Violence and social control: the logic of guilt in an indigenous group

Abstract

Examining the logics of violence in an indigenous group, the author focuses on the socio cultural mechanisms used by the social agents to understand and control their collective participation in the vendettas. These logics, based on magical thought and belief in nahualism —described in indigenous groups decades ago— allows us to understand the constrictions these societies created as a form of social control of murders, that ciclacally occur in the life of community. On a thin frontier associating acts of physical violence and actions attributed to nahualism, resulting in human deaths, the community prescribes a waiting period, within which the behavior of suspected persons is observed, until the responsability for the violent deeds is deduced and assigned. Though this mechanism is not considered as a legal proof, the belief is so strong that it is assumed that sooner or later whoever is guilty will be discovered, and that belief limits and inhibits such deeds.