Dispute Resolution

Dispute processes, those that initiate disputes and those that operate to resolve them, are cultural processes. These must be analyzed and understood within the social and cultural context of a community rather than as a matter of individuals' rights and wrongs according to a logical political system of standardized jurisprudence. The anthropological study of dispute resolution is not different from an ethnography of community life. Community life consists of relationships among neighbors and kin, and involving economic, political, religious, and environmental resources. And all of these can be the subject of disputes.

Disputes involve a contested interpretation of shared principles of community life. These principles, or structural elements, are themselves not contested. A dispute is related to the manner in which a person has acted in relationship to these principles, as this has impinged upon the interests and affairs of other community members. Thus, the members of a community may share the general belief that the products of a garden are the property of the person who worked it, that gardens should be fenced, and that pigs, watched by a swineherd, roam and forage freely. A person who has a garden raided by another person's pigs then may initiate a dispute with the pigs' owner. Neither may propose that pigs should be penned nor that garden products are not owned by their farmers. The gardener may argue that the pig owner, via the swineherd, did not watch the animals carefully, and the pig owner may argue that the gardener did not construct a durable fence.

Disputes are embedded in the recurring life events of a community; each dispute has a trajectory out of past events, including prior disputes, and proceeds encumbered with the baggage of a wider context of community affairs. The gardener and the owner of the pigs may be rivals for community resources and have been involved in prior disputes. The garden may be placed in an area where pigs are often taken by swineherds; this herd of pigs is usually taken to forage close to gardens, and so forth.

Moreover, it is likely that any dispute can be viewed as impacted by a supernatural agency. Pigs that overcome a well-built fence or that were able to eat an unusually large amount of produce may have been assisted by a supernatural agent. The gardener may have angered these and become vulnerable, or the pig owner may have facilitated their involvement.

Disputants, in a sense, must agree to dispute, and the community must agree that there is a valid dispute. A person who raises an objection to pigs roaming free to forage or who objects to farmers having ownership of the produce of their farm work would be ridiculed, or at least find no community support. One of the unsettling results of social change is the introduction of unfamiliar principles as a basis for disputes.

[Page 752]Are humans inherently contentious? There is no easy answer to this question. Humans are inherently social and socially sensitive creatures. We creatively construct our cultural behavior daily from our traditional experience and in concert with our fellow community members. And we mutually dispute our varying creative versions. It is unlikely that creatures as complex as humans and as adept at symbolic reinterpretation could live in a dispute-free condition. The continuous potential of disputing, however, does not lead to a continuing condition of social disruption.

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