The analysis of legal systems, like the analysis of social systems, requires at its base an understanding of the categories of meaning by which participants themselves comprehend their experience and orient themselves toward one another in their everyday lives. The day to day sharing, or contesting, of basic understandings are crucial aspects of the creation of moral communities that form the cultural basis of social life. Nowhere is the significance of these understandings brought into sharper focus than in the arena of disputing. In the social study of law, law is part of culture and is understood in cultural terms. This project is an ethnographic study of dispute settlement in three neighborhoods of contrasting social composition and religious orientation in the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta, Java. The study looks at dispute settlement at its least institutionalized levels, especially mediation by community and religious leaders. Through interviews, extended case-study methods, and participant observation, the following issues are explored: (1) indigenous conceptions of dispute and disputing, order, and amity; (2) strategies and tactics employed by Javanese in resolving disputes; (3) institutions and techniques available for the resolution of disputes and the choices made for settling disputes; (4) effect of the choices on subsequent rhetoric of disputing; and (5) how communities create and maintain moral cohesion and how social differentiation informs these issues. The research will result in substantial contributions to our understanding of the ways in which communities are created and maintained, particularly in a context of cultural and legal pluralism; of the evolution of legal systems; and of Javanese society. By extension and implication, the results will have relevance to any of the world's socially and legally pluralistic societies, especially developing and developed countries facing social transformation.
