Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Rules and Processes

Rules and Processes

Comaroff, John L.
Roberts, Simon

Paperback

General Sociology

ISBN10: 0226114252
ISBN13: 9780226114255
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: Jun 15 1986
Pages: 304
Weight: 0.78
Height: 0.64 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Rules and Processes is at once a compelling essay in social theory and a pathbreaking ethnography of dispute in an African society. On the basis of a sensitive study of the Tswana of southern Africa, John Comaroff and Simon Roberts challenge most of the orthodoxies of legal anthropology. They argue that the social world, and the dispute processes that occur within it, are given form and meaning by a dialectical relationship between sociocultural structures and individual experience. The authors explore in a novel way the relations between culture and ideology, system and practice, social action and human intention. They develop a model that lays bare the form and content of legal and political discourse in all its variations--a model that accounts for the outcome of conflict processes and explains why the Tswana, like people in other cultures, conceive of their world in an apparently contradictory manner--as rule-governed yet inherently open to pragmatic individualism; orderly yet inherently fluid and shifting. Rules and Processes offers a fresh and persuasive approach to our understanding of the dialectics of social life.

A work of impressive scholarship in which theoretical sophistication and ethnographic richness are convincingly matched.--Ian Hamnett, Times Higher Education Supplement.

Also in

General Sociology

View All