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Eskimo Law in Light of Self- and Group-interest

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Nelson H. H. Graburn
Nelson H. H. Graburn*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Extract

The considerable literature on Eskimo law is replete with contradictory descriptions of matters such as the functions of leadership, the imposition of sanctions, the involvement of the community as a whole in juridical matters, and the presence or absence of specific methods of conflict resolution. Rather than accuse certain ethnographers of error, I would judge that all the well-known accounts are substantially accurate.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , August 1969 , pp. 45 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © 1969 by the Law and Society Association

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Footnotes

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This paper is based partly upon fieldwork carried out in the eastern Canadian Arctic: 1959, northern Ungava; and 1960, southern Baffin Island, both under the auspices of the Northern Coordination and Research Centre of the Government of Canada–1963-64, the Eskimos and Indians of the Ungava Peninsula, work supported by the Cooperative Cross-cultural Study of Ethnocentrism, Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill.–1967-68, in the Ungava Peninsula and southern Baffin Island, work supported by the National Science Foundation, Washington, D.C. The present paper is a revision and combination of two papers presented at the Symposium on Primitive Law at the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association in Seattle, November 1968 (Graburn, 1968a, 1968b). For the preparation of the above papers and the present work, I am grateful for the help of Professor Klaus Koch of Harvard University and Professor Laura Nader of the University of California, Berkeley, and particularly to the editors of The Law & Society Review.

References

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