ABSTRACT
Stated initially, and therefore over-simply, I seek to show in this book how, in cases of a more or less serious breach of the norms of social behaviour, the people involved attempt to reach a settlement of the subsequent dispute. In any society there must, by definition, exist regularised procedures which can be used to deal with alleged breaches of norms and the injuries they cause: there must be ways by which it can be established whether in fact a breach has occurred, and what is the extent of the injuries; and there must be means of determining and enforcing decisions which provide a settlement of the dispute, and perhaps also means which tend to prevent recurrence of the matter. In some societies, of course, the principal means to these ends are contained in the complex of political authorities, police, courts, judges, lawyers and codes of law—in other words, the judicial component of organised government. In indigenous Arusha society there was no such government, and hence no established and specialised judicial system. Arusha dispute processes, as part of the wider political system, are to be discovered only by an examination of more general social roles, relationships and group activities. When one person is alleged to have committed an injury against another—when, therefore, the two persons come into dispute—the significant jural factors are not only the kind of injury involved, but the social relationship between the two persons and the position of each in the structure of his society. By position here, I mean primarily the social status of each person, and the various groups to which he belongs. Especially are the groups important, because it is very largely through them that an Arusha has access to the ability and power to take jural action, there being no traditional institutionalised authority existing over and above these groups to exercise regulatory coercion and judicial competence.
