#1271 Douglas Fry: Advanced Introduction to Conflict Resolution

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello everyone. Welcome to a new episode of The Dissenter. I'm your host, as always, Ricard Lops, and today I'm here with a return guest, Dr. Douglas Fry. He's now professor emeritus of Peace and conflict studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and also adjunct senior research scholar at the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict and Complexity at Columbia University. And today we're going to talk about his new book Advanced Introduction to Conflict Resolution. So Douglas, welcome back to the show. It's always an immense pleasure to talk with you.

00:40 Douglas Fry: Oh well, thank you Ricardo for that kind introduction and your kind words, and it's an immense pleasure for me as well.

00:47 Ricardo Lopes: Great. So I mean we've already talked on the show twice about the anthropology of war and peace. So today we're going to talk more specifically about one aspect. That is associated with those topics that is conflict resolution. So, uh, how do you approach it from an anthropological perspective? I mean, from the perspective of an anthropologist, what is conflict resolution?

01:22 Douglas Fry: That's a great place to start. It's always good to get the terms out there. So in terms of this book, I adopted for the most part, a definition which I liked from a sociologist, a scholar that's done a lot of work with with peace and conflict studies, um, Kreisberg, and he defines conflict resolution as the process of concluding a dispute or conflict. In which the adversary parties, with or without the assistance of mediators and negotiators and so forth, negotiate or otherwise strive towards a mutually acceptable agreement or understanding, taking into account each other's concerns. And I, I think that's broad enough and yet it's the key details that that I basically think that's a good one to apply anthropologically as well, meaning, of course, that it could apply across different cultural circumstances. So, um, that's, that's my overall thought on, on how to define it, um. When we're talking anthropologically, we're going to be comparing cultures just sort of inherently, and this would be a good point, I think, to mention at the very beginning, an overall perspective. I sometimes call it the umbrella perspective on not just conflict resolution, but conflict management. And there that's a bit broader than conflict resolution because it includes some things which most people would consider to be related to dealing with conflict, managing conflict, preventing conflict, but not necessarily resolving the conflict. So there have been various attempts to sort of classify or create typologies of conflict management out there. And one that I like and, and I've I've used it in my writings quite a bit, is by the now deceased sociologist Donald Black, who was really a great theorist and and and and thinker about all sorts of topics from social control to conflict resolution and so forth. And he was also pretty anthropological in the sense of including non-Western materials. So in any case, what Black does is he says, first of all, we could look at processes in terms of them being bilateral, involving two parties. And if you do that, he comes up with four different bilateral approaches, um, basically. One is just to avoid each other, just cease interaction. Uh, EITHER total or partly short-term, long-term. So that's avoidance. And you see, that's not necessarily resolving anything, but that, that you're keeping the conflict at bay, so to speak. Um, FROM there, he says there's also toleration, where you just put up with the other, you don't necessarily avoid the other person, but you put up with the situation or you just capitulate if you're tolerating. And that's another thing between two people that can just be done. And third, there's negotiation. And as implied in the definition I read, you you're trying to find some mutually acceptable agreement where you can, you know, if you're buying something, that's a classic example. Somebody wants a higher price, they're selling, someone wants a lower price, they're buying, you somehow meet in that that area. You agree, hopefully both parties are happy, you've negotiated it out. But in terms of conflict resolution, there's a lot of other things to negotiate out besides just the price of an item. So negotiation is trying to find an agreement more generally, that's acceptable to both parties. And then finally, we have one that's certainly not conflict resolution. Um, Black calls it, um, oh what does Black call it, um. Self-help, self help, and I don't like that term, so I don't use it because I realized in teaching that many students thought it was about a self-help book or a self-help program or something like this and totally getting it wrong. So, so I prefer and I use in the book self redress. So basically you try to deal with this yourself in interaction with the other person. And, and this is an area where violence and nastiness comes in. And, and I write about that in the book as well, just to make sure we holistically cover what's going on in terms of, of trying to find justice. And we'll come back to, to the concepts of justice real soon. I, I know. So, so those are four areas which you could look at, like I said, on the one hand, Here as bilateral. And then on the other hand, Black comes up and we have 5 fingers, fortunately, uh, with 5 different mechanisms of what he calls third party settlement assisted, um, conflict management. That's how's that for a mouthful? And, and I won't go into each of those in detail, but, you know, we have one thing that's just, uh, friendly peacemaking. Which is merely where a third party, a third person, or could be multiple third persons separate and distract two people who are having a conflict. Sometimes they keep them from physically fighting. Sometimes they just get them to calm down and stop their verbal tirades or whatever. But that's called friendly peacemaking, and friendly peacemakers are really very on equal grounds with the parties that are in a conflict. So the next level up in terms of having just a little bit more authority would be a mediator who comes in. And, and Black again says that Mediation is negotiation with the help of third parties. So negotiation, remember, you just want to find a mutually acceptable agreement. Here the mediator tries to facilitate that and help out, and there's all different variations on this, we'll get to it. And then we have what's called arbitration. I think we're familiar with that a lot in, in the Western cultures, um, and it of course it exists in other cultures as well. But the key thing here is the third party has yet again a little bit more authority. The third party, the arbitrator, makes a decision. And expects that the two parties who are being arbitrated will follow the decision. But what's very interesting about this, and certainly in non-Western context, is the arbitrator does not have any way to enforce that decision. And the interesting part is for so many cultures, people just follow it anyway. So it's a really interesting phenomenon. You ask yourself, well, if I'm not bound to follow it, why would I follow it? I'll just let that be out there as a teaser because there's various reasons why they do. Then we come to adjudication, which, uh, again, most of us know about, um, adjudication. Judge Jude, um, hey Jude, the Beatles. No, OK, that's a little aside, but I tell my students, if you think judge is sort of embedded in the word adjudication, then you know what you're talking about. So the difference between a judge. Right, you got it. The difference between a judge and an arbitrator is the judge does have the power to enforce, and you know, judges do that, they, they pass down sentences and they send people to prison and they cause, uh, people to pay fines and so forth. That's the authority of the judge. So I'll I'll just leave it there. The, the, the fifth one doesn't, uh, uh, it doesn't really pertain to. The book or to us very much um talking here, it's just oppressive peacemaking is what he calls it. So that umbrella view, taking largely from the theorizing of black. I find it extremely useful in thinking about conflict resolution anthropologically because it is that umbrella of conflict management with all these different bilateral and trilateral or third party assisted approaches that really help us get the big picture. So, um, maybe, maybe that's enough to say about anthropology and, and the big picture definition of conflict at the moment, but we're gonna be coming back. Um, I also want to talk about what I call variations on a theme, so I've sort of set that up, um, with the.

09:08 Ricardo Lopes: So let me just ask you one question just to clarify this and particularly for the audience. When we talk about conflict resolution, it can apply to both groups of people, and I mean just Diads of people, right? It can be a conflict just between two single individuals, and these sort of conflict resolution strategies would also apply there. Or are you focusing specifically in this case on conflicts between groups of people?

09:49 Douglas Fry: It really can be both, and it can be groups at various social levels as well. So this is one of the reasons that in conflict resolution, they very often use this vague term party and parties because a party could be, you know, multiple people or it could be one person. So I, I sometimes use that terminology and, and sometimes we can just talk about groups and, and sometimes, but for example, if we consider mediation in a cross cultural perspective, um. In some cases there's one mediator, and in other cases there's a group of mediators. For instance, imagine a group of elders in a village, and they're informal mediators, but when there's a problem between two people in the village, they've got the wisdom and the experience and are respected, and they just become the ones that try to help work this out and find a mutual agreement. So that's a group of mediators, and again, it could be just two people in the dispute or it could be multiple people in the dispute, such as the husband. The wife, the wife's families, the husband's, uh, parents, and so forth. So there could be multiple parties also in this. So just a simplistic model generally implies, you know, there's party one, party two, and then the mediator, a little bit, you know, yeah. And and in some cases, like in, in some nomadic forger bands, interestingly, it's just everybody in the camp. If they care to participate, they will. So if, if some guy starts making comments after dark around the fireplace about This other guy is just looking too much at his wife or something, and everybody in the camp hears this over the various campfires. Then the voices start going through the darkness trying to calm this thing down or anybody in the camp who, and not all of them necessarily are calming it down, but ultimately the whole idea of the mediation at the end of the day is, OK, we've we've talked this out, and we've explored it and we've examined it, and now let's go on with our lives. So that's in that case, if it works out that way, that's obviously successful mediation occurring in a in a whole camp of say 20 or 30 people.

11:54 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, uh, but when it's one single, when there's one single mediator, uh, I mean, yeah, I guess it, uh, is, it would be more or less the same for, uh, more traditional and also more. Um, INDUSTRIALIZED and post-industrial societies when people, for example, resolve conflicts within their own family or within their own community. I mean, the third party, the mediator, usually has to be for the resolution to work usually has to be someone who both of the parties respect and is usually of high authority, correct.

12:39 Douglas Fry: Yes, and, and basically correct. And just a little bit on your last part, well, let's go to, go to your overall idea. Absolutely correct. It's called impartiality, right? Because if, if somebody's trying to help resolve a conflict at whatever level of authority and they're not impartial, they are, in other words, biased in favor of one, that, that generally speaking doesn't work very well, you know, that their ruling is not accepted if, if it's an optional point and And so there's the impartiality point, I think that's your main one, but about the authority, and again this jumps back to Donald Black, it's very interesting. The the just friendly peacemaking level is, it's just who's ever there, right? It's not like there's any real person of authority. Mediors have no real ability to enforce anything. They're just trying to help out, right? And then arbitrators have a bit more authority because they do make a ruling and expect people to follow, and the culture expects people to follow what they are, you see where I'm going with this, and the judges have the most authority really, because they really can impose punishments. So authority is an interesting word there too.

13:51 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. Right. So, but how is conflict resolution studied cross culturally? I mean, because of, uh, I don't know, for example, linguistic variation, because of variation in terms of how conflict resolution can manifest itself, uh, across different socio-cultural contexts. Uh, HOW is it studied?

14:18 Douglas Fry: Yes, great, great question with that one. And um anthropologists, as you know, traditionally would do what they call ethnography and and live with a culture, live in a village or or live in a region, talk to people, observe what's going on, do participant observation, we call it an anthropology. So much of the way that that conflict resolution has been studied over decades or even going back 100 years in some cases more, is for the anthropologists. To be there participating, make observations, and if we're lucky, they have a particular interest in social control, um, or, or conflict resolution or something along these lines, um, social order, governance, and, and they write down some case studies and they write down examples that happen and they can be very rich. And in other cases, uh, in anthropology, you get sort of the bare bones description, uh, and, and some there's there's also a bit of confusion because not everybody. Um, FOLLOWS the definitions of what's arbitration and what's not, and maybe just uses them offhandedly as as English words or whatever language they're they're writing the ethnography in. So there are some, ah, methodological issues, but fundamentally the main source of this cross-cultural data would be ethnographies from many different anthropologists who've gone out across the ethnographic spectrum in different continents at different times and recorded how people are dealing with conflict. Now, if you can imagine this and you think that humans are really a flexible species, which we are, and that cultures are very different, which we know they are, you might come to a conclusion that there's just going to be a whole vast array of different approaches to dealing with conflict, and you're partly right if you come to that presumption. Um, BUT the reason that I took some time to go into this idea of the umbrella across conflict management is in fact what you find is you find recurring patterns, and, and I call them themes across different cultural contexts. So the first major one is, and, and I'm going to quote one of my old professors from UCSB in California, um. Donald Brown, he wrote a book, Human Universals, and he concludes conflict resolution is something that people do universally across all cultures. So that's a good start right there, and everything that I've read about conflict resolution in different cultures supports that conclusion as well. So, Human dealing with conflict in some way is a human universal, but then we come back to this, uh, this umbrella idea, and some of these approaches, I, I won't argue all of them, but some of them seem to be very strong universals, uh, or near universals. It's a little tricky to say. Others are patterns that occur. And then there's still other ones you can look at particular types of societies and, and see that they occur with regularity in those types of societies, but not necessarily in other types of societies. So we've got a mixed bag of, of patterns here. So, I, I like to use, and I, I, I write about this in the book quite a bit. It's one of the themes of the book that runs across, uh, the beginning to the end, and that's to draw from music, uh, a musical metaphor. Variations on a theme. So those people like myself who are not really a musician, uh, and may not have heard of this, it, it's a cool idea, and when I explain it, I think you'll recognize what I'm talking about. So it, it starts with a musical motif, something rather simple or maybe a little bit more complex, but nonetheless it's a motif. And then as you go across the musical theme, sometimes it speeds up and sometimes it slows down, or maybe the motif shifts from a minor to a major or a major to a minor. Um, AND, and it, it's varied by instrument and sometimes as well. So you hear the, the flute playing the theme, and the next thing you know, the violins are playing it, and, and so you go. So what you end up with is the ability to always recognize this theme, hence it is a theme that you recognize across the musical piece. Um, BUT with all these different variations. Musical style is changing and so that's what I argue you see with human conflict resolution. Let's, let's take avoidance, for example, one of the ones under that big umbrella, a bilateral approach, you just avoid each other. I, I think I'm pretty sure in saying this, that in every culture people practice avoidance. And the little caveat is not all ethnographers bother to note it down, but I mean, every culture that I've been in and every person I talked about, talked, you know, talked with in different cultures and different nations and so forth, it's just understood that's, that's one way you just deal with conflict is just to avoid the other person. So you can define avoidance as a theme, and then you can see the variations on it. Let's jump to Inuit group. They actually will arrange their igloos or huts in such a way so that the doors face far away if they're avoiding, even though they're still in the same camp, so they can come and go without having to see the neighbor. But if they're on good terms, the doors might face each other and then they can come and go and exchange words and be friendly and and and whatnot. So there's a zillion different ways cross-culturally that the avoidance plays out, but basic simple ways you just try to avoid contact and interaction with the person who you're in a conflict with. So that that illustrates it as well. Um, I, I think another example, maybe we'll get to this in a little bit, talk about apology that sort of makes the, the same point of the variations on a theme, idea. Um, SO how is it studied culturally? As I just said, the main way that conflict resolution and conflict management has been studied is individual ethnographers going out, recording what's going on. So that's the type of data which I draw on extensively. There's lots of articles. There's a few books. I mean, here's one example of A book that I edited with my colleague Graham Kim. And what we asked the contributors to this edited volume to particularly deal with is how is conflict managed in the society that they've worked in. So that was sort of unique to try to get everybody in the book. I think there's 8 ethnographic chapters in there, including Norway as an ethnographic. CASE, but most of them are, are, uh, less complicated in a social organization than, than a modern nation state. But in any case, to, to examine how do these people view conflict, how do they deal with it? How are they managing conflict, and provide as many examples as you can. So that, that's, you know, one case here, a book I happen to be involved with, um, that illustrates the different types of studies. And then occasionally, not really too often in the literature, but there's some cases where there's a comparison between different groups. Sometimes it might be a comparison of different methods within the same society. That's always interesting. A really neat example of this is from colleague Polly Wiesner and New Guinean indigenous person Pupu, and Wiesner and Pupu did a study where they looked at the traditional courts within. Meenga society and then they compared them with the government of New Zealand. The government imposed district courts, and what they found out first of all ethnographically is that the Meenga. Use compensation a great deal for settlements of disputes, and often mediation is involved with the the the compensation pattern. Meanwhile, the government comes in and wants to do things like impose fines and prison sentences. And so this got very different results. The case has gone to the government, about 10% of them, if I recall, people had to pay fines and they were not real happy with that. In other cases, the, the one dispute and just uh you know, one person suing the other, bringing the case just gave up and disgust and and it didn't get resolved, and other cases were thrown out by the. Um, VARIOUS legal judges from, from the government, not understanding that this was, uh, I shouldn't say not understanding, but I just they were, they were thrown out on technicalities or whatever. So the vast majority of these cases never really got heard or resolved in any way. Meanwhile, back at the traditional courts where the judge acted more like a mediator than a judge, um, They worked with the people, told one party that you needed to compensate this amount. That was understood. OK, I'll I'll pay 5 pigs for my misdeed. Paid the 5 pigs and all was good. So they found really different results. They had around 40 cases from each court. They, they compared them and came up with a number. So that's another approach you can use in doing conflict resolution studies. And finally, there's, there's not too many cases like I mentioned of this, but sometimes anthropologists team up. And for instance, there's, there's an article in the literature where they look at, I think it's 3 different societies, maybe it's even. Sologists had gone out and collected their data, and then they discussed them and compare them and see what are the the the similarities and the differences. So in a way. Um, HERE'S, here, let me, um, I, I have a few books here. I wanna plug this one certainly as well. This is from 2016, and it's, it's filled with ethnographic cases about how indigenous peoples deal with conflicts. It's a, it's a wonderful book, and it also comes with a nice theoretical introduction. And conclusion in there as well. One of the, one of the editors is, is indigenous, um, so that helps too, and he's got a lot of interesting insights. So there are these types of studies, I guess maybe that answers your question, I hope about the methods and where the data is coming from.

24:28 Ricardo Lopes: Yes, uh, uh, let me just ask you, because I mean, I'm going to take, uh, I hope, uh, a short detour here, but, uh, I, I really want to ask you because since you mentioned Doctor Donald Brown and his book Human Universals, I think this is, uh, an important question for me to ask an anthropologist like. You, uh, because, uh, I've talked about human universal several times on the show, and I, I guess this would even be a very important segment of the interview if people watch our previous ones for them to come here and learn a little bit more about this because, I mean, I read Dr. Brown's book. It's a fascinating one from the early 1990s and Um, uh, uh, let, let me ask you this. When it comes to human universals, if we find that something, a particular kind of behavior, for example, is a human universal or a near universal, uh, does it imply necessarily that it is an evolved trait or That it has some sort of biological underpinnings to it. I'm asking you that because people like evolutionary psychologists, for example, many times make use of literature on human universals to make the case that all universals every Everything that we find to be a human universal is necessarily an evolved trait or part of our biology in some way that it has an evolutionary basis to it. I remember even, for example, in his book, um, from the early 2000s, Steven Pinker has a book, uh, about. No, it's not how the mind works. It's the other one, I think from 2002. I, I'm not remembering the correct title here, but It's something about human nature and even at the, at the very end of the book puts there the entire list of human universals that Donald Brown explores in his book from the 90s and to make the claim that all of those universals are then. A biological in nature or evolved adaptations if you want to use evolutionary biology, language, I guess. So, but, but is that necessarily the case that if something is a human universal that it must be biological in some way.

27:22 Douglas Fry: Well, I think you've gone to a really important issue, and of course I know many of your listeners are going to be interested in exactly this topic, and I have several thoughts. So the first thought is when you're talking about behavior, you know, it's, it's always going to be a mix of different influences. We used to say that the genotype plus environment ends up with your phenotype as a rough model, and then nicely the whole development developmental sequence, which is very complicated and Interactive comes into play. So I think we always need to keep that in mind that behaviors are not generally speaking, so, so rigidly programmed in humans. Um, BUT there's always environmental influences, so I'm not trying to dodge your question, but I think that's an important caveat to just sort of put there in the background as we're talking about this. The, the second thought that I have is we probably should be more careful than just immediately say it's biological, and if it's biological, it's an adaptation. Uh, THAT doesn't sit right with me for several reasons. And, and, you know, interestingly, Donald Brown is coming out of UCSB, as I mentioned, he was a longtime professor there, as was Donald Simons. And I was fortunate enough to take a class, one class with both of them and several classes, uh, you know, with Simons. So, um, they actually made a bet, you might remember this little detail because it's a little bit of human curiosity, where they were talking and, and Simons is the, uh, what we call now an evolutionary psychologist, although that term didn't exist when when I was there and taking classes from him. He, he was writing his book on human sexuality. And pointing out that things like males tend to seek more sexual variety than women, and there's a reason for that, blah blah. And, and Donald Brown, a true bred and, and taught cultural anthropologist, it was wonderful to hear them debate and argue in this, this seminar class we had together with the two, Don and Don. But in any case, he, he writes this in the beginning of his book, in the foreword, I think it is, about he and, and Simon's made a bet. And then he confesses that he lost the bet, and that there were all these human universals, and hence here's this book on human universals, which he's, uh, he's surprised. And I always love it when people are able to change their mind. It just gives me hope in humanity and help in the scientists that can change their minds when presented with new evidence and, and new data. So I'm just sharing, you know, I, I was just a student, and this is long ago, but I, I was there, the fly on the wall for some of this way. Back. And another thing that that Simon's really emphasized to his students was that you should really look at the design, the evolutionary function and the design of a trait before you just attribute it to being so biological or being an evolved trait. So that is my second real point here with fortune when you just take a list. And all of that said, um, I, I think that that overall that idea is, is good, that if you see something that is what we could also call species typical, species typical behavior, which is sort of a different way of getting at universals, but It's something that most members of the species are going to show, maybe all members of the species are going to show, under the environment under which is typical for them. Again, so the environment comes in with this concept more explicitly than does just using the term universals. Mhm. I think there's a lot of evidence that dealing with aggression in ways that's nonviolent is certainly part of our evolutionary heritage, and I think this book on conflict resolution is really poking the question, you know, building on Donald Brown's book that conflict resolution is, is something that is a human universal. So I, I don't find any culture that doesn't have some various forms of conflict resolution, conflict management. As to how they deal with things. And one of the conclusions you, you know, you read in this, it's a short book, it's an easy read, um, you'll get out of this one is that Try to avoid the worst consequences of a conflict, and what they do strive to do universally, it seems, uh, well, no, I don't want to say universally for this one, but the overall pattern ethnographically, non-Western, indigenous, um, not necessarily in the United States. United States, my own culture might be the one that breaks the universality. But generally speaking, It's a big conclusion. Restore damaged relationships, reconcile the parties who are in a dispute. That seems to be the overwhelming reason why people engage in conflict resolution. And I think that's huge. Again, I'm the guy that's written in the past, you know, human potential for peace. And, and I've argued that we have a huge potential for peace, and conflict resolution is, uh, you know, one of my longstanding interests, but this book sort of pulls it together, and I try to make this case in, in the book that this is what humans do. And of course, thinking in terms of adaptation and and the Why we might consider resolving conflicts to be a human adaptation, um, there are certain reasons why this is a good thing, um. I, I think I wrote down here in my notes that I want to talk about um costs of conflict. If we just, if we come back to the idea of what is good for us and what's not good for us, if we're living in a social group and we're all interdependent on each other or we're interdependent on some people, it's going to be beneficial to get along well with them, and conflict through avoidance and other bad feelings and so forth can really mess up the relationships in so many different ways and have other negative effects. So just for example, conflict eats up time. Devours money, consumes attention better spent on other pursuits. This is certainly true in any society we're talking about. Conflict can destroy relationships, and keep in mind again, this seems to be the recurring theme that you want to restore those relationships and and reconcile the people in a conflict. So conflict damages or can destroy relationships. It can shred your reputation as a reasonable person if you just are involved in too many conflicts and never give. Um, MANGLED support networks, conflict can leave quite a mess to clean up. And let's not forget the emotions, anger, pain, anxiety, distress, frustration, annoyance, embarrassment, guilt, doubt, fear, and, and so forth. So there's certainly studies emerging now across different fields as to how we feel that conflict, being in a long term conflict can even affect things like blood pressure and other physiological responses. You know, this is not my expert area to Talk about, but I'm just intrigued, and it's something that as a human being, if I'm species typical, I certainly have trouble physiologically with a, with a conflict. So I, I, I try to play with this a little bit in the book as well as something that occurs cross-culturally, not just in, in our societies. And there's there's information out there here and there ethnographically. For instance, a study in Fiji points out that this Fijian man expressed such gratitude when the conflict was over that he can now feel normally and not be so worried about this. And Zun Twasi people from the Kalahari, uh, when there's been a conflict in their group, they often perform the special ritual of a trance dance to remove the ill feelings and be in contact with, with the spirits and get things back to normal. So this suggests, doesn't it, that the conflict is upsetting. In these contexts, uh, not just Western contexts where we're taking our blood pressure and so on, and I'm, I'm sure virtually anybody listening has spent sleepless hours lying in their bed or strolling around, uh, looking out the window because of a dispute at work or with a family member. Um, RIGHT, you've been there. Sounds like you've been there, you're nodding your head. Yeah. So, so we take this for granted. But if you think about back to your question, right, if we think about universals. This is part of the conflict and conflict resolution pattern. There's something there trying to motivate us to deal with this. It's the flashing light. Oh, you've got a problem. You've got a conflict, and you need to deal with this somehow, whether it's just simply to walk away and avoid, or whether it's to try to negotiate it out yourself, or it's whether to just tolerate you, it's not, it's going to go nowhere, so I just have to put up with it, but still you're feeling all this angst and negativity. Or do you take it to the authorities? Do, do you sue the person? Do you just, you know, act out of violence and and aggression, self-redress, and decide you're going to do something about it violently yourself, you know, I'll get the bastard, and that's not conflict resolution in my thinking, but that does pertain to justice. It does pertain to trying to solve the problem. Again, we can explore this a little bit more. So, in, in sum, and you, I realized you raised a very interesting side point here, right? That we do need to be cautious. Ideally, we would not just look at universal features, we'd also look at the developmental sequence. We'd also try to explore different elements of this, such as the emotions and the, the, the neurophysiology and, and hormones and, you know, look at it holistically as to get as much data as we can about what is causing this, if, if that's appropriate or relevant. And um then we'd also be looking in terms of, well, how does this function and and think evolutionarily. What, what would be the explanation for why we have this human universal and, you know, it, it's not just human, by the way, this is also a critical point. Uh, I, I want to definitely mention someone that everybody has heard of, uh, Frans de Waal. And of course,

37:52 Ricardo Lopes: I, I, I have the pleasure of interviewing him twice on the show, so

37:57 Douglas Fry: that's fantastic, yes. He was a very nice guy as well as an innovative thinker, and of course, so he's he's dealt in this edited volume with conflict resolution across primates and in humans and so forth and Here's just one, you know, we've heard about the first kiss. Here's a visual presentation of the two chimpanzees. Who have had their conflict and they separate a little bit of avoidance, but it doesn't last long, and it ends by the, the person, one chimpanzee person kissing the other one as a reconciliation. So what what Frans de Waal, with his landmark thinking, he, he drew attention to aggression is not just aggression, and, and that's the end of it. It very often across now numerous species, it's been documented that there's this inclination to reconcile. And one of the main reasons that he and his colleagues, other researchers have pointed out for this is the importance of the relationship, right? The valuable relationship hypothesis. And I think that This is very much the case for humans as well, that we are a very social species, we all need different members of our own species to get by, literally to survive, and this has been going on through our evolutionary history. So we can, we can link this in again, back to your question as universals and adaptations and so forth. The valuable relationship hypothesis is, is one explanation as to why we would have evolved a pattern for conflict resolution. Mhm.

39:35 Ricardo Lopes: Right. I, I mean, just for, uh, to give people the correct reference because I mean, I was trying to mention the Steven Pinker bookie. I, I was referring to the blank slate, the modern denial of human nature. That's the one where he includes the list of human universals toward the end of the book, but, uh, anyway, let's

39:59 Douglas Fry: say you drew a blank about the title. Yeah I guess so.

40:05 Ricardo Lopes: So, uh, anyway, uh, let, let me ask you, um, one more question about conflict resolution. I mean, do the kinds of conflict resolution that people adopt vary cross-culturally? I mean, is it that in some socio-cultural contexts, we tend to find, uh, Some kinds of conflict resolution that are more prevalent than others and in other social cultural contexts, I mean other kinds would be more prevalent and if so, do we have any idea about the kinds of factors that would play a role there? I mean, would there be any Uh, ecological factors, and cultural factors that influence, uh, the prevalence, uh, the prevalence of different kinds of conflict resolution across human societies.

41:02 Douglas Fry: Yes, and, and I'm just going to start by saying I think that would be an excellent series of questions for students, scientists, PhD students, for instance, to actually go out and and try to get some data on that and figure this out. Because at least to my reading of the field, we just really don't know too much as to why there would be differences from different societies. So of course 11 explanation is it's just sort of historical particularism and they, they sort of went that way, random genetic drift, you know, not literally random genetic drift, but cultural drift. Um, WHAT I will say I've noticed is that there are some cultures that just favor avoidance, for instance, they're very avoidance positive, and that means they're dealing with conflicts without actually engaging in active resolution of them. And, and this may be good and this may be bad depending on your point of view and depending on what happens. So if you go years or decades and the conflict is still seething and both of you are still avoiding each other. Not, not so great. And I mean, I, I tell an instance from my, my own family where mother and son did not talk to each other for 20 some years, and that's a real tragedy. And, and finally they did get back together and things were still tense. But all that lost time between a mother and a and a Um, due to conflict. So that's avoidance in one form, but like I say, there are, there are cultures that really favor this, and interestingly, Southeast Asia, uh, maybe Asia in general tends to have a lot of these types of, of cultures as a regional focus. I don't think that's ecological, but it might be have something to do with culture area and diffusion of. Ideas and, and it's again, research questions. I, I really don't know about that. What I've also noticed from looking cross-culturally is that it's, there's not many of these, but there's some number of cultures who really focus on self-redress and leaving the individual up to their own devices to try to deal with their, their conflict. And in the best case, this would involve negotiating. Um, RIGHT, that's a bilateral process. It's something you initiate, so that's, that's a type of, um, Well, I should say self-initiated, not, not necessarily self-redress in the negative sense, but the other is the negative where you actually engage in in violence and so forth. And I, I, I wanna read this one. So this is from work in the 1960s by a Swiss anthropologist named Broger, and what Broger describes is Uh, there was a row of trees along the property line of these two farmer peasants, Giuseppe and Domenico. Uh, Broger writes, Domenico cut down some of the trees and made charcoal. Viewing the trees as a shared resource, Giuseppe requested of Domenico some of the charcoal, but Domenico refused to share. They argued, and in a rage, Giuseppe retaliated by stealing some rabbits belonging to Domenico. Seeking retribution, Domenico cut down some of Giuseppe's vineyard in the middle of the night. Further enraged, Giuseppe killed Domenico, so. That's also, uh, you know, bilateral self-redress of the violent type. And again, some cultures, I, I don't know if this particular culture leaned in this direction or if it's an incident that Broger shared with us that unfortunately occurred, but there are some cultures where the main emphasis is you have to just take care of this yourself. And again, I, I, my impression is I don't have numbers because of the state of the data in the field, but my impression is this is not very typical, but it, it does exist in some cultures. Much more typically is, is what we would call the involvement of the third side, and I think it was an anthropologist. Uh, William Uri, who, who first coined this term of the third side and wrote a book about it, um, a couple of decades back, but this, uh, this recent book that I, I held up and, and showed you just a minute ago, creating the third force, that's playing off of this idea that that third parties get involved and looping back to what you'd raised before, it's interesting how third parties have an inclination to get involved. In many cultures to help dispute and work this out. So again, we can think about the ripple effect for a very social species where people need each other and there's a lot of interdependencies in the relationships. Conflict between two can upset conflict among many if it's just allowed to get out of, out of hand, and many of the anthropologists who have described conflict and the involvement of these third parties. Make this different this this point in various different cultural ways that they, they understand the ramifications of a conflict in their small group or their village or whatever, and that it could go really badly. So they're very much involved in more cultures than not. Hence again, this idea of just a self-redress pattern is rather minimal, but it's a really interesting question, you know, again that you're raising as to why would some cultures do it this way and most cultures not. And my final response to this one is, yes, you can also tell a few things. The obvious influence of social organization is on adjudication, because recall, if you have a judge, the judge has the power to enforce, and if you have a very egalitarian type of social organization, the judge doesn't have, there's no one that has the power to enforce anything. So what you really need is the development of a chiefdom, a strong chiefdom or a state, and then adjudication as defined, you know, by black and as we're using it here, has, has a role to play. So there's a really interesting example I talked about towards, towards the end of the book where the ethnographer, I believe it was in the 1940s, working in Africa, actually observed a shift from allowing revenge killings to Take place between lineages, and that was just the way things were functioning to exerting more authority than had existed previously in in that society and saying, OK, from now on, I prohibit the lineages fighting and killing each other as a form of self redress. Now you're going to bring your disputes to me and my assembly, and we will determine. Who's to pay whom and whatever, and there's not going to be loss of life over this. That's a very interesting example from the Otara Nba, um, written by an anthropologist, Nadel, who happened to be at the right place in the right time and and saw this interesting cultural change, cultural shift, or in other words, the the birth of an adjudication process. Uh, BY the chief. So I, I just love examples like that, you know, that sometimes fall into our laps, you know, fall into our theories. Otherwise you're left speculating, you're left looking, well, look, here's 7 chiefdoms and there's different types of adjudication, and there's an authority and the judge can make a ruling and enforce it. OK, that makes sense. And, and here's hunter-gatherers and you can look far and wide and you don't find any. Adjudication because nobody has the power to enforce and you, you, you know, you put it together that way. So like I say, when you actually get a, a case where the transition occurred and some social change occurred and the anthropologist wrote it down, it's, it's pretty exciting.

48:55 Ricardo Lopes: Right. No, it's definitely very interesting and, uh, I, I guess useful. Uh, uh, THAT'S something I'm going to ask you toward the end of our conversation, how, I mean, by studying conflict resolution across different societies and particularly non-Western. Societies, I mean, what we can learn from it and whether this can be applied to our more larger scale modern industrialized societies, but that's something we're going to come back to toward the end. Let me ask you now more about The several themes of conflict resolution that you explore in your book, starting with reciprocity. I mean, what is reciprocity? What forms can it take and what role does it play in conflict resolution?

49:51 Douglas Fry: Yes, thanks, thanks for that question. I have a whole chapter. It's chapter 2 on reciprocity, and I put this chapter early in the book because it is such an important concept. And what is, I would say, not strictly innovative but pretty cutting edge is to try to explore this combination of the reciprocity idea and conflict management, conflict reso. Um, A lot of people have highlighted reciprocity in different ways, and from different perspectives, and just let me run through this briefly because I think it's, it's pretty cool. So, so Frans de Waal again, he relates in one of his books, um, when Confucius was asked what is the most important lesson about how to run your life and live your your life. He thought because he was Confucius, right, didn't answer right away. He gave it some thought and he said reciprocity. Just one word, reciprocity. And of course, Charles Darwin interestingly um came along and also emphasized the importance of reciprocity as the foundation stone of morality. Nation start royality and basically paraphrases what's in the Bible in terms of being, again a a human universal principle, so says Darwin, as to how uh people conduct their social lives. So wow. Um, I, I spent quite a bit of time in Finland as we were chatting about informally, and while I was in Finland, my sociological trained colleagues and friends brought to my attention, uh, Edward Vestermark, and I'd heard of Edward Edward Vestermark only in terms of the Vestermark effect and so forth, but what I didn't know about Vestermark was how he had come up with a view of emotions and how reciprocity relates to emotions. And this is a largely neglected point. I, I try to mention it whenever I have an audience, so here I am mentioning it. Uh, Vestermark understood that when someone does you a good deed, you feel emotion, you feel gratitude, and you feel the need to repay. Wow, that's cool, isn't it? And we all know this, at least most of us know this. And then the other side of it is if someone does you a bad turn, well, same principle, right? You sort of want to get even payback, etc. ETC. AND this occurs across various statements of the golden rule in different major religions, um, you know, it's, it's in. In Judaism, for instance, with the elder Hillel making a comment to a novice who would like to to learn more about Jewish religion that, well, um, Do unto others as you want them to do unto you. That's basically it. The rest is window dressing. I'm paraphrasing the exact quote's in the book somewhere. Um, BUT, you know, look at, uh, Hinduism and Buddhism and, and Muslim Islam, and they're all different variations of Either do unto others as you would wish them to do, and often it's, it's turned the other way around and says don't do to others as you would not want them to do to you. Either way, it's the, the phrasing of the reciprocity rule and the golden rule, and indigenous cultures, many of them, um, where it's recorded, have exactly. Statements to the same effect, um, I, I, I would say unfortunately they're not always recorded, which doesn't mean they don't exist, but it simply means that nobody thought to write them down, or I didn't find it when I'm doing my research or so I'm a combination of the above. But for, for instance, on Ifaluk Island in the Pacific. Katherine Lutz tells a story that illustrates exactly this, pointing out that there's even the concept in that society of the payback. So one woman is giving birth, she invites her her friends and relatives to be part of the birth, and she leaves somebody out. And Katherine Lutz explains how then months later or a year later or whatever, when the woman who was left out is now giving birth, she doesn't invite the other one as the equitable payback for not having been invited. So if you think about this, as most people will get this immediately, my, my point here is if we're talking human universals again, wow, reciprocity is really huge. And the second point is, well, how does this relate to conflict resolution? I, I want to really give a call out to conflict resolver Furlong, Gary Furlong, who has written a book about conflict resolution Toolbox, and he was kind enough to give a blurb for the book, so we had a positive interaction there for the first time. But I, I really appreciated in his second edition of his conflict resolution toolbox, how he actually put in reciprocity explicitly, because I, I've not seen this in any. Of the conflict resolution literature that I'm familiar with and have reviewed for the book. So I, I, I took his idea and applied it in cross cultural circumstance. He, he gave some examples from Western context, but it's, it's really important. He, he points out that you can have the, the positive spiral or the negative spiral, and what you want to do for conflict resolution is by all means avoid going in the negative downward. Spiral of reciprocity. I do you have that. We just, we just saw it actually perfectly with these two Italian peasants and and their story. They got into this downward spiral and it ended up in one committing homicide and killing the other. That's about as bad as you can get as an outcome for a conflict. But there's also the positive, and there's also the important point with conflict resolution is if it starts to spiral downward, oh, put on the brakes and spiral it back up positively. So one example of this which has absolutely important implications today, I'll just slip this into partial answer to your other question you mentioned about implications, is is to look at international relations, and there was a really interesting book written in 1962 by a psychologist about grit, G R I T, graduated reciprocal reductions in. No, graduated, yeah, in tension reduction, tension reduction hyphenated, so you get grit, and he, he, he, Osgood is his name. Osgood pointed out how basically you can reverse an arms race, this time 62, between the United States and the USSO by taking a series of reciprocated steps, and he gives a wonderful analogy that illustrates the danger of the Cold War nuclear arms race and the threat of nuclear annihilation of all humanity or all life on the planet for that matter, by saying we have a teeter-totter. Basically a long board balanced here and just let's imagine it's above a bottomless abyss, just to make it more interesting, and we've got a President of the United States and President of the USSR and with each negative. Occasion reciprocal downward spiral, they're stepping further out on this unstable teeter totter, he says, with graduated reciprocal initiatives for tension reduction, one of them proclaims, I'm taking a step towards you. And does something concrete, announcing it ahead of time, and I'm doing it to warm our relationships. I'm doing it for peace. And in this way, if it's reciprocated, well, it has to be to keep the balance, but then the other side might take a step and it needs to be reciprocated. Pretty soon they're back hugging each other. All is good. OK, maybe not quite all is good, but it's a very well thought out book on this topic, and It has absolute implications for some of the conflicts going on in the world. I mean, as, as we're having this conversation, right, we we've got the United States and Israel bombing Iran and Iran shooting back, and it's a downward spiral of mutual exchanging of bombs and killing people. Just the latest example of this, right? Russia, Ukraine, and any other circumstance. It's no way to run a planet, to quote Lester Brown. But in any case, if we try to learn something from a reciprocity and conflict resolution, there are ways to reduce and prevent this downward spiral and in fact reverse it and come back out. So this is what Gary Furlong talks about in a in a more domestic Western setting in which I thought this is, this is brilliant and so important and so applicable that I also try to talk about in a more general, um, let's apply this cross culturally. Now my, my interpretation here is yet we have another human universal, and I think if you go back to Don Brown's book, you'll also see the word reciprocity on his list as well. So it's like no big, big surprise here. Robert Trivers, of course, wrote about reciprocal altruism. It's a special form of reciprocity. Robert Axelrod has written his wonderful book about evolution of cooperation. And there's this chapter in there, which you may be familiar about, is what occurred amongst the troops in the trenches of World War One. And they engaged in what could be considered reciprocal restraint. Not so much has been written about that, but it's, it's a key concept. I won't kill you if you won't kill me. I won't shoot at you if you won't shoot at me. And they developed all sorts of patterns and rules to this. If, if they were allowed to be facing each other for a while. And in fact, as new troops would come in and the existing troops would rotate out, they would even explain to the incoming troops, here are the rules, guys, no shooting at the enemy before 9 a.m. you know, 8 to 9 is. Truth time, we're all doing our morning stuff, you know, etc. ETC. So, um, There's lots of applications of reciprocity to dealing with conflicts, to preventing conflicts. What, what I counsel towards the end of the book, at the end of the book, I provide some, you know, takeaways, if you will, that any person might want to apply in their own lives. One of them is at all costs avoid the downward spiral of reciprocity. And if you find yourself in one, start going the other way as fast as you can, you know, so. You know, a couple of concrete lessons from this research, from this book.

1:00:44 Ricardo Lopes: So, uh, yeah, I, I think that we've already touched on this aspect in, uh, at least one of our earlier interviews when we talked about how people maintain peace between different societies. Uh, TELL us about the importance of relationships and interconnections when it comes to conflict resolution.

1:01:11 Douglas Fry: Yeah, I think, um, in, in a way, I thank you for the question to, to elaborate a little bit. So I also have a chapter on on relationships and Again, it makes the point that in any human society people are really interconnected and dependent upon each other for a variety of things, you know, whether, whether we're just talking within the family and the raising of the kids or more generally within the community and the sharing of goods. I mean, one point I make there in the chapter that talks a lot about the nomadic foragers is that every single example of every single ethnography of nomadic foragers talks about them sharing meat. That's, that's, I don't know if that one's in, in Don Brown's book because it's a special type of society, but it just shows how important it is, in our, in our past to share food resources, especially protein rich and, and, and fatty meat, that every society that I've found any ethnography, and I've looked at a lot of ethnographies, right? It's just one of those patterns that recurs and recurs in this type of society of hunter gatherers or of nomadic foragers, so. That's important to relationships, and relationships um again link back to this idea from De Waal's work in the non-human primates, of valuable relationships, some are more valuable than others, and we make that decision. Sometimes we just choose that we're not going to engage with the person anymore. That's easier for us to do in large scale modern societies where there's a lot of people. It can be very much more difficult, even impossible, to do in small scale societies, whether we're talking nomadic foragers, a type of very long evolutionary past social organization which the species evolved in, or whether we're talking about more recent but still small scale societies. So in one chapter, and I'm jumping around just a little bit, but I think it makes sense in this case, I talk about reconciliation, forgiveness, and reconciliation rituals, and we consider 4 different types, 4 different cases I should say, from Hawaii and the Hoponobono, Omaha and how Omaha used to make peace after they'd been at war. Um, THERE'S another interesting case from Sama De Laut, nomadic boat people from Southeast Asia, and that they have actually a, a term for when people are not speaking with each other, that type of avoidance. And then they have an entire ritual that the third parties, the other members of the community have to be involved in to to pull this off and make this work, and it involves all sorts of different elements of of ritual as, as they do, hence we're calling them reconciliation rituals. To reconcile the parties again, major motivation of conflict resolution reconcile the parties. And another one is to restore group harmony or normal relationships within the group. So relationships are yet another factor, just put it this way, that are integrally involved in looking at conflict resolution. And you can, you know, look at this from many different perspectives. A Western model, which I think has utility, and I talk about this briefly in the book as well, is called the dual concern model, and it has to do with, you know, say you and I are the two people involved in this case. How much do I care about your outcome and how much do I not care about your outcome? How much do I care about my outcome and how much do I don't. So we basically can create a 2 by 2 cell. There are 4 cells as to what happens. And if I care a lot about you and I care a lot about me, well, we tend to engage in problem solving and and work it out. Well, let's call it negotiation, for instance, or in some way finding an integrated solution. We, we try to work on that because I value your outcome as well as my own. But if I'm call me. Selfish bastard. I just really don't care about you, Ricardo. I'm sorry. I just want my way. Well, then I'm going to just use coercion and I don't really care about your feelings, your outcome, anything else. So we can map this out and end up with 4 different strategies as to approach from from problem solving to, um, Coercion and and self redress to avoidance, and then simply toleration. So I know this is not making any sense with me waving my hands around, but uh the book has a nice table that explains it, and if you want me to, I'll try to give it a better shot at explaining it here.

1:06:03 Ricardo Lopes: No, that, that's fine, uh, of course, this is also to promote your book so people can certainly go and look at the, that figure in your book there. So, um, but how important, uh, to get into another topic related to conflict resolution, how important is it to respect the rights of others? And, and I mean, I, I was, I was also curious, uh, when it comes to these topics specifically because Uh, are you, as an anthropologist, uh, how are you using the word right or rights here, because of course it has a form of, it, it has a legal definition, then it also has a, I guess a philosophical definition, but uh I, I mean, is that something that also applies the concept of right or that we can see a form of it mani manifested in, uh, non-Western societies.

1:07:10 Douglas Fry: Yes, and And this is, this is a more like you say, a philosophical discussion, um. I'm not a philosopher, so why am I doing this, right? The, the way I see it is, um, stemming from the work of anthropologist Laura Nader, where she talked about to make the balance. I think that this idea of, of making the balance. Is very, very central to justice, as again something that we can see as as general terms or principles to manifest across the ethnographic spectrum across humanity, and perhaps to some of the non-human primates as well. So there's this really gone viral, um, short video of one of Frans de Waal's former students, now professor well into her own right, Sarah Brosnan. So Brosnan and Dualal some decades ago.

1:08:10 Ricardo Lopes: I, I've, I, I've interviewed her as well.

1:08:13 Douglas Fry: Yeah, oh great. So just a reminder, right, she's looked at fairness. Um, THIS video is great because it's called Monkeys will not work for unequal, will not work equally for unequal pay, right? So it involves giving a more desired payment of a rate to one monkey and a cucumber, less desirable to the other, and how annoyed the monkey getting the cucumber goes. So, You know, there may be, not necessarily a sense of, of equity among the monkeys, but at least they want to get a fair deal for themselves. And I say not a sense of equity, I mean a sense of social equity that everybody should get equal pay or something. Um, I don't think she thinks that that applies to the monkeys, but it certainly can apply to humans. Um, SO this idea of rights, uh, equity, equality and fairness. To me they're linked up with this idea of justice and making the balance and I don't have in this discussion, you know, like hard evidence and lots of evidence for this. That could be a whole another book. It would be interesting to really dig into it much more deeply, but what I do notice is that if you look at the conflict resolution across these different cultures, there's this principle of fairness and equity just keep recurring as a way out of the problem. And perhaps this is a fine point just to mention that, you know, the, the What do you call it, the um Syllable, the the the RE in front, what is that? Uh, IT'S Now this is escaping me now. I'm drawing the blank about this one, but RE in Latin, the two letters R means to go back or go back again or to return. And just for fun, it occurred to me that I could give each title in the book an RE word, and it actually made a lot of sense because what it's suggesting is whether we're talking about um. Reciprocity, that's an RE word, and literally that one means back and forward again, you know, back again and forward, back and forth, just put it that way, catching that idea of reciprocity. Well, resolution as in conflict resolution, if you go back for the solution part, it actually meant in Latin originally to loosen something up. And now it sort of morphed a bit, you know, to, to fix something up, right, but to loosen. So again with the re in front of it, it's, it's something got too tight. You've got to loosen it up as a resolution. So if a conflict, is there a conflict resolution, so. Equity and rights and justice and to make the balance are concepts about resolution and and they interrelate with each other. So I encourage people just to think more about this because it's it's really pretty fascinating as to What it also says about our, our human inclinations. Yeah, maybe I'll just stop that one there at, at that point, you know, I, I explore this a bit more, but again, in this particular case, more philosophically, um, I do try to link it to conflict resolution in the book. Mhm.

1:11:40 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, HOW about reconciliation? I mean, because, of course, uh, rituals of apology and forgiveness can also play a role across human society. So, uh, how do people reconcile and how do these rituals of apology and forgiveness look like?

1:12:04 Douglas Fry: So I've Compiled a list. I actually have been thinking about this and working on it for quite a while as I read ethnographies, and by quite a while already in this natural conflict resolution book that Dal and Uli did published in 2000, I wrote a chapter for that and discussed some of the common elements of reconciliation. So here again we come back to this idea of There are themes, and in this sense we're not only considering reconciliation as a theme, but we're also looking at micro themes, you could put it that way, or sub-thees, and, and, and just listen, I, I'll just read this because that's as good a way as any. Um, SO a comparison of reconciliations cross culturally reveals various recurring subthees, for instance, giving and exchanging gifts. There's reciprocity in a positive sense, interestingly. Paying compensation or making other forms of restitution. We haven't talked about compensation yet, but we can get there. Sharing of food and drink. And what's really interesting there is think about what we humans just normally do. If it's normal, if things are in a in a good social way, we're all the time sharing food and drink, we have a conflict, very often with the reconciliation. This is exaggerated, and now we're back to sharing food and drink again. So it's sort of falling into place, I think. Making positive physical contact such as hugging, you know, I just even mentioned the chimpanzees kissing. Well, we, we do that too. And of course a fun element of this, everybody wants to hear more about makeup sex, right? So I slipped an example or two of that in there, uh, into the mix. So physical contact, um, showing gestures of of or postures that signal appeasement. Non-threatening postures, for instance, in some cases it's literally lowering the body, and this could be looked at very ecological, um, ec sorry, ecologically as, as well when you look at animal conflict and submission signals and so forth. OK, um, expressing contrition, remorse, or apology is another recurring element to this, where apology is, is one party. Understanding that they had done another one wrong, acknowledging that and saying they're sorry, that's sort of the general definition. But again, this is an interesting theme where it plays out culturally in so many different ways. So for instance, I gave an example of Rotuma Island. An apology involves the cooking of a pig in a very special way under the sand or under the earth, and then bringing the pig as a sign of apology and then expressing the apology or else having a high status person come along and do it as even more weight to the apology, but presenting the pig, which has a particular name and in this sense symbolizes the apology is legitimate and important, and here's this valuable. Uh, FOOD to go with it. So, so clearly that's rotin, you know, you've never done that. I've never done that. Other cultures don't do that. They do something else. We all have our ways. Um, OK, the list is going on because I keep giving examples, evoking the sacred through prayer and ceremony, something humans do all the time, Employing, um, unifying symbolism. Great example of that, you know, the coconuts must fall, both the coconut halves must fall this way or this way. Can't fall this way and this way. No, you're trying to do the ritual, but have to go the same way. If not, grab another coconut, cut it in half, and see which way it falls. OK, there, now we can reconcile symbolism and, and evoking the sacred prayers, um, so on, involving third parties. So we've talked about that, but that's, that's huge in these recommendations. Reconciliation rituals, they almost always involve somebody or many somebodies else to seal the deal, so to speak, and to signal to everybody that this conflict is now resolved and these people are, are mediated. And, and sometimes the, um, the third parties. Have key roles such as mediators that help to do this or or shaman who perform prayers and rites and whatnot, and sometimes they're just there to to be witnesses and participate and very often the the some of the previous elements such as the sharing of of food and drink is of course involves everybody and signifies the social relationships again. So, so these are some generalizations. That you won't find every description saying every one, but if you start reading 20 descriptions of reconciliation rituals, you can just start ticking them off and find that many of them have many and, and, and so on and so forth. So, so it's very interesting, and again I think it links back to just the importance of reconciling. And it certainly links back to one of the main conclusions from this book is that the main purpose of conflict resolution is to reconcile the parties, get relationships back to normal, and then let that spread out, sometimes mentioned, sometimes not in the ethnographies, let that spread out to the whole community and restore normality across the community. And that's what indigenous. As a non-Western conflict resolution does, but that's not necessarily what conflict resolution does in in our modern industrial states and so forth, and I think we, we all know that. So just to again put in a teaser about implications here, um, if you have a judicial system, for instance, in, in the United States, my country. Um, WHICH is based largely on punitive measures. Notice that that's not doing diddly squat to reconcile the people who are there in the, in the, in the court, uh, whether it's a civil suit or, um, criminal suit or whatever. So it's just something to think about. Why, why in the United States do we put all this emphasis, contour almost every other culture around, on punitive measures. What can we learn, you know, what could we learn to do it better.

1:18:12 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, so, so do you think that perhaps something like restorative justice could play a bigger role in our societies?

1:18:24 Douglas Fry: Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Restorative justice, alternative dispute resolution, sort of similar concepts, even things like going to community mediation. So one case I found very interestingly from Norway is they implemented nationwide that if you have minors, and I think they're defining minors into mid or low twenties, if you have young people who have some conflict, that they're actually required to go to mediation boards, and there are mediation boards, and it was hugely successful for some. 90% of the disputes between people, say age 16 and 24, I'm, I'm, I have to check my ears, but I'm just to give you an idea of the, of what age we're talking about approximately, um, 90% of them. Actually got some sort of agreement out of the mediation that now I'll do this and I'll do this and we agree and we're not going to have this dispute anymore and then 90% of those actually followed the agreement, so it was highly successful to go at this in a way that involved a mediation technique as opposed to a judicial technique. Mhm. So yes, there are lots of applications.

1:19:39 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. And one of the aspects, uh, related to con conflict has to do with revenge. I mean, someone is wronged or feels wronged by somebody else and then they feel this need to uh seek revenge to, uh, induce suffering or. Or pain or I mean, it has a sort of a righteousness element to it because usually people who seek revenge also tend to think that they have been, they have the moral high ground because they have been wronged and so they are seeking justice in some way. Um, I mean, anthropologically speaking, uh, how do you approach revenge? When do people resort to revenge?

1:20:32 Douglas Fry: Yes, so great, I'm so glad that you remembered to bring up revenge here for part of the discussion. I, I agree with everything you said that it's, it's a way to seek justice. So just as a quick reminder, we have the umbrella of conflict management, and revenge fits in there as just about the only one that can be explicitly violent, right? It doesn't always have to be violent, but it, it can be violent, um, even to the point of, of lethality. And we're all familiar with Blood vengeance, for instance, and so on and so forth. We're also pro probably all available with the um, sorry, losing my my tongue here. We're all familiar with the term blood money, which is a, a, a non-violent, a non-killing alternative to um revenge through killing, lethal, lethal killing. So there are alternatives, many different alternatives to revenge seeking, but it is a major force to contend with. And the other link, of course, to make it explicit, is it's a form of negative reciprocity. You feel that emotion, the retributive emotion, Vestermark would say that you've been wronged and you want to get even. So you want, you want to give unto them as they gave unto you in a negative sense of the breaking golden rule, put it that way, or totally understandable. So, so these are parts of, of human psychology as well. And so again, if you bring in the conflict resolution to this, the challenge becomes how to prevent those feelings. Um, MINIMIZE those feelings and give people alternative ways to deal with them. So for example, imagine, you know, in, in one of our modern industrial states with a judicial system that's functioning reasonably well, maybe very well depending on the country. Somebody commits a homicide, well, unless they go confess, police investigate, gather evidence. Someone is perhaps arrested, charged, given all the legal rights to defend themselves, etc. ETC. They appear in court. If found guilty, they're sentenced, and so forth. That's an alternative, a total alternative to the victims of the family's victims seeking. Revenge homicide seeking redress through their own actions, taking the law into their own hands, so we don't question that. And one of the main reasons we don't question that is that is a whole body is this is a society we've been born into and raised into and taught that there's police and courts and there's rights and there's a process, and it's, it's not right. In fact, it's a new crime if you were to just think that person killed your brother or know the person killed your brother and just go and kill him. Now you've got a new crime and you're going to end up in jail, more likely than not. So we're all socialized is the key word. We're socialized into what the norms and the values and the processes are for our given society. So, so whether we're living in a nomadic forager band. And the, the norms and the values are to be nonviolent and to never kill anybody, or we're in a different nomadic forager band, and there it's understood that, well, if someone's killed, the family members have the right to kill the victim if they can. And, and the killer understands this very well, raised in this society, how things work, and probably takes off for the high hills if, if he can. And, and so, The overall point I'm trying to make here is that socialization in this very learning primate, this very cultural primate, has a huge influence on how individuals act on their emotions when they've been done a serious wrong, and most of us, most of the time follow those norms. To be in accordance with with the patterns and and the values of our own culture and and our socialization and our upbringing, occasionally we don't, right? There are exceptions, but for the most part we do. So, um, What Vester Mark was arguing with his emotion is that we feel the emotions, but then there are a variety of different ways that they can be acted out or not. And here I'll just take this because it's sort of an interesting example, I think, in taking a principle and Applying it without looking at the supporting evidence well enough. And specifically what I'm talking about is evolutionary psychologist Dallan Wilson wrote a really good book, really interesting book about homicide. It's called Homicide, published in 1988. And as part of the book, they, they take the reciprocity principle, I don't remember if they really call it that or not, but anyway, they, they, they take the idea that um When someone loses a family member, they're going to feel this desire for revenge, and they're going to act on it. And I hope most listeners can see a problem with that right away, but at least I, I saw a problem with that as an anthropologist who read so much about different cultures. It's like, yeah, the emotion is there, the feelings may be there, that may be universal or near universal, and that links back to reasons for reciprocity. Feelings and behaviors overall. However, where I think Dallan Wilson just went really charging off on a horse into the plains, was that they saw this as a revenge killing, revenge killing being the trait it was selected for, and the anthropological data contradict that, uh, specifically. In a cross-cultural study, about half the cultures allowed revenge homicide and 50% did not. So clearly right there you've got a problem with this idea of it's universally is a desire or in fact an enactment to kill. Desire, yeah, but that's a feeling actually carrying through of that approximate half that allowed for revenge killing, then there were further gradations depending on society. So a few societies said it's a moral imperative, you have to do it. And guess what, there was a lot of revenge killing in those societies. Others said, well, you know, it's, it's one thing you can do and you probably should. But again, not always. And then we go up to the idea of, well, it's, it's one option among many, but it's not really the best option. You should do something else instead if you at all can and so forth. So, so humans are very flexible. We're subject to socialization. We're subject to the impact of our own societies, the norms and values and customs and institutions. In that sense, Revenge is is very interesting, I think. I know we all have that emotion. I, at least that's where I'm coming from. Um, I had a childhood friend and, and He used to say sometimes like if if something horrendous happened, not horrendous, but just something annoying, say for instance we're walking in this nice deserted area, dirt road up in the mountains, and all of a sudden we hear the roaring sound of a motorcycle, and a motorcycle comes roaring by, bumping and spewing gas and rocks and stinking and loud and everything, and he needs a I wish I had a bazooka.

1:28:08 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I mean, uh, uh, I, I mean, certainly when I was a child in the 90s, we also had those kinds of, uh, talk, uh those kinds of talks. Yeah, I, I, I, I guess that, I, I mean, to some extent, there's some universality to it, at least to the, to the feelings.

1:28:36 Douglas Fry: Exactly. There, there's some catharsis there just to express them. I mean, in the book, I give an example from my, my own life where I say, well, my first thought was I should get some roofing nails and put them under the tires of this guy's truck. Well, I saw a few problems with that possibility, you know, so we have our own restraints. Um, I don't know, did I get to the essence of the revenge item, or did you?

1:29:02 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, no, no, I, I, I think so. I mean, I was just going to say because we're also nearing the end of our conversation here, but I was just going to say since you mentioned Margot Wilson's and Martin Daly's book, Homicide. Uh, YEAH, uh, I'm an evolutionary psychologist, even more so in recent years, uh, uh, have been annoying me a bit because I mean, they make these very quick jumps from seeing something as a universal or near universal to approaching it as an evolved adaptation, and I mean I really see that. At least most evolutionary psychologists do not know enough anthropology, and if you were aware of the anthropology behind a particular kind of behavior, uh, you would know that, I mean, some of the ones that they assume are universal or near universal are actually not, so.

1:30:11 Douglas Fry: Yeah, I, I wholeheartedly concur. I mean, a paper, I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but it already got me annoyed. I came across it a few days ago, just, just published, but it was exactly along these lines of, here, here's a list of traits why we think that it was an adaptation for warfare. It's like, oh boy.

1:30:34 Ricardo Lopes: Well, we've already addressed that in our previous conversation. So, um,

1:30:40 Douglas Fry: on that line, if, if I, I'll just mention to you is, is something that you should know and is, um, perhaps, uh, I'll be back at some point before too long. My wife Janvia Suak and I are, are working on a book right now to sort of reevaluate and re-explore some of these issues, so, um. To come soon.

1:31:02 Ricardo Lopes: 00 yeah, yeah, yeah, please let me know when you have your book finished because I would certainly love to have you both on the show. I mean, to have you back and to have your wife for the first time on the show as well. So, um, let me ask you now, are there situations or contexts where conflict resolution actually does not work?

1:31:30 Douglas Fry: Oh sure, I mean it's, it's not 100% effective. I mean, 11 situation is just on a case by case basis where you might end up with somebody who's just really a deviant, stubborn, uh, you know, maybe a sociopath or a psychopath or just disturbed and it just is not going to work for that individual type of reason. So, um, yeah, sure. And then of course, as you might expect in any procedure. Maybe someone still just goes away dissatisfied, it doesn't work. Um, YEAH, it's not 100% guaranteed it'll it'll work.

1:32:08 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. So, and finally, in what ways can we apply this knowledge to large scale industrialized societies?

1:32:22 Douglas Fry: OK, that's, that's a big question, and I, of course I, I think I made a stab or two along the way at, at some implications there, but let's, I, I did jot a few notes, uh, in, in thinking about this one. So just to reiterate, reciprocity is at the top of my notes, and reciprocity, if, if we go along with the idea that it's a human universe, well, it's going to apply across any society. I think that's a very important one where we could look to non-Western society, indigenous conflict resolution, and see how they deal with this principle and certainly for us to think. Of ourselves as being human conflict resolvers is is a spin-off point here. That's what the anthropological evidence, including from Western, Cultures, that's what the, the, the universality of it all and, and the patterns and the shared goals and the recurring themes that we see, themes and sub-thees, it, it's all leading towards an idea that that humans have evolved a capacity to deal with their conflicts. They've, they've evolved psychological and even physiological. When I try to say, motivators, if you put it that way, to urge us to deal with our, our conflicts and preserve our valuable relationships and to preserve our reputations and not to get social demerits. And, you know, here's, here's a lot of theory that needs development. And I would say also, you know, propositions, if we call these hypotheses that could be investigated and looked at more precisely. But meanwhile, the anthropological evidence speaks pretty loudly, at least to me. Um, THAT, that this is going on. So I like to call it a human conflict resolution to emphasize that it's not just something that's cultural and it's maybe here and maybe there, and it's different and so much variation without the themes, um, to really emphasize that point. So another one I, I, I alluded to before, and I'll just reiterate this briefly, is that in the United States at least and, and some other Western cultures. I think there's too much emphasis on penal approach to conflict. Again, going back to theorist Donald Black, he actually talks about 4 conflict resolution styles. I think 3 of them were really relevant for the book, and they are the conciliatory, dealing with reconciliation among parties, among people. The um compensation or recompensation um to to pay to restore the balance in this way, a life for a life. Pay off for a payoff, paying restitution for something lost. You know, that's, that's extremely common. We didn't talk too much about it. I'll just say that is so extremely common. And again, it, it links in my view, back to the emotions and back to the quest for justice and fairness that, OK, it's balanced now, you know, I did, I did this damage to you. Now I paid you for it, you know, we're good. And the receiver also is more often than not, we're good. So compensation plays out in many different ways, and again that's a different style than the penal or the punishment style that Black is talking about. So yeah,

1:35:45 Ricardo Lopes: the the penal style would be what we usually refer to as retributive justice, right? No,

1:35:55 Douglas Fry: yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, yes, it would be. I was thinking it's restored, but no, no, retributive, retributive, retributive, yeah, that's another, another term. I mean, the other fun. I don't want to go off on a real tangent, but I tell my students penitentiary penal, you know, it's the same penal system that sort of conveys it's punishment oriented. OK. And another implication of this about revenge is is I like this quote from Gandhi, you know, about an eye for an eye ends up making everybody blind. Um, SO that's this, uh, lex talion this idea of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a death for a death, and so on and so forth. It certainly exists culturally, but it also, I would say, an implication here, um, and, and maybe this is more international relationships than within modern industrial nation states. But to just keep this in mind that in our international relations, aren't, aren't we going to deal with this in a more respectful, less costly way? Than just, you know, evoking this type of revenge, let's tally on this type of approach. So there are certain nation states that seem to fall into this easier than others. And again, I think an important point for really discussing and and seeing the implications is to look at this in terms of our international relations. And in another way, I mean, here, here's a big one, and obviously my opinion, if if you're going to look at Such an interdependent world today where we're experiencing economic problems around the world due to one person starting a war from one country or two people from two countries starting a war. And all the implications economically, it shows right in front of us how interdependent we all are economically and on fossil fuels and so on. Well, of course, we're horribly interdependent, I should say terrifically interdependent in terms of the climate problem, and this is something that no country can deal with alone. We have to work together. So if you're going to think about conflict resolution and all the implications here. We're used to thinking in terms of a small community or at least a village or some sort of group of people. Well, we can apply many of these same principles that are in this book and that we've talked about in terms of conflict resolution absolutely globally, you know, regionally and globally. The same ideas apply, and I must say in the short book I don't talk too much about that explicitly, but maybe that's another book, but it's it's certainly got the implications right there in front of us. Here's one more, and I don't think you'll see this one coming. One thing that emerged from this is that very often indigenous peoples in indigenous contexts. Expand a proven technique for conflict resolution up a level, and then maybe up another level. So for instance, I'll take the Hanoshawnee, or also called Iroquois in the past. Now we should call them Hanoshawnee, which is what the people want to be called themselves. So they had village councils to deal with disputes and even homicides and so forth. And then they had up the level, tribal councils to deal with the levels of the tribal, and when they formed their confederation. Of five nations living close together and stopped warring with each other. Guess what? They established the intertribal council with some of the same mechanisms and rules. So, you know, you can take an example from a Western court system where there's city courts or municipal courts, and then there's of course state courts, and there's federal courts. The idea of adjudication in many of the same laws and processes apply. You're upping at the level. So this relates back to the previous point about what are the implications for conflict resolution, avoiding war, international law, and so forth. We need to up the level, I would argue.

1:40:06 Ricardo Lopes: Oh, OK, so some of, some of these mechanisms of conflict resolution can be scaled up,

1:40:14 Douglas Fry: right? Well, scaling up is a, a very polite, nice way to say it, but I like to say. Not a weird sense of humor. Maybe that's a wonderful place to say thank you for the interview and your comments and great questions, and it's been a. Yeah,

1:40:33 Ricardo Lopes: no, let, let me just say again or tell the audience again that the book is Advanced Introduction to Conflict Resolution, and then I'm of course leaving a link to it in the description. And Douglas, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show again. It's been a fascinating conversation as always, and Uh, please keep me, uh, informed about your future book, about your next book. So

1:41:01 Douglas Fry: thank you so much, Ricardo. To my pleasure and I'll do so.

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