AFTER VIOLENCE: 3R, RECONSTRUCTION, RECONCILIATION ...

acts in the light of extenuating circumstances; nature, structure,
culture. But then restitution and apology followed by forgiveness
are built in. So are elements of penitence and punishment, but in
a way building ties between victim and perpetrator. We have
mentioned the karma element. The Truth element is obvious, only
that all parties have to tell their truths (making it more easy
for the perpetrator). No doubt the result will be like a replay of
Kurosawa's Rashomon./84/ This is also theater: ho'o ponopono is a
reconstruction of what happened, with the parties as actors. And
it is all very joint.
In short, Polynesian culture puts together what Western
culture keeps apart. There is a coherence to these processes, and
that coherence got lost in the Western tendency to subdivide and
select, and more particularly to select the punishment approach.
So, maybe a culture that managed to keep it all together is at a
higher level than a culture that out of this holistic approach to
"after violence" (including "after economic violence") selects
only a narrow spectrum?/85/
Conclusion Some conclusions flow from these explorations:
- there is no panacea. Taken singly none of the approaches is
capable of handling the complexity of the "after violence"
situation, healing the wounds of so many kinds, closing the
violence cycles, reconciling the parties to themselves, to each
other and to whatever higher forces there may be.
- one reason is that they are all embedded in dense nets of
assumptions, some of them cultural. Westerners would have no
difficulty recognizing ho'o ponopono as culturally specific, or
"ethnic",/86/, but tend to claim that the theological and
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