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.