ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some of the more general features of community authority: its operational structure, the values associated with it, the ways in which it is exerted, and the sanctions that uphold it. The collective, concerted nature of corporate community actions is also stressed by Banyang, especially where they are based upon the wider residential groupings. No community council has a formally defined membership but is a body of individuals brought together by virtue of age and kinship status, by their representation of sectional parts of the residential group concerned, or more generally by their involvement in or influence over the affairs of the group. The authority which controls a community, however, is more strictly coercive in nature: it is the community's power which is feared, its physical command over the life of an individual member in the past, its present power to make the existence of a member unbearable.
