The Social Contexts of Apology in Dispute Settlement: A Cross-Cultural Study

Recent anthropological studies of law and dispute settlement have spurned an interest in rules of substantive law and have concentrated, instead, on the social process of dispute settlement. For the most part, these studies have been case studies conducted in one culture, and the focus has been intracultural rather than intercultural variation in the dispute process.2 The study described here departs from most previous studies in that it attempts to test hypotheses regarding regularities across cultures in the social structure and child socialization contexts associated with one selected element in the dispute process, namely, apology. Apology is behavior by which a party implicitly or explicitly expresses regret for having wronged another and requests the forgiveness of the aggrieved party. Although a survey of the ethnographic literature indicates that apology is used in many cultures, these cultures differ in the extent to which their members stress apology as a redressive technique.3 My interest in apology derives from a case study of dispute management in a Fijian village. The following summary of the findings of that study provides a contextual description of apology.4