Marriages, Norms and Structures
Marriages, Norms and Structures
The Dilemma of Finding a Wife among the Piaroa of the Sipapo
Mansutti adopts Needham’s scheme of distinguishing three analytical levels; the jural rules; the statistical-behavioural, and the categorical. He includes a computer simulation to gain a time depth in his model of Piaroa kinship and marriage, which demonstrates that the exceptions to the marriage rules are not residual and inexplicable but are necessary to maintain the ideal model anticipated by the formal rules. Although violations of the rules are motivated by personal desires and not a desire to save the formal system, they are in fact necessary to its preservation. Moreover, he employs Bourdieu’s distinction between official and private kinship, and illustrates his approach with apposite case studies. For instance, he describes how personal interests can be transmuted into community interests, and genealogical relationships between two people in small-scale societies can be “read” along different routes with telling results.
Florida Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
