Speaking as a Woman: Structure and Gender in Domestic Arguments in a New Guinea Village

Conflict-between social classes and between ethnic groups, between the individual and "society," and between people in their encounters with othershas always been one of the major preoccupations of social theory. Yet, despite the central position of conflict in social theory and despite its frequent occurrence in human interaction, relatively little work has been devoted to understanding how people actually manage conflict in face-to-face interactions. Accounts of conflict management such as Goffman's (1967, 1969[1959], 1971) are helpful in that they provide us with a way of seeing conflicts and a language for sequencing them. But as Goodwin has recently pointed out, even this type of research "has investigated disputes by theorizing about how they might function in larger social processes, while paying little attention to the procedures and competencies employed to build the dispute as a coherent, culturally appropriate object in the first place" (1990:142). Furthermore, the primary data for research on face-to-face conflict management are usually summaries of such encounters as observed by the researcher, reports of conflicts by informants who recount or gossip about them, or reports or transcriptions of meetings at which previous conflicts are publicly settled. Even recent volumes specifically devoted to the analysis of "conflict discourse" (Brenneis and Myers 1984; Briggs 1988; Watson-Gegeo and White 1990) turn out to focus much more on talk about conflicts or on conflict settlement than they do on actual sequences of conflict talk.