Halme, Miia Marika
(2001)
This is a study of all the reasons why it is impossible to allow the Miccosukee Tribe of Florida to use their own culturally determined mode of dispute resolution to settle a homicide case. However, it is simultaneously also a methodological experiment on the way anthropological approach can be used to study state law. Thus, despite the importance of answers to the question posed here, at least equal significance is placed on all the ancillary information acquired on the way to answers: what kind of difficulties such an approach entails, and what kind of methodological choices can be used to overcome them. In other words the attempt is to take rather orthodox, although modified, anthropological methods to a whole new setting, and to study both what kind of new insights could be gained from such an approach, and to examine what kind of contributions the method could offer to this new field.
Further questions are also created on the relationship of state law to other modes of social control - should all of them be the subject of study, or should clear division be maintained between formal and casual modes dispute resolution? What should then be identified as social control, and who should be identified as its author?
Overall the study derives from a variety of sources, including newspaper articles, communications from the attorneys of the parties involved and other online documents.