Cross-Cultural TOC LAW AND SOCIETY. Richard Scaglion

Transcription

1 Cross-Cultural TOC LAW AND SOCIETY Richard Scaglion

2 The topic of law and society has been of interest to scholars in many different disciplines. Perhaps the broadest view of law and society comes from the perspective of anthropology. In studying the vast range of human societies, anthropologists have come upon many interesting law-like rules and behaviors that are very different from those found in western cultures. As a result, anthropologists have spent a lot of time arguing over what law really is. Of course, they could have saved themselves much of this effort by taking to heart lawyer Max Radin s warning that, Those of us who have learned humility have given over the attempt to define law. 1 However, even though anthropologists have not solved the problem of defining law, their attempts have resulted in a broadening of the conception of law throughout the social sciences. Historically, the study of law and society has been dominated by two major paradigms or models: the rule-centered approach and the processual approach. The rule-centered approach, followed by some anthropologists and many other social scientists, is based on the idea that social life is rule-governed. Advocates of this approach believe that social groups develop rules or norms of behavior in order to regulate the lives of their members. However, people acting in deviant ways sometimes break these rules, and counteraction by the legal institutions of society becomes necessary. This view of law has its roots in Anglo-American legal theory. Law is seen as a discrete subject, able to be studied in its own right. The legal process is thus seen largely as a matter of rules, courts, lawyers, and judges. When anthropologists began studying societies having neither courts nor judges, however, they observed that in many such simpler cultures, people seem to be much more interested in social relationships than in formal rules of behavior. Often the members of politically decentralized societies, sometimes called tribal societies, cannot articulate any set of legal rules for their group. On the other hand, they are very concerned about the conflicts or trouble cases that naturally arise from time to time between people, and are concerned that peace be restored. In other words, they think of conflicts as more or less endemic to social life rather than as necessarily resulting from some form of deviant behavior. If, for example, one person s pig breaks through a fence and spoils another person s produce, neither of the parties to the dispute is necessarily wrong. Disputes are simply seen as confrontations arising from (at least partially) incompatible interests of opposing parties that occur normally in all societies. Scholars following the processual paradigm became interested 3

3 4 CROSS-CULTURAL RESEARCH in analyzing how such trouble cases are resolved, and how social relationships are restored or altered as a result of them. Thus, in this approach, attention is centered on legal processes rather than on legal rules, and law is seen as intimately intertwined with the broader fabric of society rather than as a discrete entity. Anthropologists taking a processual approach, therefore, take a very broad view of law and society and study many different types of social institutions in order to understand how dispute resolution takes place in other societies. An extended example may be helpful in showing the difference between the rule-centered and the processual paradigm. In many complex, socially stratified societies like the United States, disputes are often settled through a process of adjudication. In adjudication, a third party with official authority makes a judgment which the litigants are forced to accept. The judge determines the facts of the case, finds an appropriate rule governing the specific situation at hand, applies it, and thus determines the outcome of the case. However, in tribal societies with no formal governments, judges, police, or prisons, such a decision would be difficult if not impossible to enforce. How do the people in such societies resolve their differences? Anthropologists found that other mechanisms for settling disputes, such as negotiation, mediation, and arbitration, are used in place of adjudication in tribal societies. In negotiation, the principal parties in a dispute try to reach a mutually acceptable settlement without the intervention of a third party, but often with the aid of supporters. In this conflict management strategy, litigants are not necessarily concerned with any particular set of rules and do not usually care about legal precedents. If they have a problem, they need to find a solution in order to keep the peace. Anything that all parties are willing to accept is, in a sense, a good solution to the problem, because peace is restored. It really does not matter if similar cases in the past were resolved differently. In mediation, a third party intervenes in a dispute to help the principals reach a settlement. However, this third party has no official authority to compel compliance, as a judge might. Instead, a mediator tries to coerce or cajole the parties to the dispute into agreeing to a solution. Many tribal societies have specific individuals designated as go-betweens, who help to mediate disputes. For example, the Nuer of southern Sudan have persons called leopard-skin chiefs. These individuals, who are not chiefs in the usual

4 LAW AND SOCIETY 5 sense of the word, have no secular authority, but people believe that they have the supernatural power to bless or to curse others. In the case of a homicide, a murderer can seek sanctuary at the compound of a leopard-skin chief. The murderer resides safely there while the leopard-skin chief tries to convince the family of the deceased to accept cattle as blood compensation for the death, and tries to get the family of the murderer to pay the compensation. Because people fear the supernatural power of the leopard-skin chief, they often agree to such a settlement. In arbitration, both parties to a dispute consent to the intervention of a third party whose solution they agree to accept. This person, therefore, has legitimized power or authority, but only because the litigants have agreed in advance to abide by the arbitrator s decision. If one party decides to renege and not accept that decision, the arbitrator has no power to force compliance. It should be obvious by now that the presence or absence of legitimized power, or authority, is critical to the choice of a remedy agent for resolving conflicts. Complex societies with some form of centralized government have legitimized power. Legal authorities can use that power in order to force compliance with rules or laws. For this reason, social scientists working in complex or socially stratified societies often find the rule-oriented paradigm to their liking, because it helps to explain much of what they see happening. Scholars working in decentralized tribal societies, on the other hand, often adopt the processual paradigm for the very same reasons: it helps them to explain the human behavior that they witness. I have drawn the contrast between tribal and complex societies rather sharply in order to explore the broadest range of the concept of law and society. However, this contrast is not as sharp as it might initially seem. Some tribal societies actually have very complicated normative orders or rules for behavior. And, while it is true that tribal societies mostly lack courts, judges, and adjudication, it would be a mistake to conclude that complex societies lack forms of negotiation, mediation, and arbitration. Disputes in America are often settled by such techniques. Also, while orthodox legal scholars believe that the rules of law in complex societies are clear, predictable, and determine the outcomes of cases, other legal scholars, called legal realists, see law as somewhat uncertain. Legal realists, like processualists, examine the processes rather than the rules of conflict resolution. They are interested in the actual decisions of judges, and in how cases really get resolved. In

5 6 CROSS-CULTURAL RESEARCH this regard, it is not difficult to apply a processualist approach to a complex society. It is somewhat harder, however, to apply a ruleoriented approach to a tribal society which has few, if any, formal rules. The type of society being studied seems to affect not only the model used for analysis, as we have just seen, but also the very words that are used for description. A famous debate in the law and society literature took place between Max Gluckman and Paul Bohannan, each of whom studied an African culture. 2 Gluckman conducted his research with the Barotse of northern Rhodesia, who live on a flood plain of the Zambezi river. The complex ecological system of Barotseland, which required considerable societal cooperation for survival, probably led to the development of a highly centralized and politically complex kingdom. Paul Bohannan, on the other hand, studied the Tiv, a decentralized tribe of northern Nigeria. The Tiv have a lineage form of social organization in which several families related through the male line live together in a compound headed by a senior male elder. There is no traditional political authority above the compound level. Gluckman thought that English legal terms were perfectly adequate for describing the legal system of the Barotse. He saw clear parallels in how the law operates in both cultures. Barotse disputes are heard at a court (kuta) presided over by a senior judge (Ngambela). Present at the trial are two groups of councilors: judges (indunas) and stewards (likombwa). During the trial, litigants sit before the judges. The plaintiff s case is stated and answered by the defendant. Witnesses are called, and cross-examination takes place. Final judgment is rendered by the Ngambela, subject to review by a court of appeal or by the king. Legal precedents are considered and followed. Thus, the Barotse legal system can be described relatively easily by using the formal legal language with which you are probably familiar. In fact, Gluckman argued that, the refinements of English, and in general European, jurisprudence provide us with a more suitable vocabulary, despite its connotations, than do the languages of tribal law. 3 Bohannan, of course, took a very different position. He argued that to analyze the system of justice and judgment of one culture through the interpretation of a system indigenous to a second one can only lead to confusion and distortion. He advocated describing the legal systems of other cultures using their own folk or native terms. When we consider the nature of the Tiv legal system, this is

6 LAW AND SOCIETY 7 not surprising. Bohannan gave the example of the Tiv word injo, which has no clear English equivalent. It is a kind of wrong that covers a wide range of matters such as assault, trespass, defamation, and so forth. Bohannan thought that any English gloss for the Tiv word injo (like calling it by the English term tort, or civil wrong) would not be accurate. Bohannan had a particular interest in the meetings (jir) that Tiv hold in order to consider trouble cases. Although Gluckman apparently was comfortable with calling a Barotse kuta a court, Bohannan felt that Tiv jir bear little resemblance to western courts. They are not held in any particular location, and do not seem to follow any particular rules of evidence or procedure. During a jir, people talk for as long as they wish, about almost anything they wish. They can shout, stomp around, and vent their anger. The focus is on reaching a compromise solution, satisfactory to everyone. The object is not to win or to lose, but to restore harmony. What Bohannan was seeing, of course, were the bargaining modes of conflict management discussed above. The Barotse, having centralized authority, are able to adjudicate. The Tiv instead employ methods of negotiation and mediation. Since a court is based on legitimized authority, which a jir lacks, Bohannan felt that the word court would not be a good translation for the Tiv institution. As anthropologists studied more and more decentralized societies, it became clear that institutions like the Tiv jir were very common. What was needed, anthropologists decided, was a new analytic vocabulary that would describe these types of institutions without having to resort to the people s own terms every time (for every group!). In an important article, James Gibbs describes the berei mu meni saa of the Kpelle of Liberia as a moot. 4 In this article, Gibbs shows how a moot displays aspects of psychotherapy: It is not only conciliatory, but also therapeutic in reconciling the disputing parties and in restoring peace. From Gibbs s work, among others, the term moot came to be generally adopted as the functional equivalent of the word court to describe informal institutions for conflict management found in most decentralized societies. Moots and other methods of conflict resolution employed by tribal peoples actually have more relevance to our life in the modern world than people might think. Bohannan recognized this when he produced a figure similar to Table 1. 5

7 8 CROSS-CULTURAL RESEARCH Table 1 POWER Centralized Decentralized (Courts; authority (Moots; bargaining modes of conflict modes of conflict management) management) One Society Legal systems of Legal systems of complex societies tribal societies More Than One Society Colonial law International law We have thus far been contrasting the internal legal systems of two different types of cultures: those with centralized power (which stress the use of courts and authority modes of conflict management) and those with decentralized power (which stress the use of moots and bargaining modes of conflict management). But what happens when we consider the relationships among societies, or countries, as is common in the contemporary world? When one society has power over another, as occurs in colonial situations, the rule-oriented paradigm explains much of what we see happening. One country has power and can force compliance. But there are many other kinds of contemporary global relationships among nations. There is no king of the world, no centralized authority on the planet. Thus even an institution such as the United Nations can, at most, employ only methods of arbitration. The only real authority of the UN is the authority that its constituent nations agree to give it. Consequently, the bargaining models of conflict management used by members of tribal societies are most applicable to the nonviolent settlement of disputes between nations today. Tribal peoples could probably teach us a lot about these techniques! Although the Gluckman-Bohannan debate described above was phrased primarily in terms of the proper vocabulary with which to describe a legal system, it was really more of a debate about the comparative study of law. What should we be comparing, and why? Law, as it has traditionally been defined, does not occur in all societies. Yet disputes occur everywhere, and all societies must find ways to deal with them. Laura Nader pointed out

8 LAW AND SOCIETY 9 some of the assumptions that underlie the processualist method of analysis: (1) There is a limited range of dispute for any particular society ; (2) A limited number of formal procedures are used by human societies in the prevention of and/or settlement of grievances (e.g., courts, contests, ordeals, go-betweens, etc.); (3) There will be a choice in the number and modes of settlement (e.g., arbitration, mediation, compromise, adjudication, and so on). 6 Thus, for Nader and others following a processualist paradigm, the comparative study of law is a truly cross-cultural undertaking that involves finding social correlates of, and relationships among, these procedures and modes of settlement. An example of this sort of research is Letitia Hickson s study of apology as a form of redressing conflicts in various societies. According to Hickson, Apology is behavior by which a party implicitly or explicitly expresses regret for having wronged another and requests forgiveness of the aggrieved party. 7 Hickson found that, although apology is used in many cultures, there is wide variation in the degree to which it is stressed as a conflict management technique. It appears to be most important in two kinds of societies: those having a hierarchical, kin-based political organization, and those in which children s most frequent companions are adults rather than other children. The hypothesized reasons for this finding are complex, but have to do with the potentially disruptive effects of disputes on important social relationships in these particular societies. Basically, apology is submissive behavior that affirms the superior position of the aggrieved party, and thus helps to maintain an existing (and important) hierarchical social relationship. Hickson s study is therefore a good example of the wide range of social behaviors that processualists consider in their research. One of the criticisms that the proponents of the rule-oriented paradigm have leveled against the processualists is that the processualist view of law is too broad and really has no conceptual boundaries. Are we to consider everything that people quarrel over to fall under the rubric of law? People quarrel about nearly everything, at some time or another! The rule-oriented scholars therefore prefer a comparative study of law focused on the substantive aspects of legal systems, and have conducted their studies accordingly. Consequently, before proceeding further with a

9 10 CROSS-CULTURAL RESEARCH description of some of the findings of these two types of comparative studies, we need to consider exactly what is meant by law. Early attempts to define law were, with a few exceptions, undertaken mostly by those following a rule-oriented paradigm. Their goal was to set law apart from other social institutions. Most of them saw law as a form of authoritative social control. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, for example, defined law as social control through the systematic application of the force of politically organized society. One of the problems with this definition, however, was that it seemed to restrict law to complex or state societies, the only ones capable of exercising force in a systematic fashion. 8 E. Adamson Hoebel got around this problem by focusing on rules or norms, holding that a social norm is legal if its neglect or infraction is regularly met, in threat or in fact, by the application of physical force by an individual or group possessing the socially recognized privilege of so acting. 9 This broadened the application of law to include various tribal societies and their different ways of applying negative sanctions or punishments; it also enabled broader comparisons. Max Gluckman, still focusing on rules, indicated that the Barotse think of law as a set of rules accepted by all normal members of the society as defining right and reasonable ways in which persons ought to behave in relation to each other and to things, including ways of obtaining protection for one s rights. 10 One problem with Gluckman s (actually, the Barotses ) definition, however, is that it does not really set legal rules apart from moral or ethical norms, and law again loses its conceptual boundaries. Leopold Pospisil has distinguished four main attributes of law: authority, intention of universal application, obligatio, and sanction. 11 Authority is legitimized power, meaning that some person or agency must have the socially approved right to enforce punishments for breaches of social norms. Such punishments should not be meted out arbitrarily, though. According to Pospisil, legal authorities intend their rules or decisions to apply to similar cases in the future. Thus, law is supposed to be universally applicable, consistent, and predictable. Obligatio refers to mutual obligations between people and specifies the rights of one and the duties of the other party. Sanctions are either punishments or rewards that society applies when individuals either do something bad or good. With these notions in mind about what constitutes the domain of law, we can now turn to an examination of some of the compar-

10 LAW AND SOCIETY 11 ative studies of law that have been done by researchers and scholars. Many of the earliest studies were evolutionary in the sense that scholars sought to determine the direction or trend of the law as societies moved from more simple to more complex forms of organization. One of these scholars, Sir Henry Maine, found that, The movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from status to contract gradual dissolution of family dependency and growth of individual obligation in its place. 12 In other words, corporate, kinship-based responsibility in tribal society is replaced by increasing individual responsibility in complex society. Recall that in the example of the Nuer leopard-skin chief mediation, the entire kinship group of the murderer was responsible for paying blood compensation to the kinship group of the deceased. In the United States, a murderer is responsible for his or her own actions. The families of criminals are not held accountable. A classic study in this evolutionary genre was E. Adamson Hoebel s The Law of Primitive Man: A Study in Comparative Legal Dynamics. 13 In order to discover patterns in the development of law from egalitarian, small-scale societies to more complex stratified societies, Hoebel examined a small sample of cultures of increasing complexity: the Eskimo, the Ifugao of northern Luzon, the plains Indians of the American west, the Trobriand Islanders of New Guinea, and the Ashanti of Ghana. We have already alluded to some of Hoebel s findings: he saw a trend from private to public law from systems of self-help to third party intervention such as we described earlier in this essay. However, another of his findings, that the trend of the law, like the trend of society and culture, has been one of steadily increasing complexity, is arguable, depending on how one defines law. 14 If one takes a rule-oriented approach, as Hoebel did, then legal rules may indeed become increasingly important as power becomes centralized and society becomes complex. But if one considers the comparative process of conflict management, as a processualist might do, then Hoebel s own data show that structurally simple societies can sometimes have very complicated systems and methods of resolving disputes. An example can be seen in the song duels of the Eskimo or Inuit, the simplest group described by Hoebel. Inuit who are involved in disputes compose special songs about their protagonists which they deliver in a highly conventionalized singing style at a series of special moots. During the singing of these songs, litigants hurl insults and present allegations and evidence against their rivals. Public opinion,

11 12 CROSS-CULTURAL RESEARCH expressed in the form of laughs, jeers, and applause, plays a large part in the outcome of these trouble cases. Song duels, then, can be considered to be the functional equivalents of the trials of politically complex societies. In the United States, we have very few song duels (although songs such as Carly Simon s You re So Vain come immediately to mind). However, if we were interested in examining the trend of complexity of song duels as a means of resolving conflicts in society, we might well conclude that, as societies become structurally complex, their skills in song dueling deteriorate. In this sense, law is apparently becoming simpler! In a very interesting paper on comparative dispute resolution, John M. Roberts described the results of a study on oaths and autonomic ordeals. 15 An oath is a solemn and somewhat formal matter of calling upon a god or supernatural power to witness to the truth of what one says and, by implication, to punish false statements. An ordeal is a means of determining guilt or innocence by submitting the accused to often painful tests, believed to be under supernatural control. Roberts study was mainly concerned with autonomic ordeals, a subtype of ordeals in which a determination is based upon some sort of involuntary response, like the scalding or blistering of the skin of the person being tested. Examples include touching a hot knife to the tongue or skin of the accused or plunging the accused s hand into boiling water. Roberts found that oaths and autonomic ordeals seem to be associated with somewhat complex cultures having weak authority and power deficits. In other words, a society has to be complex enough to have the power to compel the individual to undergo this sort of trial in the first place, but at the same time lacking sufficient centralized authority to back up a secular judgment. If found guilty, the accused s kinsmen might be willing to accede to the will of the gods and accept a supernatural verdict, although they might revolt against a human decision. Studies like Roberts have made it clear that there is really no single unilinear course of development of legal phenomena in the most general sense. Different social conditions produce different ways of dealing with trouble cases. In a formal cross-cultural study of law and economic institutions, Katherine S. Newman maintains that, In sum, one cannot simply take any dimension of social life and argue that the more complex the dimension, the more complex the law. 16 While this is a strong statement, it does seem that things are never simple. For these reasons, many contemporary compara-

12 LAW AND SOCIETY 13 tive studies either focus on a single legal institution (like courts, police, apology, or song duels) which they examine cross-culturally, seeing how the institution changes with changing social conditions; or they contrast different types of societies, and consider how law or conflict management operates under the different conditions of each type. An example of the first kind of study is a cross-cultural analysis of the police function by Cyril Robinson, Michael Olivero, and me. 17 We found that, in structurally simple societies, collective tribal security systems usually preclude the need for police. However, certain conditions, like the need to prevent the spooking of a buffalo herd before a communal hunt, may sometimes necessitate temporary police. In these cases, certain individuals (the members of a soldier society, for example) are temporarily empowered to police the community. Since these people later revert to the status of ordinary citizens, they do not abuse their power but instead act as the protectors of all the people. However, in contrast to the popular image of modern police as protectors of all the people, the full-time police specialists that emerge in stratified societies usually act to preserve the power and dominance of the ruling elite at the expense of the common people. An example of the second kind of study, comparing different types of societies, is that of Felstiner, who compares what he calls technologically complex, rich societies (like the United States) with technologically simple, poor societies (like India). 18 Felstiner finds that avoidance (simply staying away from someone) is a very common means of conflict management in technologically complex, rich societies, because they are characterized by mobility and by simplex relationships, meaning that people usually have limited types of contacts with one another. It is therefore easy to sever ties. If you have a dispute with a sales clerk in a store, you can just stay out of that store in the future and have nothing more to do with that person. Technologically simple, poor societies, on the other hand, are characterized by multiplex ties between many individuals. People are involved in a complex web of kinship and social obligations, and avoidance is costly. Thus, mediation and adjudication are more common than avoidance in these circumstances. Returning to the ideas that opened this chapter, I think that it should now be clearer how anthropologists have helped to broaden the concept of law and society. The processualists who focus on disputes rather than on rules encourage researchers to consider law as an intimate part of society, affected by a broad

13 14 CROSS-CULTURAL RESEARCH range of social institutions. Interestingly, there has been a movement lately to reconcile the rule-oriented and processual paradigms that have produced so much debate in the past. Rule-oriented scholars increasingly realize that rules alone are not determinative of the outcomes of cases, and processualists increasingly realize that the normative order plays an important part in shaping how cases actually get resolved. Researchers are recognizing more and more that there is a dialectical relationship between the normative order and social process, between sociocultural structures and individual actions. 19 In other words, rules affect how disputes get settled, but dispute settlement also helps to determine the actual nature of the rules. Ideally, rules may seem clear, but in practice they are somewhat vague and highly negotiable. Thus a legal system can be both rulegoverned and highly variable, with considerable room for procedural flexibility and compromise. This understanding, that rules and processes act to reinforce one another, has set the direction for future research in the field of law and society. NOTES 1. Max Radin, A Restatement of Hohfeld, Harvard Law Review 51 (1938): Max Gluckman, The Judicial Process among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1955); Paul J. Bohannan, Justice and Judgment among the Tiv of Nigeria (London: Oxford University Press, 1957). 3. Max Gluckman, The Judicial Process among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), p James L. Gibbs, Jr., The Kpelle Moot: A Therapeutic Model for the Informal Settlement of Disputes, Africa 33 (1963): Paul J. Bohannan, The Differing Realms of the Law, in Laura Nader, ed., The Ethnography of Law (American Anthropologist, special publication, 67 (6, part 2) (1965): Laura Nader, The Anthropological Study of Law, in Laura Nader, ed., The Ethnography of Law (American Anthropologist, special publication, 67 (6, part 2) (1965): Letitia Hickson, The Social Contexts of Apology in Dispute Settlement: A Cross-Cultural Study, Ethnology 25 (1986): 283.

14 LAW AND SOCIETY A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and Function in Primitive Society (New York: Free Press, 1952), p E. Adamson Hoebel, The Law of Primitive Man: A Study in Comparative Legal Dynamics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), p Gluckman, The Judicial Process Among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia, 2nd ed., p Leopold Pospisil, Anthropology of Law: A Comparative Theory (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp Henry S. Maine, Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Ideas, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas (London: Murray, 1861), p Hoebel, The Law of Primitive Man. 14. Ibid., p John M. Roberts, Oaths, Autonomic Ordeals, and Power, in Laura Nader, ed., The Ethnography of Law (American Anthropologist, special publication, 67 (6, part 2) (1965): Katherine S. Newman, Law and Economic Organization: A Comparative Study of Preindustrial Societies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p Cyril D. Robinson, Richard Scaglion, and J. Michael Olivero, Police in Contradiction: The Evolution of the Police Function in Society (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994). 18. W. L. F. Felstiner, Influences of Social Organization on Dispute Processing, Law & Society Review 9 (1974): Examples of these sorts of studies are Sally Falk Moore, Law as Process: An Anthropological Approach (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978); and John Comaroff and Simon Roberts, Rules and Processes: The Logic of Dispute in an African Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). SUGGESTED READINGS Bohannan, Paul J. Justice and Judgment among the Tiv of Nigeria. London: Oxford University Press, A classic study of the anthropology of law of a politically decentralized tribal people. Comaroff, John L., and Simon Roberts. Rules and Processes: The Logic of Dispute in an African Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, A study showing how a legal system can be rule-gov-

15 16 CROSS-CULTURAL RESEARCH erned and at the same time highly variable, with considerable room for procedural flexibility and compromise. Gibbs, James L., Jr. The Kpelle Moot: A Therapeutic Model for the Informal Settlement of Disputes. Africa 33 (1963): This article describes how moots, or informal forums for dispute management, can be therapeutic in reconciling the parties to a dispute. Gluckman, Max. The Judicial Process among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia, 2nd ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press, A classic study of the anthropology of law of a politically centralized people. Hoebel, E. Adamson. The Law of Primitive Man: A Study in Comparative Legal Dynamics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, A classic study of how law operates in increasingly complex societies. Nader, Laura, and Harry F. Todd, Jr., eds. The Disputing Process: Law in Ten Societies. New York: Columbia University Press, Ethnographic examples of the processes of conflict management in ten societies of varied complexity. Cross-Cultural TOC