Of Nets, Nails, and Problemas

This thesis examines how people in a Central American setting create, understand, and manage conflict in everyday encounters. The investigation is based on tape recordings of actual conflict episodes, member talk about conflict, and extensive participant observation in various Central American settings. The enthnography describing a folk vision of conflict is accompanied by the application of a phenomenological framework drawing extensively from the sociology of language and knowledge to describe processes central in the accomplishment of conflict at the microsociological level, building toward a general theory of how social conflict and social realities are constructed…

The thesis inductively builds a theory of transvaluation. It is argued that the creation and accomplishment of conflict is better understood when connected to a theoretical framework that endeavors to describe the constitutive process of how social meaning is negotiated and constructed.