John Conley & William O'Barr, Just words: Law, language, and power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. xi, 168. Hb $35.00, pb $13.00.

Abstract

Until recently, legal anthropologists have treated talk as a source of information about conflict rather than as a techno-political device used by participants in the conflict. From Malinowski to Gluckman to Bohannan, conflict – between social classes, ethnic groups, individuals and society, or individual interactants – has always been one of the major concerns of socio-cultural anthropology. Yet the classic studies yielded very little knowledge of how people actually manage conflict in interaction. They suffered from an absence of detailed primary data and elected to present summaries, reports by native sources, or reports from meetings held to resolve the conflict. In sum, those studies analyzed the law as a set of cases and rules, rather than a contested field of linguistic practices.