The Tarahumara — a non-violent people

Press, 23 August 1979, Page 22

The Tarahumara — a non-violent people

Consider a society completely without crime, completely without violence. Delinquency, theft, bashings and murder are unknown. Suicide is so foreign to the culture that the language does not even have a word for it.

Such a society might sound a Utopian dream, but it exists.

It was used in contrast, in glaring, vivid contrast to the societies with which most of mankind is familiar in a lecture on researches into violence and its causes yesterday by Professor L. Jolyon West, a noted American psychiatrist and behavioural studies expert at present in Christchurch. Professor West is chairman of the department of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, the biggest such department in the world — it has more full-time psychiatrists than there are in practice in New Zealand. He is touring Australia and New Zealand as a travelling professor under the H. B. Williams Trust and the auspices of the Royal Australia and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists. The crimeless society of which Professor West spoke, and in which he has done much of his research on violence, is that of the Tarahumara Indians, about 50,000 semi-nomads living in the rugged Sierra Madre Occidental in the highlands of Mexico.

“They are freaks — an experiment of nature,” Professor West said. Their culture, however, held many lessons for more “civilised” cultures. “Guilt” and “conscience” as we understand them, as they are instilled in the young of most cultures by civil strictures, by religions, and by physical dominance of adults over children, are unknown to the Tarahumara. It is the fundamental absence of these concepts to which Professor West attributes the lack of violence. “The concept of conscience, which we consider fundamental to law and order, and proper behaviour, and normal inter-personal relationships is outside the sphere of their experience altogether,” he said. Children are raised with-

out punishment and so do not know violence. Ridicule and shame are used to control children and it is from shame that children learn “right” from “wrong,” he said.

“This is a pure shame culture. Shame is a much more powerful extinguisher of unwanted behaviour than is guilt. Shame is different from guilt,” said Professor West.

“What are the implications in this for law and order, violence in the streets in New Zealand or anywhere else? The inculcation of guilt which comes down to v.s through our civil structures, through the teachings of all the great monotheistic religions — where an angry god punishes you when you do wrong, He always knows — requires of you that you strive for the opposite of guilt, which is innocence. “But nobody’s innocent. Some people are not even born innocent if you have original sin. But in any case you do not remain innocent, because that’s not the way of things. “But the opposite of shame is pride. What these Indians have and what makes them the way they are — noble, kindly, nonviolent. even though they get drunk, even though they are competitive and physically fit — is they have pride in being Tarahumara

and that is the way Tarahumara behave,” he said. “They show us that the infliction of pain upon a child for any reason in the name of good parenthood is ridiculous,” said Professor West.

If young children displayed violence to each other, it was shamed out of the par’icipants. who were made to feel that to resort to physical solutions was shameful and beneath a Tarahumara, he said. In other cultures where child-beating, or infanticide, was encountered, the child beaters and those who had killed their children had b-en found to have a history of being subjected to undue violence when they were children themselves, said Professor West. “Most violent folk were subjected to violence themselves, especially in early childhood. Not just murderers, but rapists, people who engage in all kinds of impulsive or periodic acts of wanton dustruction or personal damage, were once victims.

“Violence in that sense is something that can be handed down in the family, generation after generation,” he said. “If there is violence in th® environment and children perceive it, it has a profound and undoubtedly lasting effect. The word becomes a dangerous place, even if the child does not directly suffer,” he said.

The evolution of the Ta« rahumara “shame culture” in child training had a practical impetus which has dominated their society for thousands of years down to the present day, said Professor West.

Infant mortality among the Tarahumara was betv- en 60 and 70 per cent, a direct consequence of the tough environment, and as a result th Tarahumara regard their children as so precious that the society tacitly made taboo physical violence towards children.

Generations of Tarahumara had grown to adulthood free from violence and as adults had continued t© live without violence. 1