Wives, Pets, and Affines: Marriage among the Jivaro

Abstract

(...) my aim is to explore the premises informing Jivaroan conceptualizations of conjugal and cross-sex sibling tics, and thereby to shed some light on local understandings of social relations in general. My argument presupposes that relationships, that is to say, the forms of interaction between individuals as determined by what structuralist analysis calls the "system of attitudes", are built on, and usually combine, more elemental schemes of relating to non-selves according to their perceived identitu or alterity in relation to ego in a given contexte. (...)