Practicing Harmony Ideology

Abstract

Twenty-five years ago, drawing on her fieldwork among the Zapotec, the legal anthropologist Laura Nader proposed the term harmony ideology to characterize postcolonial systems of justice. She found outward social harmony to be the result of coercion, as people were denied access to legal means and were forced either into alternative dispute resolution or into autocoercion, in which marginalized people presented unity to outsiders to avoid state interference. This proposition constitutes a relevant advance in relation to previous approaches to conflict and harmony in the social sciences, but it falls short by failing to account for indigenous notions of and demands for harmony. Ethnographic data from rural Kyrgyzstan and the South Omo region of Ethiopia indicate that there are models of harmony active at various social levels and that harmony is a genuine concern of communities. Demands for harmony are performatively integrated into social practices. The authors argue that, rather than searching for a scale of sociality where harmony might be “organic,” it is necessary to critically assess proclamations of and demands for harmony as means of coercion even within small communities. A focus on social practice in such places reveals that the experience of community partly derives from acts of collectively condemning and sanctioning deviance.

Family law in Senegal: opposition and pragmatic pluralism

“…The flexibility in the way judges deal with situations where parties draw on norms that are in conflict with the Family Code is also exemplary. All of this connects, it is worth pointing out, to a broader appreciation of harmony in Wolof society (Kaag 2001, 122-123;Ly 2016;Sylla 1978), an appreciation which is also seen to be central to the coherence and continuity of many other communities (Beyer and Girke 2015).…”

Harmonious Relations: A Framework for Studying Varieties of Peace in Music-Based Peacebuilding

“…In music, this means adding a tone that complements the other tone(s). In social settings, “actors impose [harmony] on themselves by adjusting their agency in line with others’ behaviours and expectations” (Beyer & Girke, 2015, p. 228).…”

“…The above discussion has shown that harmony can be pursued by both top-down, authoritarian means as well as bottom-up, horizontal, and agentic means. Furthermore, it has demonstrated that people in all societies and at all social levels place high value on social order, blended unity, and forging consensus, recognising the resulting stability and security to be of value to all and not just those in power (Beyer & Girke, 2015, p. 235). Harmony therefore has the potential to manifest as relational peace, but in order for the characteristics of non-dominance, cooperation, and deliberation to ascend, it requires the productive coexistence of the stability and control of order with the possibility and opportunity of freedom , the unity and coherence of blend with the political voice and recognition within diversity , and the reassurance and safety of consonance with the disruption and creative ignition of dissonance . …”

Studying Peace in and with Central Eurasia: Starting from Local and Trans-Local Perspectives

“…Without feeding localism, they are interested in emic perspectives on conflict, order and peace and in illustrating concepts and practices of ordering and peace formation that can also be found in other regions, particularly in the Global South. An example of this is the variety of customary harmony ideologies at work not only in Kyrgyzstan but also in Ethiopia and Mexico (Nader 1990;Beyer and Gierke 2015). Most of the articles in this issue focus on peripheral contexts in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.…”