The temptations of war and the struggle for peace among the Hamar of Southern Ethiopia
Sociologus Beiheft/Supplement 1.1999:227-259
##The aim of this short essay has been to invite the reader to listen to the Hamar and witness their struggle for peace in the face of war. I began with Baldambe"s fable of the original safety of Hamar country, a safety both from the threats of the natural world (drought) and the social sphere (war). Then I recalled the large-scale conflicts which in the past three centuries occurred in the Horn of Africa and in many ways also affected the Hamar. After this I outlined the traditional patterns of warfare and showed that in spite of the external incursions the Hamar have upheld much of their old sense of security even until today. It is from this vantage point of original safety that one can understand the various personal thoughts and feelings expressed in the sections "Witnessing the struggle for peace and the temptations of war" and "Madness as the ultimate cause of war".
The final section dealt with an example of collective and ritualised peace-making. I examined the rhetoric and magic involved and tried to show that the peace-maker employs three strategies: Firstly he relegates the ultimate cause of war (the mind) to the realm of the unspeakable (see Tyler 1987); secondly he uses his rhetorical skills to address the intermediate cause of war (the body) and makes it the focus of persuasion; and thirdly he turns to the immediate cause of war (the weapon) and uses it as magic as the strongest shield against the mad ness of war.
Embedded in the presentation and interpretation of Hamar discourse was an attempt to articulate my own theoretical position. Following Tyler (1978) and Montague (1994) I argued against determinism and emphasised the need to study war not as a necessity caused by resource competition, cultural differences or other "hard underlying reasons", but (to paraphrase Spinoza as quoted by Montague 1994: X) by people who willfully have abandoned "virtue, benevolence, confidence and justice".##
Keywords: Hamar, war reasons, violence, peace-making, Tyler, S., rhetoric and war, resources and war
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