2018 Volume 82 Issue 4 Pages 526-546
This paper describes and analyzes the process of conflict resolution in a village in Tsaka Valley, located in Enga Province in the New Guinea Highlands, which lies at the interface of “top-down” and “bottom-up” peace. The creation of peace maintenance methods that cannot be reduced to either of those two types is also discussed. In anthropology, when dealing with that theme, we must ask, “What is peace?” However, the question is temporarily shelved in this paper. Instead, the aim of the paper is to examine the interconstitutive relationship between the court system introduced during the colonial and independence periods, on the one hand, and “customary” conflict resolution methods, on the other. When investigating such places as the New Guinea Highlands, which have not experienced large-scale conflict with thousands or tens of thousands of casualties, anthropology must comprehend the totality of social life containing the possibility of small-scale conflict as “peace,” and capture people’s creativity and logic in conflict resolution.
Originally, when studying conflict, anthropology suggested a form of society permanently in conflict without the binary of “pre-conflict and post-conflict.” That type of research is abundant. Typically, those studies are conducted from an ecological approach to the analysis of social structure and legal anthropology. However, previous studies do not sufficiently address the question of emotion, which cannot be fully explained by analyzing structure and norms. In conflict studies, the investigation of how anger is triggered and subsides in conflict has long been regarded as the most important research question. However, in reality, research on that is not sufficient.
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