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Patrick J. Christian is a Policy Advisor with the Office of the Secretary of Defense, an adjunct instructor-researcher at the National Intelligence Univeristy’s Department of African Studies, USA and a PhD student at Nova Southeastern University’s Department of Conflict Analysis & Resolution, USA. He is author of A Combat Advisor’s Guide to Tribal Engagement (Universal, 2011) and has extensive field experience as a Special Forces Officer operating in Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Guatemala, Kenya, Darfur Sudan, the Somali Ogadin region of Ethiopia, Morocco, and Iraq. His research focus is on the sociological and psychological foundations of violent intra-state conflict. Abstract This paper is an examination of sociocentric indigenous systems of conflict resolution and their connection to intractable conflict when damaged. Some of the complexities that sociocentric systems of conflict resolution present include high levels of sovereignty and their basis of naturally evolved sociocentric sociological structure as a basis for their existential identity and physical life-cycle. Within the complexity of the sociocentric structure, the paper discusses the larger issues and difficulties of processing loss, violence, and conflict events within a group context where meaning is communal rather than individually constructed. Finally, the paper reviews the inherent conflict that is created by egocentric interventionist organizations and institutions’ unconscious attempts at overlaying western-urbanized forms of ethno-justice and ethno-psychology onto sociocentric structures; a practice that further devolves the structures into conflict intractability. Introduction The number of indigenous societies that are engaged in protracted communal conflict suggest that a principal reason for the levels and intractability of the violence is as much structural- internal to the community as situational-external. 1 The structural condition that is put forward as an underlying reason is in the nature of the type of society; that of a highly sovereign sociocentric life-cycle of organization that is characteristic of many communities in under or 1 Under situational, I include foreign interventions over ideological struggles, post colonial infighting, economic deprivation, and the ubiquitous political strongman-cum-leader who hasn’t learned to comply with the rules governing the Westphalia state model of social structure. Intractable Conflict and the Sociocentric Indigenous system of Conflict Resolution Patrick James Christian National Intelligence University, Wash DC Nova Southeastern University Department of Conflict Analysis & Resolution
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Intractable Conflict and the Sociocentric Indigenous System of Conflict Resolution

Nov 06, 2022

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Page 1: Intractable Conflict and the Sociocentric Indigenous System of Conflict Resolution

Patrick J. Christian is a Policy Advisor with the Office of the Secretary of Defense, an adjunct instructor-researcher at the National Intelligence Univeristy’s Department of African Studies, USA and a PhD student at Nova Southeastern University’s Department of Conflict Analysis & Resolution, USA. He is author of A Combat Advisor’s Guide to Tribal Engagement (Universal, 2011) and has extensive field experience as a Special Forces Officer operating in Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Guatemala, Kenya, Darfur Sudan, the Somali Ogadin region of Ethiopia, Morocco, and Iraq. His research focus is on the sociological and psychological foundations of violent intra-state conflict.

Abstract

This paper is an examination of sociocentric indigenous systems of conflict resolution and their connection to intractable conflict when damaged. Some of the complexities that sociocentric systems of conflict resolution present include high levels of sovereignty and their basis of naturally evolved sociocentric sociological structure as a basis for their existential identity and physical life-cycle. Within the complexity of the sociocentric structure, the paper discusses the larger issues and difficulties of processing loss, violence, and conflict events within a group context where meaning is communal rather than individually constructed. Finally, the paper reviews the inherent conflict that is created by egocentric interventionist organizations and institutions’ unconscious attempts at overlaying western-urbanized forms of ethno-justice and ethno-psychology onto sociocentric structures; a practice that further devolves the structures into conflict intractability.

Introduction

The number of indigenous societies that are engaged in protracted communal conflict suggest that a principal reason for the levels and intractability of the violence is as much structural-internal to the community as situational-external.1 The structural condition that is put forward as an underlying reason is in the nature of the type of society; that of a highly sovereign sociocentric life-cycle of organization that is characteristic of many communities in under or                                                             1 Under situational, I include foreign interventions over ideological struggles, post colonial infighting, economic deprivation, and the ubiquitous political strongman-cum-leader who hasn’t learned to comply with the rules governing the Westphalia state model of social structure.

Intractable Conflict and the

Sociocentric Indigenous system of Conflict Resolution

Patrick James Christian National Intelligence University, Wash DC Nova Southeastern University Department of Conflict Analysis & Resolution

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ungoverned spaces within modern political states. The perspective of this paper is from that of egocentric interventionists planning and conducting post conflict restoration of justice and society in sociocentric communities.2 Using examples from the Middle East and Africa, the paper will reframe the indigenous, sovereign social order so that the nature of its sociocentric system of justice and conflict resolution reflects its central purpose; that of protection and maintenance of the sociological structure. The thesis that this reframing of indigenous justice systems makes is two-fold; that intractable violent communal conflict occurs when sociocentric indigenous systems of justice fail to integrate external situational events (political, social, military), or fail to adapt the sociological structure to the demands of changing conditions of environment, economics, or technology. Second, interventions by westernized-urbanized-industrialized societies that attempt to introduce egocentric based replacements for damaged sociocentric structures of society and justice can deepen the violent communal conflict and ensure its intractability.

The indigenous sociocentric community and internal conflict resolution

Georg Jellinek (1895) once described sovereignty as a “mass psychological function” that resides in the minds of the community members as a way of describing the conceptual belief of sovereign ownership of sociological structure (p. 10). In ungoverned or under-governed spaces, there exists a corollary between the strength of this ‘mass psychological function’ and the reach of the political state’s governance and authority. The greater a tribe’s responsibility to defend, feed, and care for themselves, the greater is their belief in sovereign self determination. The Darood and Issaq clans of Somalia, the Kababish tribes of Kordofan, or the Tuareg peoples of Mali and Niger are several examples of the most extremely sovereign peoples to defy incorporation into the larger societies surrounding them. Their nomadic form of social ordering is supported by complex systems of justice3 and constitutes an evolutionary marvel that allows for survival in the harshest of climates without external dependence. The illusion of primitiveness held by external observers belies a complex sociological structure that harbors brilliant inner displays of meaning, faith and morality that are reflected interior to the community in stories, art, poetry and music. Underlying their extraordinarily high context4 displays of

                                                            2 The nature of constructed egocentric societies logically lends itself to intervention in the sociological affairs of other societies. That which is constructed must be maintained and repaired when broken. Sociocentric societies are natural emanations of blood, marriage and adoption, unused to the concept of neutral intervention by others seeking nothing in return. 3 Such as Dia (blood wealth), Xeer (mutual wealth), and reer, jamaa, qabila, or tol (marriage or belonging wealth) 4 The creation of communal context in meaning, thought and action; the intimacy of belonging; and the shared aspects of family member identity are all interactive elements that originate in, and are sustained by, the sociocentric sociological structure.

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communal meaning is the outer-shell of survival and belonging, an idea that Ann Simons (1995) refers to as an “irreducible significance of belonging” (p. 139) a phrase that intimates survival as both a physical and a metaphysical reality within a community of people “who cohere in order to depend on one another because they know they can, not because they think they should” (p. 142). The nature of choice in the construction of these sovereign communal societies is not theirs to make, but is rather a function of individual member and family acquiescence to an external (metaphysical) order of moral social functioning.

The morality of indigenous justice systems

Contrary to French sociologist Émile Durkheim’s (1997 (1933) ) ideas about primitive society, what he thought of as mechanical, repressive structures lacking moral cohesion were in actuality sociocentric societies dependent on this external locus of member control.5 Durkheim’s assumption of lacking morality was incorrect; morality deeply infuses the sociocentric person, perhaps more so than their egocentric counterpart. The sociocentric father for instance, learns to live with the requirement to make painful and difficult choices between equally loved members of family; between the good of the one versus the good of the whole. The misunderstanding of morality in primitive society lies in the differing calculus of behavior control of societal members – internal for the egocentric and external for the sociocentric. Where the egocentric member of society is consumed with individual decisions about moral thoughts and behavior, the sociocentric member is consumed with a shared moral character that encompasses at a minimum, the nuclear family and maximally the entire tribe6. The sociological construction of society based on an external member locus of control establishes vast and complex differences for the sociocentric family (from that of the egocentric) that is particularly susceptible to damage and rapid change. This greater vulnerability to damage in sociocentric families involves the requirement for group synchronization in thought and emotion as part of the process of making meaning and sustaining the ethos laden collective of shared individual identities. Using Durkheim’s example of primitive morality, sociocentric family members determine right and wrong collectively, not individually – shame of alienation drives conformance rather than individual guilt socialized into the egocentric member. Even before any right or wrong act takes place, the family members interact with each other to form the basis for their shared individual

                                                            5 This is opposed to an internal locus of member control found in the (then) emerging egocentric societies characteristic of western, industrialized, urbanized political states of Europe, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. 6 This is not to suggest that egocentric persons are any less concerned with family values and morality; only that they view these social goals from an individual agent perspective. For the egocentric society, family morality is encouraged by tactical and strategic policies that encourage voluntary participation and acceptance on the part of the individual – the individual must choose. For the sociocentric society, family morality is legislated as required participation and acceptance – the family must protect (choose for) the individual.

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Figure 1, simple comparison diagram contrasting elements of sociocentric being with that of egocentric life‐cycles. Developed for analyst training at National Intelligence University’s Department of African Studies, Somali Civil Conflict course  

morality, just as they do their shared individual identity. In such a communal structure, morality cannot be an individual ideation in the sociocentric society, dependent as it is on the collective for definition, context, and execution. This difference can be better explained by reexamining a number of indigenous justice case studies that document sociological damage from external sources against the attempts by internal systems of conflict resolution to restore their social order – often unsuccessfully.

The failure of western intervention – pedagogies of victimization and perpetration

Perhaps the single most immediate priority grievance of populations in the midst of an unstable, violent communal social structure is their inability to manage or ameliorate the effects of damaged structures of justice and social order (Center for Global Development, 2007). The plight of the Acholi people in Uganda and South Sudan shows us the relationship between

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damaged internal systems of indigenous justice and a society’s devolution to intractable conflict. The damage to the Acholi sociological structure is grounded in the historical reality of colonizing practices and subsequent overlay of sociological and psychological damage from well intentioned but failed attempts at intervention by the political state, contenders to control of the political state, international organizations, and competing private religious and humanitarian organizations (Latigo, 2008). Once traditional methods of conflict resolution by the political state and supporting political intergovernmental organization had failed, some interventionist efforts turned to the use of popularized elements of indigenous justice as a last resort to ending what is now an intractable conflict. However, the extent of the structural damages to the most affected populations’ sociological structures combined with the interaction of external inhibitors of indigenous conflict resolution prevented any meaningful reparative processes from forming.

The internal damage to the population’s sociological structure could potentially repair itself with indigenous systems of conflict resolution and restoration of justice if not for the presence of the external inhibitors. The Acholi peoples are separated by at two political states; South Sudan and Uganda. They are separated by at least two competing religious traditions; Christian-animism and Islam. Finally, they are conflicted by their members’ participation in a rogue international armed force – the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The Acholi people both populate (in part) the LRA and are victims of it. Together, these external inhibitors deepen the social trauma and ensure its transmission across time and space. The transmission of generational trauma not only predates the current conflict, but establishes pedagogies of victimization and perpetration that generations of Acholi’s have now grown up with; learned ideations that violent conflict is an undesirable, but normal part of social life in the northern part of the Albertine Rift (Stearns, 2011). Where the first two external inhibitors are fully capable of being integrated into the Acholi indigenous sociological structure and positively resolved by native practices of post conflict restoration of justice, the ongoing recruitment and participation in the divisive conflict prevents any possibility of the use of indigenous systems of justice to resolve this external conflict.

Indigenous sociological structures are damaged by violent loss of their members; by loss of their physical habitat or infrastructure; or by diminishment or assault on their historical narrative and the existential identity it contains (Elsass, 1992). Often, like the Acholi peoples, the damage is a combination of all these and creates a ‘wound’ or trauma in the community’s psychological reality that overwhelms the capacity of its internal structure of justice and conflict resolution (Herman, 1992). The wound-trauma may be evidenced by physical damage, but only exists within the members’ ability to trust the meanings within their communication and critical ideations of social reality such as safety within the home, purity of the child, sanctity of one’s own body, and control over one’s own mind. The ‘wound’ in the reality of the Acholi people is

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now a multigenerational collapse of social reality, where the efforts of current elders to represent a future society based on the best parts of their existential historical narrative and origination run headlong into the counter-realities posed by the western-oriented political state and the contender to the political state, Joseph Kony’s disparate, outlawed militia. The political state of Uganda consists of multiple cultural segments and the dominant parties possess a distinct bias against traditional sociological sociocentric structures based on segmented families (tribal) and clan structures (Latigo, 2008, p. 89). The LRA has decimated entire tracts of the Acholi tribal areas with large scale killings, massive abductions of children and forcible incorporation into the ranks of the militia by means of advanced traumatization and psychological diminution of free agency7. Together, the political state and the armed militias have reduced the psychological sociological structure of the Acholi people to a shadow of its former definition.

The subsequent attempts by the Ugandan political state and international organizations to resolve the violence from what is now an international outlaw force (LRA) by means of traditional measures of Acholi internal social conflict resolution were ultimately resisted by their surviving social leaders. Ceremonies of reconciliation from conflict (mato oput) 8 welcoming return home (nyono ton gweno), cleansing from captivity (moyo kum), cleansing physical spaces touched or damaged by violence (moyo piny), and ceasefire vows (gomo tong), are intimate activities designed to repair the internal psychological wound to the sociocentric social order interior to the membership. Etic attempts to externalize and/or export these intimate rituals of sociological nurturing of a wounded communal structure suggests that western interventionists have learned little since Durkheim’s ascription of primitive morality to sociocentric societies. Indigenous systems of justice and social order evolve over a sociological life-cycle that shapes and coheres the community to its geographic, geologic, climatologic, and natural resource environment. In such complex development, ‘one size does not fit all’ in terms of sociological structure and process. As a contrasted example, the restoration of Mozambique’s sociological order after their terrifying transition from colony to independent state shows that these internal ceremonies of reconciliation from conflict possess great power when applied internally to the sociological psychological interior of member belonging. The post colonial war between the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) and the Mozambique National Resistance (RENAMO) divided the remnants of a social order that had survived a 12 year guerrilla war against Portugal (Thom, 2010).

                                                            7 This refers to the levels of psychological deconstruction/destruction that are used to forcibly break down an individual’s adherence to their home or family sociological structure; the LRA uses the technique whereby abducted children are forced to kill another child or adult, or even their own parent as a method of breaking them away from their community’s structure of values, ethos, and belonging. 8 “drinking the bitter root” (Latigo, 2008, p. 104)

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The psychology of indigenous systems of conflict resolution

Against the normal political-military descriptions of the Mozambique civil war, Igreja and Dias-Lambranca (2008) present a nuanced reflection of the underlying divide between the conflict parties; one that is based on the damage to the sociological structure from both the decades of enforced colonial rule and the violent struggle to break free of western subjugation. The authors focused on the Gorongosa people’s use of the magamba spirits ceremonies to restore their damaged sociological structure as a means to illustrate the non-political, non-judicial nature of conflict resolution and post conflict restoration of justice. In their delicate explanation of the interior psychological and emotional spaces of Mozambique society, Igreja and Dias-Lambranca illustrate how a wounded or traumatized society used their metaphysical system of beliefs and meaning to open spaces of spiritual, psychological and emotional healing. Like many systems of restorative justice, the magamba spirit ceremony works without courts, retribution, or additive damage caused by separation of members into separate status of victim and perpetrator, innocent and guilty. Instead, “Magama spirits do not primarily evoke individual factual truths. What counts in the scenes of gamba spirit possession are testimonies of collective truths of victimization and … accountability… responsibility and guilt are collective” (2008, p. 77).

The magamba spirit and mato oput conflict resolution practices are two examples of naturally occurring processes that human sociological structures create as part of their maintenance of their sociocentric communities. These and other conflict resolution practices work to maintain the psychological, emotional, and spiritual needs that evolve from or within their native geographic, geologic and climatologic environments. This is in contrast to egocentric systems of justice that serve more of a philosophic construction of societies that are based on an internal locus of member control9. Schweder and Bourne (1982) characterize these two approaches to the individual versus social relationship “as the ‘egocentric contractual’ and the ‘sociocentric organic’” (Bracken, 1998, p. 54). Because the sociocentric society is organically evolved (rather than contractually-constructed) to serve the development and maintenance of relationships between people rather than the development of the individual, its focus is necessarily different. Western justice, like western mental health, focuses on the individual, unlike sociocentric justice and mental health that focus on the interrelationship (Bracken, 1998). In egocentric communities, one can have justice at the expense of the family or at the expense of the society; this is the balance between the rights of the individual and those of the collective. Egocentric justice presumes the existence of universal rights of the individual that are separate from the society. This is not true in sociocentric society where the health of the family and of the society defines or determines the health of the individual, a reality that often runs counter to

                                                            9 It is this internal locus of member control extended across multiple societies that forms the basis of international law, universal human rights (individual agency) and obligations (guilt and innocence based system of justice).

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institutional interests and the mixed motives of Western governments (Summerfield, 1998, p. 32).

There is a valid purpose in linking and comparing the difficulties faced in exporting western mental health and western concepts of post conflict restoration of justice across the egocentric-sociocentric barrier; that of the centrality of psychological health in sociocentric justice. In western justice systems, one must be sane to be judged, but not necessarily mentally healthy. The purpose in western justice is not the restoration of psychological, emotional and spiritual health, but rather infliction of punishment of the individual agency; a ‘time out’ for adults that replaces the ‘corner rocking chair’ with a penitentiary. The egocentric system of punishment reinforces individual responsibility and individual agency in an opposite manner than the sociocentric system of repair of the damaged social structure. The sociocentric system of restoration reinforces the collective responsibility of the whole to vouchsafe the protected interior placement of each member. Where Bracken suggests that western mental health diagnosis and treatment should be categorized as “ethnopsychiatry” (1998, p. 40), we can arrive at the same conclusion regarding western systems of justice and conflict resolution as they relate to the applicability in damaged sociocentric systems. “Psychiatric systems, like religions, kinship systems, or political systems, are culturally constructed. Each mirrors a culturally constructed reality” (Gaines, 1992). Like western psychology, western justice is socially constructed around a locus of member control that is internal to the person rather than external to the family, or society. As such, to understand the post conflict justice and conflict resolution needs of sociocentric communities, we must learn how these systems restore and repair at the sociological psychological level of the family and its members.

The psychological basis of sociological restoration of damaged sociocentric society

If the fundamental difference between egocentric and sociocentric societies is the locus of individual member control (internal for egocentric and external for sociocentric) then it makes sense that their systems of indigenous justice will focus on restoring trust in individual agency for the former and sociocentric communalism for the latter. Post conflict justice in sociocentric systems of conflict resolution work to redress the breakdown of sociocentric structures and correlate ability to exert external control over internal members. Where egocentric society can assign responsibility to selected members so as to construct/reconstruct rules that are based on general or lowest common denominator value systems and then enforce those rules; sociocentric society constructs and enforces rules as a collective. That which is constructed by the collective must be reconstructed or repaired by the collective. This means that conflict is not resolved by the identification and punishment of the perpetrator; conflict is resolved by the restoration of love, trust, communication, expectation, and forgiveness between victim and perpetrator. The

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sociocentric system of justice seeks to restore or repair the wounded (traumatized) psychological reality of harmonized social relationships primarily because both individual and collective reality is intra-psychically connected. Each individual serves as part of the basis for each other’s identity and reality. This is contrasted with the western egocentric emphasis on the individual reflection of self-as-individual-agent supported by an individual identity based on personal identification with a self-chosen set of archetypes and prototypes. The (prototypical) sociocentric individual does not self-select identity archetypes; does not choose individual paths of being or economic productivity; does not choose to forgive or reestablish love, trust, and communication in a vacuum.

The sociocentric person does all things as part of a psychological and emotional communal embrace within a collective that serves as the family-collective identity. I am not Ahmed; I am abu Salim, the father of my son, the husband of my wife, the son of my father, and the steward of my lineage’s existential identity that is encased in a treasured historical narrative. My ability to forgive is dependent on a collective ability to restructure our damaged interrelated reality that we constructed as a family unit over time with each birth adding to the layers and complexity of the whole. The sociocentric person’s ability to forgive requires the reestablishment of psychological and emotional placement in the shared space of identity and belonging that characterize their sociological structure. This forgiveness is dependent on their integration of the loss, violence and trauma into their shared system of beliefs that shape and define their reality (Bolton & Hill, 1996, p. 359). Bracken calls this a “completion tendency” (1998, p. 48) where the sociocentric family members process information about the loss, violence and trauma until their conflict situation changes, or they adapt their cognitive model to an accord with the new reality (Horowitz M. J., 2001, p. 95). Within the conflict resolution rituals of indigenous societies are the elements of reparative love, communication, trust, expectation, safety, and commitment that lay broken by the loss, violence and trauma. How these complex rituals achieve the desired reparations constitutes the remainder of this paper.

Indigenous rituals as participatory communication in the making of meaning

Taken at face value, indigenous rituals of conflict resolution might seem primitive and superstitious; a collection of practices thought up and incorporated into social life without any real basis of reparative possibilities outside of blind belief. Beginning with the assumption however, that each element of indigenous ritual serves a hidden reparative process within the sociocentric commune, a pattern of collective discourse healing reveals itself. Let’s start with the example of the gamba spirits, a Mozambique Gorongosa conflict resolution ritual based on the deceased spirits of both victim and perpetrator returning to the collective minds of those damaged survivors (Igreja & Dias-Lambranca, 2008). As the ritual is practiced, the effects and outcome resemble a key component of narrative mediation. An essential part of narrative

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mediation is the ability of the participants to externalize conflict that is too painful to bring to mind or collective dialogue (Winslade & Monk, 2000). In this conflict resolution practice, the narrative mediator works to help each party externalize the conflict outside of the boundaries of their own emotions, minds, and bodies onto some external actor(s) (White, 2008). This externalization allows the participants to externalize the pain and unbearable emotion along with the storyline. Then, removed from the overwhelming pain by artificial neutrality, the parties can act through their surrogates to dissect the conflict, relive the story and ultimately re-integrate the painful events into the life of the communal whole without destroying the soft tissues of the remaining undamaged sociological structure (White, 2007). I suggest that the gamba spirits work (at least in part) in a similar manner; to allow the living, surviving victims to externalize their pain, suffering, shame, alienation and rage onto some external relative who is at once, both a part of the collective and not a part of the collective. They are part of the collective because their existential memory remains embedded in the surviving whole. They are not part of the collective because they died in the conflict that has damaged the community. They serve as a profound externalization of both victim and perpetrator; sufferer and punisher; living and – soon to be – past.

The metaphysical spirituality10 of indigenous practices of sociocentric communities works to repair damage and maintain the collective. These practices serve to connect past, present, and future networks of psychological ideation of existential being and life giving emotions that together make up the virtual part of the sociological structure. Because sociocentric society possesses a higher degree of sovereignty than egocentric, authority for healing and reparation can be problematic. As a case example, a village girl of 14, just at the age of marriage potential is abducted and raped. Returning home, she will face a level of alienation previously unknown to her resulting in devastating shame that is not hers alone to bear. The alienation and shame are borne by the family, and potentially outward to a predetermined level of lineage segmentation. As a conflict resolution question, ‘what is to be done with the girl’ becomes a collective discussion because all face the shaming alienation of victimization in sociocentric society. The question of her rapist is a material consideration: more so if he is a member of the family, clan or sub-tribe and less so if he is a complete stranger to the family and village. The far side of repairing the family’s alienation is to hold the perpetrator’s family materially responsible for the harm. In societies practicing the indigenous law of Dia, all members of an offender’s extended lineage segment are required to participate in the payment of restitution because of their failure to exercise their collective responsibility of providing that external locus of member control.

                                                            10 Of faith traditions that transcends the immediate physical with the possibilities of the extant metaphysical. An example of the difference might be the metaphysical saint laden frame of reference of the devout Catholic against their spiritual, but philosophic based protestant co-religionist. Another example pairing might be Sufism as contrasted with the Sunni traditions.

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At the near side of repairing the family’s alienation is the placement of the raped girl back into the family sociological structure to a degree that she can survive, live a healthy life and participate in the communal ethos that comes with life in such societies. Some authority however must be invoked to determine and sanction her return to the fold as well as determine and sanction her forgiveness for her victimization; the latter serving as cover for the collective forgiving themselves for their victimization. Over and again, the reparative justice process of sociocentric society is laden with internal restoration of love, communication, empathy, trust, expectation, and forgiveness. Joe Alie’s depiction of the Sierra Leone NGO Carital Makeni and their work in the northern town of Makeni demonstrate that the principals embedded in the indigenous rituals are powerful elements in reconciling the survivors of wounded sociocentric communities. Their reparative model of conflict resolution and post conflict justice focused on “’change the hearts’ of their children through a combination of care, support and ritual action” (2008, p. 142) using rituals quite similar to those of the Acholi in Uganda and Gorongosa in Mozambique.

The praying over the cup of water by a member of the family in Makeni; the initiation of discourse between the living survivors and the deceased victims in Gorongosa; or the reconciliation rites by the Acholi’s in Uganda do not in and of themselves constitute the healing. Nor do the healed (and healers) necessarily believe that the water has power, or the spirits of victim, perpetrator and anscestors are presently repairing the community anymore than Catholics believe in the physical intercession of saints and angels11. What is believed during ceremonies is the desire and participation of the community on all sides of the conflict. The collective desire to reunite and forgive themselves and each other are demonstrated in the actions and participation of the communal whole by their reenactment of a staged production. The ‘role-play’ they reenact is drawn from a part of their cultural historical narrative; that part of which restores the justice to their sociocentric social order through a restoration of the balance of love, trust, expectation, empathy, communication, and the relief of alienation, shame, and pain of loss. In this way, indigenous systems of conflict resolution and post conflict restoration of justice serve a singular purpose of repairing and protecting sociocentric society in a manner that is yet to be fully understood by western interventionists.

                                                            11 I accept the possibility of all levels and types of beliefs; I personally have Catholic family members that in fact believe in the immediate and daily physical intercession of the Virgin Mary and Saints Peter, Paul and Joseph every bit as much as the residents of Gorongosa believe in the gamba spirits. But the physical, psychological and emotional participation of all members of the sociocentric structure is the crucial ingredient of post conflict restoration of justice.

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Failing sociocentric structures and conflict intractability

At the risk of over-reaching, I suggest that we can compare the sociocentric family’s personality collective to the egocentric person’s individual personality12 as a methodology of crossing the barrier of understanding between egocentric and sociocentric responses to damage and attempts at restoration of justice. In both the egocentric individual and the sociocentric family, the healthy personality (as we are using that term here) will be organized and efficient, allowing each to understand their physical, psychological and emotional needs and find non-violent ways of fulfilling those needs. Remember that the egocentric individual does these functions as an individual agent where the sociocentric family does these functions as an ethos charged social unit. When loss, violence and conflict damages members’ willingness or ability to meet expectations, their respective systems of justice work to process the events and reconcile them with the existing schema for the egocentric individual and the existing sociological structure for the sociocentric family. Success for both leads to reconciling the events with existing schemas and structures or adapting those schemas and structures to the realities of changed situations created by the loss, violence or conflict.

When the egocentric individual or sociocentric family is unable to successfully adapt or reconcile the events within their respective schema or structure, that schema or structure (respectively) is wounded, or we say it is traumatized (Herman, 1992) (Gilligan, 1996) (Elsass, 1997). So we understand that not all loss, violence, or conflict creates trauma; only that which breaks the schema or structure. If the schema or structure is not broken, then both are capable of restoring harmony without intervention – they self heal. When the egocentric individual or sociocentric family suffers loss, violence, and conflict (especially extended in depth and duration) and trauma occurs, the symptoms are expressed in disorganization of the psychological sociological personality (Gilligan, 1996) (Bracken, 1998). For the egocentric individual and the sociocentric family, this disorganization can be seen as self destructive behavior in a cyclical pattern of hope, alienation, shame, and rage that devolves in a downward spiral (Gilligan, 1996). The attempts to process the loss, violence and conflict continue even though it is apparent that the egocentric individual or sociocentric family is unable to integrate the occurrences or adapt their schemas or structure so as to repair the wounded personality (Horowitz M. J., 2001). Focusing back to the sociocentric family-community, in a perfect environment, their sociological structure depends on internal indigenous rituals comprising complex psychological and emotional functions that allow for the cognitive processing and integration of the event by the community members affected.                                                             12 Included in personality will be the sum of archetypes and prototypes that inform and guide identity; communication type and pathways of love, nurture, anger, pain, humiliation, reconciliation and the like; socialized and cognitive expressions of emotions (levels, content, and methods); and the interface between physical reality and psychological reality and emotion.

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The wounded sociocentric structure – disorganized and devolving

Just as the disorganized personality of the egocentric individual would present behavior that is self destructive in a downward spiral of devolution, so too would the disorganized ‘personality’ of the sociocentric family or community. We would expect to see broken families (which is far more disabling in sociocentric than egocentric life-cycles), fractured clans and tribes using violence and taking actions that are nowhere in accordance with existing cultural mores and values. We would expect to see a wounded sociological structure that does not have the capacity to reorganize or repair itself. We would expect to see member defection to other sociocentric structures or abandonment of sociocentric communal participation in favor of egocentric individual agency. This individual agency would be expressed by single disaffected males in pursuits of self determined applications of violence and the economic exploitation of former communal members. Psychologically and emotionally, the lack of communal ethos that sociocentric community provides would be substituted by casual sexual release (endorphins), drug and alcohol use and even the use of casual violence to excite testosterone levels over unmet needs of emotional nurturance and love. While a number of places in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and South America come to mind with this description of decimated sociocentric sociological structures, none fit so well as the ring of conflicts that surround the Albertine Rift from Uganda south towards Rwanda and eastward through the Horn of Africa (Stearns, 2011).

Africa is seen to be witnessing wars which thrive on primordial social-ethnic identities and metaphysical belief systems and seemingly, by implication, lack clear-cut ideological agendas. The goals are characterized as bizarre, irrational and even crazy. Often the same characterization is extended to the leaderships themselves. (Latigo, 2008, p. 93)

In reality, these sociocentric communities consist of sociological structures that are wounded (traumatized) in their ability to integrate loss, violence and conflict and are unable to adapt their wounded structures to the realities of their current situations. In short, their sociocentric communal ‘personality’ is fractured and psychologically disorganized as a clinical diagnosis (Elsass, 1992) (Gaines, 1992). Western egocentric interventionists are usually at a loss to understand what is occurring and why; even as they attempt to rely on egocentric utilitarian precepts of political power, resource competition, or even chronic conflict zones (Summerfield, 1998). What is actually broken is the sociocentric sociological structures’ ability to integrate loss and violence events and/or adapt their structures to the rapidly changing environments or both. Either way, they are unable to self-heal and thus continue to suffer and inflict suffering. Attempts at regenerating structural organization and cohesion are interfered with by external forces of resource exploitation, militia violence, and western humanitarian attempts at overlaying egocentric structures of social order and justice.

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Sociocentric communication and contested meaning

Another way of thinking about the sociocentric systems of indigenous justice is to consider them as forms of psychological, emotional and spiritual dialogue formed into physical channels of participatory communication.

One of the major goals of emotional processing after trauma may be to achieve ‘cognitive completion’, to integrate the stressful experience with enduring models of the world and one’s relation to it…The experience of being victimized causes a rupture in the person’s personal, family and community identity; if unprocessed, the rupture continues, severing the meaning of all that happened in the past from the present and the future. A continuity needs to be re-established between past and present, and the experience integrated. (Hodgkinson and Stewart, 1991) (Bracken, 1998, p. 49)

In participatory theater, the cast, crew and audience are blended into the action and dialogue that allows for all forms of verbal and non-verbal communication and emotional expression. The play ‘stories’ and ‘restories’ the event allowing for Horowitz’s integration of the event or adaptation of the communal structure to meet the changed circumstances of the community. Because they are sociocentric, this play and its dialogue, the creation of meaning, the integration of loss and violence, and the adaptation of a communal sociological structure is necessarily a group experience rather than one that is decided for them by others; even if those others are related by blood and marriage. Sociocentric community requires the communal making of meaning from which no member can be excluded unless they are cast out permanently. As the community seeks to make new meaning from events of loss, violence or conflict, they do so both individually and collectively; each seeks to understand and explain their lived experience with terror within a complex communal story. The barrier to success in this natural process of indigenous conflict resolution often lies in the ability of the individual to integrate the phenomenological structure of a violent event with the texture of their lived experience. This is the processing of violent events with the horror and terror experienced that most, if not all, indigenous systems of conflict resolution are required to facilitate.

Mediating conflict within tribal, sociocentric societies requires the interventionist to spend countless hours patiently listening to stories of pain, suffering, death, and anguish against social responses to alienation, shame, rage, revenge and attempts at restoring assaulted communal egos (Christian, 2005) (Gilligan, 1996). A primary failure of indigenous sociocentric rituals of conflict resolution involves the members’ inability to form collective meaning; inability to agree on the nature of their experience; and inability to accept the distribution of suffering and loss amongst the membership. Each of these agreements are key aspects of restorative justice; both for the living in material placement and recoupment; and for the dead in historical placement in the communal narrative. For the etic interventionist, these disagreements may seem as ugly disputes

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over minute details that the members from all sides seem fixated on for no apparent constructive purpose. For the emic participants within the family, clan, village and tribe, the successful processing and integration of the conflict events into the larger historical narrative is a primal requirement for the repair of their sociological psychological structure and the emotional conjugates created to sustain the members. Thus when violent conflict occurs, the mediation of the lived experiences between members takes on a magnified role in post conflict restoration of justice and community.

Mediating meaning in indigenous conflict resolution

How tribal members “experience the suffering of war” is entirely dependent on their social, cultural and political context (Bracken, 1998, p. 38). But generally, lived experience is processed as both a structural cognitive recording of the sequence of events and the textual emotional and psychological import of the event. In the arena of tribal conflict analysis, the how (structure) of that experience is often the most frequently described portion of the event, even to the exclusion of the what (texture) of that experience13. This is because the structure constitutes the participant’s representative account of actors involved and the activities as they seemed to occur that invoked or created the conditions for the experience. The most visible part of the event experience – the structure – is what is most often related in communication because it is the least invasive to the participant. Left unrelated is often the completion of the meaning experience; the texture. The texture of the experience is oft avoided in recitations, painfully invasive as the description of such reenactments must be in contexts where suffering and dying are an integral part of the landscape.

An experiential object of terror however, is not complete without both parts of its essence. The midnight raid of an opposing militia; bullets that puncture the walls of a fragile abode; the roaring mix of riders on horses and militia on technicals mounted with machine guns and the audible expulsion of empty casing cartridges as they spatter the ground around the entry of the village and the houses within constitute the structure of an experience in terror. The blast of noise that pulls the sleeping occupant awake during the raid; the smell of cordite mixed with the tactile feel on hands and legs of something wet and warm smelling of coppery cinder; the cognition of blood that is not his and therefore his child’s; the explosive startle as holes explode in the walls above the bed raining wood and mud brick down upon the bedclothes soaked with wet, warm fluid and the new smell of excrement constitute a glimpse of the texture of an

                                                            13 Patton (1990) writes that phenomenological study is "focused on descriptions of what people experience and how it is that they experience what they experience" (p. 71). Using Creswell’s (2007) replacement of what with texture and how with structure (p. 60), the texture of how terror might be experienced consists of received visual, audible, tactile, and olfactory stimuli combined with internal cognitive functions of memory, awareness and imagination (among others) to create a mental object.

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experience in terror. The verbs of feel, sleep, awaken, startle, touch, smell, and hear describe the intentionality of the victim’s experience. The direct object expressions such as bullets that puncture and casings that spatter the ground articulates the presentation of structure and its link to the texture of the experience; the man hears the casings spatter, sees the bullets puncture and feels the wet, warm fluids from his first person perspective. He reacts not to the external events, but rather to what the external events mean, how they appear, what they portend (Laverty, 2003). Together, the interior perceived texture combined with the structure of how he experienced the appearance of the object of terror constitutes what Creswell calls “the essential, invariant structure (or essence) (Creswell, 2007, p. 62)” of the experience. Memory in conflict occurs in peaks and ravines – glory and trauma. Routine is less remembered and what is highlighted is laden with texture even greater than the structure it portended. Where texture is disproportionate in memory, structure must be revised before the memory event can be integrated into the narrative whole. This is how the egocentric individual and the sociocentric collective14 suffer failure in their processing of the event story. Narrative mediation works to assist them in reconstructing meaning between what they cognitively experienced and emotionally imported during the event. For the sociocentric collective, this reconstruction is a cooperative function where members co-reconstruct the event by reliving structure and texture in communal rituals of indigenous systems of justice.

Cognitive imprinting as a primal inhibitor of indigenous conflict resolution

The sociological psychological emotional processes that sociocentric indigenous systems of conflict resolution resolve also touch on some of the same issues that egocentric society’s members are affected by and struggle with. One in particular, cognitive imprinting from cultural and environmental factors, is essential in understanding some of the intractable conflicts. This potential conflict resolution inhibitor is an issue that is relevant to many of the traditional indigenous cultures whose life-cycles are being interrupted by rapid changes to their physical environment and surrounding external change of a social, political and economic nature. The loss of habitat, desertification, drought, denuded forest lands, decreases in infant morbidity and corresponding increases in population, shrinking availability of land, restructuring political states and the calls to collective action external to the family, village and tribe create unsustainable pressures on the sociocentric life cycle of many cultures emerging into the realities of

                                                            14 The hippocampus & Amygdala, store the last 3 years of a person’s structural and textural memory; after which, this memory is synthesized into long term or remote memory that is stored throughout the brain. The frontal cortex, parietal cortex, anterior cingulate, and parts of the basal ganglia are crucial to this process as they control reasoning, comprehension and cognitive functions in both conscious and unconscious states.

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globalization. Cognitive imprinting may be a bit speculative, but involves physical and/or virtual imprinting on members’ cognitive process from generational exposure to specific geographic, geologic, and climatologic environments around which developed their psychological sociological structures.

Colin Turnbull’s (1972) frightening portrayal of the Ek tribe in northern Uganda is an example of the effects of what may be cognitive imprinting as a primary inhibitor to conflict resolution. In short, the Ek tribe were/are mountain dwelling hunter-gatherers who at the point of their life-cycle interference, had developed a highly complex social structure based around life in a mountain habitat that depended on hunting game in nearby preserves and gathering wild berries, nuts and roots. With the loss of their hunting preserve to an environmental preservation concern, their continued existence in their mountain habitat was compromised. All attempts by government and humanitarian representatives to transition them into an agrarian substitute failed and their members declined by all forms of death including starvation, suicide, and the calculated killing by starvation of parents and children that the dwindling social group was unable to feed. The inability of the Ek tribe to transition to a habitat different from what they are cognitively imprinted with is documented; however I acknowledge that the underlying causality may be less physical and more psycho-cultural sociological. The archetypes and prototypes associated with historical Ek mountain life may have created a situation where all indigenous attempts at resolution of the conflict failed due to their inability to adapt rapidly enough to the changing situation.

Cognitive psychologist Donald Spence (1982) suggests that it takes at least three generations for most societies to process and integrate fundamental change of the nature that affected the Ek tribe. The issue of cognitive imprinting has tremendous implications for indigenous systems of sociocentric conflict resolution in those societies that are still fully engaged in nomadic, Pastoral, Agro-pastoral, Bedouin sociological structures. Discourse with Bedouin15 tribes is laden with dialogue specific to the desert that cannot be fully understood outside of that geologic and climatologic environment. More than just words are at stake; basic forms of thought are said to be different between desert nomads and all other peoples. Mohamed Bamyeh (1999) suggests that the concept of time is different in the desert because expectation does not exist. In the vastness of the Sahara, the Sahel, and the Arabian deserts, one does not expect to meet someone; one does not expect to ‘arrive’ at any one place at any one time. All things happen with the will of God (Insha’allah) and that expectation by mere humans is a waste of energy. This difference in cognition and psychological sociological states of being may well create fundamental

                                                            15 Clarifying note on the term Bedouin: Bedouin is an Arabic word for a nomadic-Arab. Its use by African nomadic pastoralists creates divisive discourse over identity, religion, origination, belonging, and parentage between Africans and Arabs of the African Muslim ummah throughout the Sahara and the Sahel across Africa’s northern tier states.

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differences in the construction of social orders and their supporting systems of indigenous justice.

Conclusion

We can acknowledge that all peoples, all societies, all families and all persons suffer psychological and emotional damage during violent conflict and extreme loss. What is different is the pathology of this damage, based as it is on the natural functioning of the society pre-conflict, and that society’s ability to adapt itself and its members to the event or adapt their structure to changed realities. What must be differentiated is the existence of the sociocentric barrier that most egocentric organizations and institutions have not successfully bridged in their attempts to develop post conflict resolution initiatives and policies. This includes recent attempts by etic interventionists at incorporating the use of indigenous practices of conflict resolution to effect post conflict restoration of justice. Indigenous systems of justice are part of the organic fabric of the damaged society and the surviving conflict resolution system may or may not be able to heal the community. Most often, given the high levels of damage and the ongoing external interaction that exacerbates the damage, some level or type of indigenous justice system repair or growth must be initiated. This is not a prescription for the introduction of egocentric structures that will only further damage the sociocentric structure. However, methods of communal dialogue and participatory action communication that are facilitated by egocentric interventionists knowledgeable of sociocentric needs and practices can be helpful in stopping the destructive devolution of the social personality and facilitate the process of reorganizing the communal sociological structure while safeguarding it from ongoing damage.

Crossing the sociocentric barrier is tremendously challenging for egocentric interventionists in that they are helping construct or reconstruct social tissue that may feel foreign or alien to their psychological sense of individual health and agency. The wounds that the indigenous justice system must repair to sustain the sociocentric society may only be tangentially perceived by the egocentric interventionist who may require the development of metrics that reflect only indicators of success rather than the actual success itself. Sociocentric wounds are directly visible, audible, or sensible to the internal members of society. The indigenous conflict resolution rituals of each society work to repair sociological ‘wounds’ of the collective members’ basis of psychological reality and the emotional conjugates that are fulfilled in the healthy social interactive process. Endogenous as such a system must be, it cannot be exported, borrowed, or transplanted to repair the ‘wounds’ to the reality of another society. This is the underlying basis of cultural relativity; not to merely understand and respect the cultural practice, but the meaning that it contains.

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