Justice and Judgment Among the Tiv

As ethnography, this book remains an important monograph on an indigenous West African legal system. Tiv conceptions of order are complex and articulate, but Bohannan presents them in a way that contextualizes them in legal and larger social terms. The book concentrates on disputes and various forums in which they are heard; the analysis is based on and illustrated by numerous cases that the author attended. Beyond the specific ethnographic and regional significance of his findings, Bohannan's volume is an early, and very thoughtful, reflection on the limits of anthropological interpretation.