Aspects of Group Relations in a Complex Society: Mexico 1

S TARTING from simple beginnings in the twenties, anthropologists have grown increasingly sophisticated about the relationship of nation and community. First, they studied the community in its own terms, taking but little account of its larger matrix. Later, they began to describe "outside factors" which affected the life of the local group under study. Recently they have come to recognize that nations or 'systems of the higher level do not consist merely of more numerous and diversified parts," and that it is therefore "methodologically incorrect to treat each part as though it were an independent whole in itself" (Steward 1950:107). Communities are "modified and acquire new characteristics because of their functional dependence upon a new and larger system" (ibid: 111). The present paper is concerned with a continuation of this anthropological discussion in terms of Mexican material. The dependence of communities on a larger system has affected them in two ways. On the one hand, whole communities have come to play specialized parts within the larger whole. On the other, special functions pertaining to the whole have become the tasks of special groups within communities. These groups Steward calls horizontal socio-cultural segments. I shall simply call them nation-oriented groups. They are usually found in more than one community and follow ways of life different from those of their community-oriented fellow-villagers. They are often the agents of the great national institutions which reach down into the community, and form "the bones, nerves and sinews running through the total society, binding it together, and affecting it at every point" (ibid: 115). Communities which form parts of a complex society can thus be viewed no longer as self-contained and integrated systems in their own right. It is more appropriate to view them as the local termini of a web of group relations which extend through intermediate levels from the level of the community to that of the nation. In the community itself, these relationships may be wholly tangential to each other. Forced to understand the community in terms of forces impinging on it from the outside, we have also found it necessary to gain a better understanding of national-level institutions. Yet to date most anthropologists have hesitated to commit themselves to such a study, even when they have become half-convinced that such a step would be desirable. National institutions seem so complex that even a small measure of competence in their operations seems to require full-time specialization. We have therefore left their description and analysis to specialists in other disciplines. Yet the specialists in law, politics, or economics have themselves discovered that anthropologists can be of almost as much use to them as they can be to the anthropologist. For they have become increasingly aware that the legal, political or other systems to