Vorspeisenplatte

Wieder Schnee und Kälte – mir blieb nur die Hoffnung, dass es der letzte bis zum nächsten Winter sein würde.

Große Freude aufs lange Wochenende samt Maifeiertag. Pläne: fast ausschließlich Rumlungern und Sport.

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Ähnlich wie es wenige Untersuchungen über psychische Gesundheit gibt, fehlt es offensichtlich in den Gesellschaftswissenschaften an Forschung über Frieden. Anthropologin Margaret Paxson hat das zu ihrem Projekt gemacht:
“What is peace?
Forget ideals of milk and honey. Peace is found in the grit of everyday life, in a town that takes in troubled strangers”.

via @MargaretAtwood

I wanted social science that landed smack on the inside of peaceful societies and studied human interactions at the eye-to-eye level, saying something about how peace works in its tight mechanics. I wanted empirical research that regarded the social body up close and asked about its long-term health and stability; research that asked how, in hard times, regular decency can sometimes translate into extraordinary kindness. Here and there I found brilliant examples of work like this, but strikingly few of them.

I began to wonder: why is peace so hard to think about? Or conversely, why is violence so easy?

(…)

And yet, despite the Cartesian dualisms that continue to shape our scientific models, perhaps peace can in fact be analysed. What if it can be seen not as timeless, but as dynamic; not located in the beginning or in the end but in the unfolding; something not of the ether but of lived soils and grounds? What if peace is, actually, something flawed and rough-grained? Well then, social science can handle that. It can do dynamics. It can look towards the longue durée, settling happily into the study of actual, imperfect behaviour. That kind of research doesn’t require calls to the angels or to Elysium. You just look into the faces of real people and the connections they make or don’t make with each other, and the stories they tell or don’t tell, and the ways they decide or don’t decide to treat a stranger as one of their own.

If peace could be this — defined within a regular, real kind of social world — how would you know a peaceful community when you saw it?

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Dazu passt fast:

https://youtu.be/kQFKtI6gn9Y

Nein, tut es nicht.
Doch, tut es.

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Über manche seiner Beispiele könnte man diskutierten, aber die Grundbeobachtung ist interessant: Es gibt einen Film-Topos der superattraktiven Kindfrau vor allem in Science Fiction, der einiges über unsere Gesellschaft aussagt.