The Anthropology of Marriage in Lowland South America: Bending and Breaking the Rules
Paul Valentine, Stephen Beckerman, and Catherine Alès
Abstract
Traditional treatments of marriage among indigenous people focus on what people say about whom one should marry and on rules that anthropologists induce from those statements. This volume is a cultural and social anthropological examination of the ways the indigenous peoples of lowland South America/Amazonia actually choose whom they marry. Detailed ethnography shows that they select spouses to meet their economic and political goals, their emotional desires, and their social aspirations, as well as to honor their commitments to exogamic prescriptions and the exchange of women. These decisions ... More
Traditional treatments of marriage among indigenous people focus on what people say about whom one should marry and on rules that anthropologists induce from those statements. This volume is a cultural and social anthropological examination of the ways the indigenous peoples of lowland South America/Amazonia actually choose whom they marry. Detailed ethnography shows that they select spouses to meet their economic and political goals, their emotional desires, and their social aspirations, as well as to honor their commitments to exogamic prescriptions and the exchange of women. These decisions often require playing fast and loose with what the anthropologist and the peoples themselves declare to be the regulations they obey. Inevitably then, this volume is about agency and individual choice in the context of social institutions and cultural rules. There is another theme running through this book—the way in which globalization is subverting traditional hierarchies, altering identities, and eroding ancestral marital norms and values—how the forces of modernization alter both structure and practice. The main body of the book is given over to eleven chapters based on previously unpublished ethnographic material collected by the contributors. It is divided into three sections. The first collects essays that describe the motives behind breaking the marriage rules, the second describes how the marriage rules are bent or broken, and the third gathers chapters on the effects of globalization and recent changes on the marriage rules.
Keywords:
lowland South America,
Amazonia,
agency,
globalization,
marriage rules
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2017 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780813054315 |
Published to Florida Scholarship Online: January 2018 |
DOI:10.5744/florida/9780813054315.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Paul Valentine, editor
University of East London
Stephen Beckerman, editor
University of Utah
Catherine Alès, editor
National Center for Scientific Research
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