MA Research Interests: Conflict Resolution and Identity.

 



(British Museum, Christmas 2006)

Conflict.

Does studying the past as a collective history help us to understand how to avoid conflict in future? What strategies did human beings employ in the past to maintain order and peacefully co-inhabit? How does this vary between various types of human communities; from hunter gatherers to early agricultural communities and post Urbanisation? Finally, what do these strategies tell us about human psychology, existing or possible social and economic models, as well as the recursive dialogue between environment and human systems of co-inhabitation?

In short, are we pre-programmed to react within definable models or patterns? Is our innate nature one of peacemakers or aggressors and can we successfully evade conflict even when programmed to react; indeed is it socially healthy to do so?

These are all questions that have led me to look at how the past can inform us as to our fundamental workings and to address a very contemporary (indeed ongoing) issue. How can we resolve conflicts without aggression, are acts of warfare justifiable, necessary, even an ecological necessity, an inbuilt part of human nature or avoidable? What strategies do we have to cope with balancing human needs with the limited resources available.

Currently this work involves looking at anthropological studies, genetics for early communities as well as food storage and division strategies among early Neolithic communities. In later communities, around the time of the Urban revolution in the Near East (c. 3,500), I'm interested in studying what changes and how subsequent communities deal with increasingly dense, urban populations. With the advent of urbanism internal divisions become more complex to manage. The forging of alliances on a larger more complex and international stage becomes a new necessity for acquiring the required resources. Such work can be conducted by examining the foreign correspondence, codes of conducts, and legal systems of the time. 
Identity.

“D’où venons nous? Que sommes nous? Où allons nous?”

Before tackling the issue of conflict resolution in ancient communities however, I believe it is fundamental to first understand the importance of identity, the identity of the individual, the clan, the tribe, the Nation and how this plays a part in defining the causes and nature of human conflict. Marxists tended to perceive past human communities were much more centred on group identity, acting together for greater good, than about the cult of the individual. Is this expressed through the archaeological record? Many psychological studies suggest there is an optimal population number, above which human beings are not heard-wired to deal with effectively. Evidence for this comes in the form of the group splitting at around this optimal number within hunter-gatherer communities. In more advanced societies identity becomes a more crafted concept, as do many aspects of human existence, with the formation of statesmanship. Cumulating in the idea of Nationhood and Empire, where identity is bound up with imagined cultural and political boundaries (sometimes though not always coinciding with natural ones.) Carving up of the environment into these imagined boundaries are often the result of competition over resources. It is this process that often forms the root cause of conflicts and necessitates the creation of fragmented group identities within a more homogenising human identity.

Important themes to this investigation:

Ø  The relationship between Human communities and the natural world, or extraneous realities V.s the internal perceptions with which individuals and communities shape the surrounding landscape.

Ø  What it means to be human and to express oneself humanly; (The Sapient Paradox: the reflection of self and the world resulting in complexity). The production of art, music and the sciences as symptoms of a deepening sense of self both in relation to one another and as an expressed desire to both define ourselves as a species from the surrounding matrix of the cosmos whilst connecting with it.

For my MA I shall be hoping to focus on early communities, or a comparative approach between two distinct time periods one characteristically urban the other pre-urban.  

Recommended Reading (This list will be updated as research progresses.)

Smith, Adam T. The Political Landscape, Constellations of Authority in Early Complex Polities. University of California Press, London, 2003.

Renfrew, Colin. Figuring it Out. Thames and Hudson, London, 2003.