ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that attitudes toward law which entail fundamental notions about appropriate and inappropriate interpersonal behavior, particularly approaches toward the resolution of disputes, are grounded in large part in unconsciously held beliefs and personality structure, which change much more slowly than such overt aspects of culture as clothing and weaponry. The chapter discusses briefly the habitat and culture of precontact and early postcontact Eskimos, the specific cultural traits generally agreed upon as existing in Eskimos by early observers, and then a reconstructed aboriginal Eskimo cultural personality. It shows how apparent changes in “law ways” have, in fact, obscured a fundamental continuity of unconscious attitudes and, in fact, behaviors and outcomes. The chapter argues that approaches to conflict resolution, or the absence of such approaches, relates to something more profound than some changed cultural trait.
