Chapter 2 establishes the foundational context of dispute resolution in China by delving into the cultural, social and political factors that shape Chinese mediation practices. The chapter highlights the significant influence of Confucianism on the Chinese mindset, emphasising harmonious, integrative and compromising approaches to conflict resolution. It discusses how Chinese people’s dispute resolution strategies are deeply rooted in social relationships (guanxi) and local governance structures, particularly in rural areas. The chapter also examines the balance between emotion and rationality in Chinese culture and its impact on mediation preferences. Additionally, it addresses the interaction between state law and local customs, illustrating the unique dynamics within China’s diverse and transitional society. The chapter concludes by emphasising the importance of empirical research and interdisciplinary methods to understand the complexities of Chinese mediation fully.

This chapter traces how payments made by the laity to the Church changed across the nineteenth century. A brief discussion of the total amount of money given to the Church in the period, and of various attempts to formally regulate dues and fees on the part of the state, the Church, and sections of the laity, is followed by the analysis of some of the most fundamental, day-to-day methods of funding the Church and its personnel. This chapter traces first, at parish level, the evolution of Easter and Christmas dues payments and pew rents. Second, the varied funding of a raft of religious orders that emerged and grew in the period will be dealt with. Finally, the use of Sunday collections of various kinds and their connection to emerging national and international Catholic funding campaigns will be discussed. The key argument here is that this enormous diversification of the Church’s fundraising was a response to changes in the broader economy, including increased access to cash and growing consumption opportunities on the part of the laity.

This chapter explores sacramental fees in respect of baptisms, weddings, funerals, and other life cycle events. One of the most significant aspects of clerical income, these fees were equally a substantial, but vital, financial outlay for the laity, which had meanings that were social, cultural, religious, and personal. This chapter argues that those on either side of the transaction could often value the money involved very differently, a finding that has an important bearing on our understanding of where the balance of power lay between Church and people. This chapter will also emphasise, through its varied examples, that sacramental fees were highly regionalised and could operate very differently depending on the parish or diocese involved.

This chapter analyses household and community mediations of violence in Sierra Leone, which emphasise social relationships over harmony. These non-state dispute resolutions consider overall character rather than specific actions, with (character) witnesses playing vital roles and blame being shared amongst disputing parties. Informal mediations prioritise maintaining social groups over individual or relationship harmony. Grievances are deemed inevitable but must be contained within individuals through rituals like ‘swallowing’ to prevent wider community disruptions. Proximity, gender, and kinship dynamics influence case-dependent assessment, often leading to harsher punishment for women despite their prominence in mediation. The chapter challenges the notion of harmony ideology and emphasises the difficulty of forgiveness. Swallowing grievances aims to preserve relationships and contain conflicts while minimising state interference. Sierra Leoneans must choose between informal and state mediations. Institutions in this legal pluralism highlight different aspects – fact vs context, acts vs character, preservation vs rupture – resulting in different outcomes.

A gift, my grandmother used to say, is just a loan. And certainly in many parts of the world gifts, far from being merely free-will offerings, are what bind people together in relationships of felt indebtedness. As one traces the meaning and forms of gift-giving in the Middle East and North Africa, one appreciates that the lines along which gifts flow and the meanings that are attached to them are, like the traces of one’s passing, an indicator of the bonds of obligations formed. In a sense, the running imbalance of gifts thus underscores the nature of many social ties and their negotiation in this part of the world and with them a keener appreciation of how they inform the encounters that sustain the social order.

This chapter challenges some prevailing beliefs about the decline of violence and the rise of the English state. Neighbourliness was a ‘critical social ideal’ that underpinned social relations in early modern England. But village life was characterised by an atmosphere of contention and sometimes bitter enmity. Neighbourliness was put under strain by a population rise during the sixteenth century, as growing numbers of poor began to burden the community. Litigation did not supplant violence. The murder rate, moderate in the 1560s and 1570s, rose sharply in the 1580s and 1590s. Indictments reached a peak in the 1620s and did not fall to the levels that had prevailed in the mid-sixteenth century until the early eighteenth century. I present new evidence that the overall homicide rate in England was much higher than is usually claimed. The new pattern requires us to re-examine the effectiveness of the machinery of repression. I demonstrate that judicial records alone are insufficient for studying violence and suggest some alternative sources for capturing the history of violence and assess how that helps us to rethink the traditional narrative.

This chapter compares the European experience of violence in sacred space. Churches are not normally associated with violence. They were, after all, designed for worship. But because in most communities they were the pre-eminent site for the display of social capital, they were theatres of conflict. Although disorder inside sacred space was frequent in England and Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, serious incidents such as these were relatively rare. One reason for this was the absence of urban factions. In the European league table of church murders, Italy takes the title, with France in a distant second place. Precise figures are hard to compute, but victims certainly ran into the hundreds in Italy and the dozens in France. The reasons why Italian, and to a lesser extent French, churches were so frequently scenes of violence is investigated. The comparisons and contrasts between different regions and states helps to illuminate and explain the different forms and trajectories taken by enmity. In both France and Italy churches were sites for politicised violence. The chapter considers the role of assassination, patrimonialism and anti-clericalism mainly in the French and Italian contexts, and then broadens to explore sacred space as a theatre for staging social conflict across Europe.

The social life of animals poses specific adaptive challenges that may be cognitively different to challenges from ecological adaptations to their physical environment.Social cognitive adaptations for dealing with other agents are evolutionarily remarkable in that they automatically become an adaptive challenge that may trigger counter- or co-adaptations. This chapter discusses three main problems in social cognition: first, the issue of mentalism or theory of mind, or whether social cognitive adaptations in animals are based on mentalistic attribution skills that may involve representing the intentions and knowledge of others; second, the cognitive underpinnings of animal communication, with a focus on referential and intentional communication; and third, the problem of how animals know and represent the social relations structuring their groups. There is widespread debate about how the social knowledge and reasoning demonstrated in animal social behavior are exactly implemented. The traditional debate in comparative psychology between reductionist behavioristic explanations and complex cognitive explanations has become especially pronounced in social cognition. A widespread proposal is that the type of knowledge demonstrated by animals is ‘implicit,’ distinct both from the verbally expressible knowledge evolved by humans, and from low-level, reflex-like associative behaviours and habits. However, the key notion of implicit knowledge remains elusive and ill-defined.

Two ostensibly contradictory forces operate in Japanese society, as is the case in other industrialized societies. On the one hand, it is subject to many centrifugal forces that tend to diversify its structural arrangements, lifestyles, and value orientations. On the other hand, a range of centripetal forces drives Japanese society towards homogeneity and uniformity. This chapter endeavors to recapitulate these two forces in the context of Japan’s civil society. The first section examines the fragmentation of social relations. The second section scrutinizes the rise of social movements in the 2010s. The third section delves into the quiet spread of volunteer activities and non-profit organizations and non-governmental organizations as the backdrop of the dissenting protests and the changing configuration of interest groups at large. The fourth section examines the viability of the emic notion analogous to citizenship in the analysis of the Japanese context. The last section attempts to locate a variety of forms of control in an analytical framework and to summarize their features as ‘friendly authoritarianism’ across the wide spectrum of Japanese society.

This chapter focuses on masculinities research as a diverse field of inquiry with many interrelated points of interests for discourses about crime and deviance. It explores 'critical masculinities theory', which coalesces around several shared assumptions: that masculinities are ‘plural, socially constructed, reproduced in the collective social practices of different men and embedded in institutional and occupational settings’ (Tomsen 2017: 816). From this perspective, masculinity is the product of a complex relation between multiple social structures, the institutions that are shaped by them, and the everyday practices of both men and women. These practices may include crime and deviance as resources for enacting particular hegemonic masculinities in specific contexts. In advancing thinking around the ‘maleness of crime’, critical masculinities theory encourage consideration of both the micro and the macro forces that shape behaviour.

If we look beyond the unusual circumstances that prevail in both the Iliad and Odyssey, we find a fragmented world in which relatively small-scale local communities are the norm. In this chapter we reconstruct what Homeric communities look like and how they function, considering their basic social, political, economic, and religious structures. If we wish to link this picture to a specific archaeological period, the degree of settlement and community organization of Homeric communities seems fairly comparable to that of the Early Archaic period.