By Bruce Bower
After 15 years of intense warfare, Papua New Guinea’s Enga society recently gave peace a fighting chance. Outdoor village courts, which had formerly settled local disputes, resolved many bloody conflicts between Enga clans by determining how much communities should compensate one another for murders and other offenses.
The Enga demonstrate that small-scale societies can devise effective, sophisticated means for peacemaking, say anthropologist Polly Wiessner of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and Nitze Pupu, a lawyer and researcher at the Enga Tradition and Transition Center in Papua New Guinea. Their analysis appears in the Sept. 28 Science.
Researchers have documented higher rates of murder and warfare in many hunter-gatherer groups and village-based societies than in modern nations (SN: 2/6/88, p. 90). The new work underscores an often overlooked tension in nonstate societies between the constant danger of violence, particularly from young men, and efforts to restrain lethal conflicts, usually organized by women and older men, says Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker.