A Community of Rewilding Means Adults Maintaining Accord
What do you think of when you think of adults? What do they do? How do they carry themselves?
How about in an intact, and indigenous culture? Does that picture change at all?
It does for me. In our culture we have the ‘provider’ side of adulthood down, but we seem to have long lost our traditions of agreements and community collaboration.
In Gypsy Law, Romani Legal Traditions and Culture, editor Walter Weyrauch has assembled a group of essays that address the heart of this subject, using a cultural group that has role-modeled a sustainable and vital adult tradition of collaboration and agreements for centuries now. Alternately demonized and romanticized, at the heart of Romani culture sits something extraordinary, invisible to modern eyes because it in fact impacts the mundane flow of day-to-day life the most; an unarticulated, yet ever-present system of religious (and therefore to indigenous minds, legal) strictures that modulate behavior and prepare the ground for community disputes and dischord, called the Romaniya.
For this essay I’d like to focus in on one piece of this vast and ever-evolving (yet also unchanging and the most ancient of traditions - deal with the paradox, you can do it!) web of laws held and passed on by the community elders. I’d like to single out the legal proceeding and communal adjudication known as the kris. A kris forms whenever two adult parties have irreconcilable differences and need some more powerful tools to find a resolution (and often, some kind of reparation).
In the United States of America, any typical courtroom in any legal context operates using a very important guideline: in a community of highly diverse religious traditions and values, from cultures all over the world, you must narrow the scope of the proceeding, and the kind and source of information, or total chaos will result.
Whether or not you agree with this notion, it defines our legal system, the system that, barring radical and fundamental cultural change, we do have to deal with as part of the bargain of living in the modern world.
The Roma (Gypsies) flip this idea of narrowed-scope. At a kris court proceeding, no complaint, story, comment, or rant from an adult belonging to the community lies outside the scope of the proceeding. Every kris acts as a chance for adults to voice the current crop of imbalances and issues at play in the community; this can seem like a stream of non sequitors, irrelevant to the stated reason the community convened the kris in the first place. And the spokesman for the different parties, what you might call ‘citizen attorneys’, act more as mediators.
So, in a state-controlled diverse context of highly varied values and traditions, we narrow scope to help find a resolution. In an egalitarian and communal context of very similar values and traditions, we widen the scope of information kind and source.
Note that each has a narrow scope, but of a different kind. Non-Roma (whom gypsies call gadje) do not attend a kris; the community excludes them. The Romaniya does not, in fact, apply to non-Rom, so they simply do not belong and have no say. So Roma narrow the scope of a kris by only including adult community members, and find their own kind of efficiency.
If you know anything about Open Spaces Gatherings, you may have just had quite the revelatory moment.
The Roma, amongst themselves, use the kris for every intra-Roma dispute that they can; issues of theft, adultery, and rare incidents like murder, they try to convince the state legal system to allow them to resolve. When the ‘crime’ or dispute has occurred between Roma and gadje outsiders, then they use the state’s legal system. They have interfaced in this way, between egalitarian Roma community and majority hierarchical state culture, for several centuries at least, and only have more success with this balance as they go along.
As a cultural critic I cannot help but note one other contrast between these two cultures, and of the balancing act it illuminates.
The United States legal system, along with narrowing the scope of information allowed, also employs an adversarial paradigm. The system applauds and supports the discontent of two parties, and assures them that, in the end, the state will announce one party ‘Right’ and the other ‘Wrong’, and divvy punishments and rewards accordingly.
The Romani legal system uses a paradigm of remedy; the kris endeavors to answer the question, “what must we do to make this situation right again?”, as opposed to “who do we blame, who do we punish?”. To stay clear, the kris does allot fines and other penalties at times, but it prioritizes the return to community balance over such solutions, and uses penalties and fault-finding in accord with mediation and peacemaking.
Boiling it all down, in one hand we have an adversarial system of narrowly-focused information exchange between parties of different values, and in the other a peacemaking system of widening-scope communal information exchange between parties of very similar values.
Ironically, I don’t see the state’s legal system as more efficient and less time-consuming; I emphatically see evidence of a situation quite the opposite, where the days or week of a kris court end in a resolution satisfying to the community, where state trials can last months and years ending in a resolution that truly satisfies few or even no one (anybody who gets paid from it probably feels pretty good).
For regular readers of the College of Mythic Cartography, I hope to tie a whole assortment of parallel threads together in this. In a culture of people who don’t actually listen to each other, but rather just wait for their turn to talk, we have very little experience when it comes to making systems of agreement, collaboration, and conversation that works. This whole field of knowledge really has just begun to open up with real possibilities.
I believe, that just as we can work with community energy by changing the games we play, just as we can choose our culture depending on the kind of experiences we want, we too can choose how to resolve disputes and remedy dischord by learning from the Romaniya and applying some of its principles.
February 15th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
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February 18th, 2009 at 12:35 am
I’ve been part of a program called restorative justice here. Mostly we deal with “young offenders”, first offences, generally property things like vandalism or theft.
The cases have to be referred to a restorative justice cricle so it is up to the police or a judge to do that and then up to the “offender” and the person they offended against to all decide that this is the route they want to go.
It is basically a talking circle comprised of the two parties and people directly affected or supporting them. People get a chance to say how this incident has affected them in terms of cost, inconvienience, feelings of loss, fear, anything. And the other party is able to give their story.
It is not about determining guilt. In these cases the basic facts of who, what ,where,e when are already established. This is possibly about “why” to a certain degree but mostly about how do we make things right between these two parties so that we can all move forward in a good way.
The main ways that this is an improvement over the traditional legal system, particularly for young offenders, is that the parties come face to face. They talk to each other. Restitution is made to the party that was offended. Both parties must agee to the outcome. This process is usually resolved much faster than a case making it’s wway through the court system.
This is based on a model used in many Aboriginal communities sometimes called a sentencing circle. Facilitating these circles requires a specific training.
February 18th, 2009 at 12:55 am
Oh yeah, The rate of re-offending for young first timers is very low after going through this process. Many choose this, thinking it will be the easy way out compared to going to court. Often the restitution involves much more of a commitment to making things good again than the sentence they would have recieved in a court and also involves direct interaction between the two parties rather than some totally unrelated community service hours that the mainstream courts often give young offenders.
February 18th, 2009 at 1:06 am
Billy-
Totally, totally wonderful and fascinating. Could you give some resources or links to information about the “specific training” you mention? This sounds exactly like the stuff that we all need to learn and start building.
February 18th, 2009 at 8:32 am
If you do a googoo search for “restorative justice” there is a ton of stuff. I recieved the training from a person who came to our community from the Justice Institute in Vancouver.
It can be tough to get the local justice system on board with this program mostly because there is a perception that the offender gets of easy, which is not the case. The other fear is that the “victim” (not the best choice of terms) may be further traumatized by having to be face to face with the offender. This is why we have to pick and choose which cases get handled this way. In our community we have gone through a long spell of very little support from the local RCMP and the group of us became very discouraged. There seems to be a new opening so I’ve been getting calls to get involved again.
The training is very much like other group facilitation skills. Willem, I’m sure you already have much of it as second nature from your background.
February 18th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
Actually reading what I wrote earlier, I didn’t word that right. The ideas are the same as other group facilitaion but the facilitator here has a definite script. Previous facilitaion would definitely help but there is some specifics needed here. The story of the parties involved is what is essential.
February 19th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
Could you tell me more about “the story of the parties involved”? That sounds really interesting - how do you make space for that and encourage them to tell their stories openly?
February 20th, 2009 at 10:02 am
Sorry I just wrote a pretty long response and it did not post. Now it’s gone!!! oohhh woe is me. I’ll try later.
February 28th, 2009 at 6:28 pm
[…] the articles A Community of Rewilding Means Adults Maintaining Accord, and When the State Assigns Blame, I started a line of inquiry I want to continue here. Using the […]
March 6th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
Billy tried to post this, but couldn’t and sent it via email; so I’d like to quote his email here: