BIBLIO is the largest independent book marketplace in the world, with over 100 million books.

Skip to content

Rules and Processes
Stock photo: cover may vary

Rules and Processes Paperback - 1986

by John L. Comaroff; Simon Roberts

Add to wish list

Reader reviews for Rules and Processes

Write a review for this book

There are no reviews for this book yet. Be the first to write a review!

Your review will be anonymous unless you login or create an account first.

Overall rating
Remember: You’re rating the book as a work, not the seller or the condition of the specific copy you purchased!

Important Terms and Guidelines

  • Please focus on the book’s content and context. Also, add any personal comments as to how you enjoyed the book. Substantiate your likes and dislikes. You may make comparisons to other books.
  • Reviews must be at least 140 characters in length.
  • Please do not reveal critical plot elements.
  • This is not a help line. Contact customer support if you need help.
Your review must not include:
  • Obscenities, discriminatory language, or other insulting language not suitable for public domain
  • Advertisements, “spam” content, or references to other products, offers or websites.
  • Email addresses, URLs, phone numbers, physical addresses or other contact information.
  • Overly critical comments about other reviews or reviewers
  • Time-sensitive material (i.e. promotional tours, seminars, lectures, etc.)
  • Availability, price, or alternative ordering/shipping information

From the publisher

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.

First line

This is a study of dispute processes, based on ethnography drawn primarily from two Tswana chiefdoms.

Details

  • Title Rules and Processes
  • Author John L. Comaroff; Simon Roberts
  • Binding Paperback
  • Edition First Edition
  • Pages 304
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher University of Chicago Press, Chicago
  • Publication date 1986-06-15
  • Features Bibliography
  • ISBN 9780226114255 / 0226114252
  • Weight 0.78 lbs (0.35 kg)
  • Dimensions 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.64 in (21.59 x 13.97 x 1.63 cm)
  • Category Sociology
  • Library of Congress Catalogue Number 80026640

About the author

John L. Comaroff, Chair of the Anthropology Department at the University of Chicago, is the coauthor (with Jean Comaroff) of Of Revelation and Revolution, also published by the University of Chicago Press. Simon Roberts is professor of law at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Please wait a moment while we load the requested page.