ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the manner in which disputes were processed in the village communities in Gonjhé and the Dharamgarh valley. Dispute processing is marked by different “layers of legality” (see page 68) in these communities that witness an interaction and struggle of different types of law, and the postulates underlying them, that seek to govern and regulate the lives of people in these communities. People’s instinct for self-preservation then reveals the, often furious, engagement between the spheres of religion, state and everyday life practices within these processes.
