The culture of coincidence

In this innovative study, Laurence Goldman examines the ground between law, linguistics, and anthropology to provide the first full-length ethnography on the grammar and pragmatics of the rarely acknowledged or researched topic of accident. He challenges two long-standing preconceptions about tribal society: that there is absolute liability for deaths and that indigenous theories of misfortune lack concepts of pure accident or coincidence. Utilizing transcript case data from the Huli people of Papua New Guinea, Dr Goldman explores the linguistic encoding of intentionality, causality, responsibility, and control to show how actors dispute in volitional (murder) or non-volitional (coincidence) idioms. He examines causativization, case marking, adverbs, why-questions, and verb choice to reveal how intentions, and not just consequences, are an inevitable focus of all conflict talk. He also examines the notion of 'state of mind' in terms of Huli ideas of desire, motive, purpose, and reason. Dr Goldman concludes that, with regard to the concept of accident, Western and non-Western juristic ideologies exhibit startling similarities; his study has important implications for the way we describe the world views of other cultures.