Nonkilling Societies Exploratory Colloquium in Montréal

CGNK will organize during this week (November 16-17) its second Exploratory Colloquium which will explore what role of cultures in contributing to a world without killing, bringing together a group of prominent scholars from a wide array of theoretical, empirical and methodological approaches and also different academic and geographical backgrounds.

The Colloquium, to be held in Montréal, will encompass a full session on nonkilling at the American Anthropological Association 110th Annual Meeting followed the next day by an open debate based on an agenda, list of discussion topics and objectives agreed upon before-hand by the Nonkilling Anthropology Research Committee members and additional participants. This meeting will be co-sponsored by the Canada Research Chair on Islam, Pluralism and Globalization, at the Université de Montréal.

This Nonkilling Societies Exploratory Colloquium will challenge the still prevailing Hobbesian view of humans as inherently violent beings exploring existing killing-free societies, comparing nonkilling practices among other cultures and scrutinizing ethnographic misrepresentations shaped by the assumption of human intraspecific lethal predisposition.

Program

The Exploratory Colloquium on Nonkilling Societies will consist of a two-day gathering focused on

• the socio-cultural causes of killing;
• the socio-cultural causes of nonkilling;
• the socio-cultural transformations relevant to building societies where human killing is greatly reduced and eventually absent (i.e., killing-free societies, with no killing, threats to kill or conditions conducive to killing).

Day one will take the form of an organized session at the American Anthropological Association 110th Annual Meeting, with the general title: “Challenging the Legacy of Innate Depravity: The New Tidemark of the Nonkilling Paradigm”. The session is organized by Leslie E. Sponsel (University of Hawaii) and Joam Evans Pim (Center for Global Nonkilling) and Chaired by Poranee Natadecha-Sponsel (Chaminade University) including Kirk M Endicott (Dartmouth College) and Douglas P. Fry (Abo Akademi University) as discussants. Abstracts for the eleven papers to be presented are featured in the PDF program. The session will be followed by an initial discussion. This initial discussion on day one will be continued in a full day of debate at the Canada Research Chair on Islam, Pluralism and Globalization, Université de Montréal.