Approaches to the understanding of law as an aspect of culture have changed rapidly and drastically in recent years. The same can be said about approaches to the understanding of small communities in relation to the modern states of which they are integral (but often distinctive, and even contrastive) parts. This book brings together a fresh view of law and an effective view of a contemporary Mexican Indian society, in ways that illuminate both.
The author notes, “. . . having begun my research with the idea that law was a body of rules enforced by men with authority, I ended with the view . . . that law is a language used by individuals to interpret and manipulate their social environment” (vii). The evolution of her thinking is not discussed in detail in this book, but her clear writing and good organization make a compelling case for the idea of law as language.
No social scientist should be surprised that some basic premises of the Zinacantecos are different from those of Jewish, Roman, English, or other traditional corpora that have dominated in the Western literature on law. The degree of such difference might be surprising, however; e.g., “Zinacantecos were not concerned with crime and punishment. They cared about ending conflicts, to forestall supernatural vengeance” (viii).
In such a situation, rather than attempt to isolate and analyze a list of crimes and related punishments, Collier chose to look at conflict management “from the bottom up,” in terms of the decisions made by litigants, at various stages, in the resolution of differences. In short, she examined in detail some 287 “trouble cases” over a ten-year period, noting not so much the content of norms as the ways individuals manipulate norms.
The book opens with a brief ethnographic sketch, which sets the stage and quickly introduces the various types of social contexts in which conflict management can be accomplished, from informal groups of kinsmen up to the “official” judicial system in Mexican courts. The second chapter outlines ways in which litigants choose the forum best suited to their purposes; the third is devoted to a case study, in which a single hearing at the town hall court is described and analyzed in detail, in the metaphor of a stage production. The meanings of legal concepts in the native language are meticulously explicated in Chapter 4, and beliefs about witchcraft and their relation to attitudes about how conflicts should be resolved are portrayed in Chapter 5: “. . . the ultimate justification for a Zinacanteco settlement is that it calms the heart of the plaintiff and not that it satisfies some abstract notion of what is just” (123). The next two chapters are devoted to analysis of several cases, with special emphasis on ways in which people express aggression and ways in which people interpret such words and actions. A series of chapters focuses on particular kinds of social relationships and how these relate to what people fight about—kinsmen, spouses, families in courtship disputes, neighbors, and individuals vis-à-vis the community. A final chapter summarizes the value of this way of looking at law, and briefly but effectively explains how and why an ethnic minority can maintain its own legal system, even though it is by no means isolated from the legal structures of the nation of which it is a part.
This book is valuable not only in illustrating the utility of viewing “law as a language,” but also as an ethnographic document. For those who have not already noticed, Zinacantan is one of the best described and most insightfully analyzed social systems in the non-Western world. A township of about 9,000 Tzotzil-speaking Indians in the highlands of southeastern Mexico, it has been studied by literally dozens of social scientists (including linguists, economists, political scientists, and others, as well as anthropologists). Although few scholars would challenge the proposition that long-term and interdisciplinary studies in small regions should be fruitful, many such “projects” have, in fact, been disappointing in terms of both the quantity and the quality of data and of insights that have come out of them. Fortunately, the work of V. Bricker, E. Calnek, F. Cancian, G. Collier, M. Edel, H. Ermitte, E. Vogt, and others has been sound, and their contributions are not only complementary in providing an understanding in depth of various aspects of Zinacanteco life, but also independently valuable in contributing new perspectives on particular institutions that are of cross-cultural importance. The present monograph carries on that valuable tradition.
