Hostility management and the control of aggression in a Zapotec community

Abstract

Theoretically, sociocultural devices which curb dispositions to destructiveness in people should act as mechanisms in the control of overt destructiveness, i.e., aggression. From an anthropological perspective, these devices should be patterned in any culture and somewhat variable across cultures. I refer to the operation of these mechanisms as hostility management. I describe and analyze a number of these hostility management mechanisms which I have observed to operate in the control of interpersonal aggression over a number of years in a Zapotec community in Mexico. The attitudes and values of people in the community are not demonstrably antiaggressive. On the other hand, aggressivity does not meet with approbation in the value system either. There are values in the system, most notably those stressing cooperation, responsibility, and respect which although they are not explicitly anti-aggressive, nevertheless, function generally to preclude high levels of interpersonal aggression. Formal social control mechanisms, in and of themselves, are largely ineffective in controlling aggression and for effectiveness are largely dependent on less formal mechanisms of control. The effectiveness of the less formal control control devices appear to rest in the observed fact that they function primarily in hostility management preventing covert hostile dispositions from empting into overtly aggressive behaviors. The descriptions and analyses of these hostility management mechanisms evident in the Zapotec community appear to have counterparts in other Zapotec and non-Zapotec communities in mesoamerica. Evidence for them exists in a number of unrelated fragments to be found in the accounts of anthropologists, most of whom have had no focal interest in the study of aggression control.

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