Background

This chapter deals with the widest range of power and status relationships in Swaziland's customary land control hierarchy. By means of observed and elicited land dispute cases, it illustrates how procedure and outcome are linked to position in hierarchy. Moreover, it argues that harmony ideologies are used by authorities to justify procedures and outcomes. In effect, while authorities strategically use harmony ideologies to legitimate dispute-processing methods, thus reinforcing their control, case litigants strategically respond to harmony ideologies according to their immediate case needs. The power plays underlying the officials' and disputants' strategizing behaviour in each case produce a ‘politics of harmony’ in which all participants in a dispute struggle for validation of their interests – enhanced status and favourable dispute outcomes.

Swazi disputants' hierarchical status relationships are defined in this chapter according to a dyadic model of social and political relationships which are forged at different levels of the land community: family members with one another in a homestead; subjects with one another in a chiefdom; subjects with their chiefs to whom they pledge allegiance; and chiefs with the Central Authority (ruling Dlamini clan) to whom they pledge allegiance. My interpretation of the dyadic model, which delineates six Swazi disputant dyads, well suits my main analytic goal of correlating disputants' relative statuses with their disputing styles, which involve strategy use.

Disputing styles are primarily characterized by disputants' strategic use of procedures and forums (Nader 1969).