throes of the civil rights movement, I, like most citizens of this century, experienced conflict as an assumed part of life. Perhaps it was no accident that I chose mediation as a career, nor that I came to wonder more and more, as the years of helping people resolve conflict rolled on, about the nature of animosity.

      So much enmity appears in the modern world that it is tempting to ascribe it to human nature and let it go at that. But I could not work as a mediator if I truly believed that conflict emerges from some dark, inescapable side of the human psyche. To help people solve problems, I must believe in the existence of solvable problems, and, sure enough, that belief has led to the identification and resolution of many conflicts over the years.

      But do lessons learned in practice with individuals and small groups apply to conflicts among much larger—and perhaps more resistant—masses of people? Had my colleagues and I learned anything, I wondered, over the years of practice that had theoretical significance on the level of collectivities, and, if so, how could we turn theories into tools for understanding, and perhaps helping to solve, those intractable struggles?

      Before I became a mediator in the United States, I lived in India, and there I encountered a dramatic example of community conflict, the longtime struggle between Hindus and Muslims that culminated, in 1947, in the radical reorganization of the subcontinent. ^{I determined to start my project there.}

      Communalism (as such friction between communities is labeled in South Asia) has been studied and theorized abundantly, for obvious reasons. Ethnic, racial, religious, and other sorts of community conflicts interlace so much of modern history with thick lines of intransigence that their understanding is a high priority for peacemakers and politicians alike. In India, communalism runs like a pulsating vein through the body politic СКАЧАТЬ