LAURA NADER
See also ADVERSARY SYSTEM; CIVIL AND CRIMINAL DIVIDE; CRIMINAL LAW REFORM: CONTINENTAL EUROPE; CRIMINAL LAW REFORM: ENGLAND; CRIMINAL PROCEDURE: COMPARATIVE ASPECTS; RESTORATIVE JUSTICE; SHAMING PUNISHMENTS.
Preliterate societies do not constitute a single type of society but a whole assortment of societies. Just as most people speak about English, Russian, or Chinese Law, an anthropologist might speak about Tongan, Tiv, or Zapotec law. Any study of criminal law in preliterate societies must take this diversity into account. The comparative perspective, however, need not stress only the differences am…
Order and disorder. Theories have been proposed to explain the relation between modes of production and the organization of social controls. For example, a number of anthropologists observed that hunters and gatherers do not develop means for adjudicating disputes, but rather for avoidance of disputes. Order and disorder are present in both small and large societies. For this reason, the presence …
Most stereotypes of preliterate societies have not withstood the empirical test. Preliterate societies, like modern ones, support various, and sometimes contradictory, systems of rules. Adjectives that apply to the law of some African societies—communal, restitutive, cloaked with magic-religious beliefs—do not apply to the Australian aborigines, the Plains Indians of North America, o…
Surviving preliterate societies are increasingly being encapsulated by the modern bureaucratic state, a process that began under colonial governments and has developed further under conditions of independence. Creating central administrations has had a pervasive influence on local communities by acting as a brake on inter-village hostilities. Elizabeth Colson reports that before becoming subjects …
——. Politics, Law, and Ritual in Tribal Society. Chicago: Aldine, 1965. …
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