Making Kin: Kinship Theory and Zumbagua Adoptions
Author(s): Mary Weismantel
Source: American Ethnologist , Nov., 1995, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Nov., 1995), pp. 685-704
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/646380
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
American Anthropological Association and Wiley are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,
preserve and extend access to American Ethnologist
This content downloaded from
147.251.6.77 on Tue, 14 Sep 2021 03:39:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
featured article: issues in debate
American Ethnologist proudly announces a new category of occasional articles unde
heading. We will sometimes invite a reviewer whose critique of an otherwise pos
evaluated manuscript strikes a timely theoretical note to join with the author of that manu
in a brief exchange of views immediately following the article. These exchanges will
only those arguments the Editor deems to be unusually noteworthy. We hope that t
serve to highlight and clarify some of the most important debates in ethnological research
making kin: kinship theory and Zumbagua adopt
MARY WEISMANTEL-Occidental College
fieldwork * Heloisa gets a daughter
The last time I went back to Yanatoro, a scattering of farmsteads on a steep hillside ab
indigenous community of Zumbagua in highland Ecuador,1 I found that my achi
(godchild) had a new mother. It was May 1993, and Nancy de Rocio was ten years old; sh
been born during the year and a half that I lived in Yanatoro conducting doctoral resea
those days, Heloisa was Nancy's unmarried aunt, her father Alfonso's oldest sister. Dur
previous visit, in 1991, Nancy had been living with Heloisa but called her "tia"(aunt); tw
later, the child was calling her "mama."2
The apparent ease of the transition contrasted vividly with conflicts surrounding unm
women who want children in the United States. Heloisa, a tall, spare 50-year-old who
black clothing, would not find it easy to adopt here. She lives without a husband
windowless room, out of which she runs a small bar selling trago (cane liquor) on mark
During most of the 1980s her closest friend was a locally prominent white woman name
who was rumored to be her lover; the two spent hours sitting together on wooden c
Elena's kitchen, and many nights in Elena's bed. But Elena moved from Zumbagua, leav
friend behind. And so Heloisa brought her small niece Nancy to live with her-and to
her daughter.
The biological definition of family at the root of functionalist kinship theory has
been rightly criticized by contemporary feminist and symbolic anthropologists, but
in retreating into an antinatural position such critiques simply recapitulate the
limitations ofan opposition between nature and culture in which the former is prior
and essential, the latter secondary and historical. From the perspective of Zumbagua,
where people become parents by feeding and caring for children over
extended periods of time, both schools of thought are not only inadequate to
explain fully the material bases of local practice but are representative of a specific
Western-bourgeois ideology that indigenous people actively oppose. [kinship,
adoption, nature/culture, materialism, Ecuador, Andes]
American Ethnologist 22(4):685-709. Copyright ? 1995, American Anthropological Association.
making kin 685
This content downloaded from
147.251.6.77 on Tue, 14 Sep 2021 03:39:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
At our reunion, Nancy, shy at meeting her godmother again after a two-year hiatus, clung to
Heloisa, whispering into her ear everything she wanted to say to me before essaying it aloud. I
had not seen the normally rather brusque Heloisa publicly so affectionate since her own
mother's death some years before, and thought that she was creating in Nancy a passionately
devoted daughter after her own image. Alfonso and Olguita, Nancy's birth parents, were
obviously pleased with the new relationship, which strengthened Alfonso's ties to his rather
intimidating-but financially solvent-oldest sister.
When I returned to Los Angeles, in contrast, I was once again besieged with stories of bitter
conflicts over children. Extensive media coverage had brought to the public eye attempts by
surrogate mothers to retain infants they had borne for the wealthy and barren; by 1993,
journalists began to introduce new characters to personify these debates. One was the lost
father, like Mark King (Los Angeles Times 1993; Perry 1 993a, 1 993b): men portrayed as troubled
souls seeking personal salvation by trying to reclaim long-abandoned children.
Mark King based his case on his rights as a "natural" father; but as another newspaper story
(Harrison 1993) from the same period demonstrates, the source of these rights is not always
self-evident. Tammy Thomas, a young white woman from the South, fled an alcoholic and
abusive husband and started over in Los Angeles. In 1993, however, a Mississippi judge denied
Thomas custody of her two children, returning them to her estranged husband's parents.
"Testimony [in the case] centered mainly on Tammy's interracial relationship with Jake Brown
. .. and on her judgment in allowing her sister, a lesbian, to babysit," reported the Los Angeles
Times (Harrison 1993). Even birth mothers, then, can lose their children by becoming "unnatural"-transgressing
against "natural" categories of sex or race.
Neither "natural" nor "unnatural" parents gain secure victories; indeed, as cases climb up
the appeals ladder, each side may experience temporary wins and losses. In a diverse and
unequal society, it is unsurprising that individuals and communities create families that do not
conform to the hegemonic ideal or that the courtroom serves as a public spectacle in which
such deviant relationships are displayed and dismembered. What commands attention is the
uncertainty of the judiciary about the ideals it should be defending: instead of reinforcing a
familiar moral code, these cases and the media attention they generate exacerbate a national
sense of doubt. In debates about custody, adoption, abortion, and reproductive technologies,
the public searches for a suddenly elusive definition of paternity and maternity.3 America is
experiencing a crisis over consanguinity.4
The contrast between definitions of family in these two sites-Zumbagua and Southern
California-is my focus here. Although the text concerns families in Zumbagua, the context is
my own movement back and forth between these two social fields (Clifford 1986:2). When I
initially agreed to write about adoption in Zumbagua for a conference on Andean kinship, I
thought the results would be rather specialized, of interest only to a handful of scholars and not
of immediate relevance to anyone's life in Zumbagua or the United States. But I found that
differences in thinking about what makes a parent in Zumbagua and Los Angeles touched upon
issues of critical personal and political importance.
The social fabric of Zumbagua is made up of small households based on lifelong heterosexual
marriages, a pattern that superficially resembles the conservative Euro-American ideal embraced
by the Mississippi judge. In fact, however, the bonds people form with one another in
the parish are based on an understanding of relatedness that differs strikingly from Euro-American
principles. Absent from Zumbagua discourse are those anxieties over natural and unnatural
parents that loom so large in the popular imagination of Los Angelenos. This absence separates
the premises underlying Zumbagua kinship, not only from American mass culture, but from
scholarly preoccupations as well.
Anthropological thinking on the topic depends upon assumptions about human nature that
derive from the peculiarities of Euro-American kinship in the 19th and 20th centuries. Growing
686 american ethnologist
This content downloaded from
147.251.6.77 on Tue, 14 Sep 2021 03:39:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
popular doubts about these assumptions have steadily undermined scholarly confidence in the
anthropological ability to speak about families (M. Strathern 1992a, 1992b); yet, by the same
token, the study of kinship itself has taken on a new urgency, propelled by the sense of crisis
in Euro-American society (e.g., Collier and Yanagisako 1987; Glenn 1994; Ragone 1994; Stacey
1990; Yanagisako 1978a, 1978b, 1979).
Atthe same time, insistent questioning about the relationship between metropolitan academia
and the rural periphery where anthropologists have traditionally worked demands new conceptualizations
of why and how a project such as studying kinship in the Andes might be
undertaken. The challenge is to bring these two dilemmas to bear upon one another fruitfully.
As social crises in the West force us to relinquish our claims to a greater truth value for
abstractions derived from Euro-American models, new understandings about cross-cultural
work need to be developed (Marcus and Fischer 1986:vii).
In my own case, studying Andean kinship has become less a matter of the bloodless
documentation of cultural diversity than one of looking to indigenous practice and theory for
answers to questions that cannot be resolved within the terms of the rancorous debates over
parents and families in the United States. In Los Angeles as in Latin America, poor and
marginalized communities have had to create strong, flexible kinship systems in order to
survive. In Zumbagua these aspects of intimate daily life form part of a larger struggle against a
national society seen as acutely hostile to the very survival of the indigenous community. One
of the actions through which Heloisa became Nancy's new mother was to take her along on
the famous 1991 national indigenous march on the capital. When I traveled to Yanatoro in
1993, I found that the local sense of embattlement toward a hostile white society, a perennial
characteristic of parish life, had taken newly concrete forms: the road up to the parish was
blocked by enormous boulders, set in place by local residents against possible invasions by the
Ecuadorian military.
It is not surprising, then, that the kinship practices of the parish seem to an outsider like myself
to be not just different from those of Euro-American culture but to represent an embodied, if
implicit, critique of that culture-perhaps even a site from which alternative understandings of
the relationship between parents and children might be introduced into dominant discourses.
Given the tremendous pressure exerted by Euro-American ideologies upon peripheral societies,
such a critical focus on metropolitan culture from a non-Western perspective does not ignore
the needs of the periphery in order to address those of the center, but rather, as Ahmad has
recently commented in a rather different context, is the necessary starting point for understanding
the "disorientations . . . in our [non-Western] institutions" as well (1992:44). As can
be seen in the ethnographic material presented below, Euro-American preoccupations with
consanguinity are not irrelevant to indigenous residents of Zumbagua but instead represent one
particular aspect of the many ideological pressures to which they must respond.
I look at contemporary Zumbagua kinship, not as a set of facts to be interpreted using "our
own" theories, but rather as a theory and a practice in its own right, which can be contrasted
with a body of theory that emerged from a specific historical moment in Euro-American
capitalist culture. Rather than allowing the latter to stand as "theory" to the other's "data," I
want to substitute a more fluid juxtaposition, in which each reveals the unspoken assumptions
of the other-and thus also the relationship between embedded theory and social practice that
underlies all social life, whether in the decentered metropolis of Los Angeles or the indigenous
periphery of Zumbagua.5
theory * jural fathers, natural mothers: the elementary family
Radcliffe-Brown, a founding father of functionalist kinship studies, saw an unchanging natural
"substratum" beneath the whole edifice of social structure: the elementary family (1 950, 1965).
making kin 687
This content downloaded from
147.251.6.77 on Tue, 14 Sep 2021 03:39:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Its universality was an important tenet in "post-Morgan" refutations of the evolutionists' claim
that the human family had not always been the same (Fortes 1969:65). Meyer Fortes began an
important lecture in honor of Morgan with a rather oblique reminder that the "momentous
importance" of the scientific study of kinship lies in its special insight into the "very springs of
man's social life" (1969:9). The implication was made explicit a few years later, when John
Barnes (1973:63) in turn introduced a tribute to Meyer Fortes with a flat statement that kinship
is the aspect of human culture with the closest links to the natural world. The solemnity of
statements such as these provided Schneider with ample material for parody in his 1984 critique,
in which he suggests that the existence of the natural family was fundamental, not so much for
actual social systems, but to the existence of functionalist anthropology itself.
One result of this implicit dependence on "Blood Being Thicker Than Water" (Schneider
1984:1 65 et passim) is that the institution of adoption has constituted something of a conundrum
for kinship theorists. Adoption was especially troubling for Malinowski, for it undermined his
conviction that in the domain of kinship, above all others, "cultural processes tend to follow
the lead of innate biological drives.... [P]hysiological facts ... lead to purely cultural
institutions" (1930:165-166). Classificatory kin terms conform to this logic, he argued, because
they begin with biological ties and then extend to others according to specific and limited
principles (1957:x); but adoption, in which a consanguineal relationship is wholly fabricated,
seemed so problematic that he was driven to assert that it must be statistically uncommon
(1930:137).
It soon became quite clear, however, that a wide range of forms of adoption existed
throughout the world, and that sometimes, even in European history, it was a very common
practice indeed (e.g., Brady 1976; Cardoso 1984; Carroll 1970; Schildkraut 1973). Anthropologists
wedded to the biological bases of kinship thus had to explain adoption, rather than simply
dismissing it as Malinowski had done. They developed two main theoretical strategies for doing
so. The first and perhaps older of these is what Cardoso (1984:196) has called the theory of
"compensatory kinship": the assumption that, although common worldwide, adoption is found
within any given community only when biological kinship fails (as in the case of infertile parents,
orphaned children, or the lack of a male heir). Keesing, for example, speaks of adoption as
necessitated by "less than ideal circumstances" (1975:12). As a cross-cultural axiom, this too
has been amply disproved, especially with data from Polynesia;6 nor does this contention of
biological necessity fit the Zumbagua case. Heloisa, 50 years old and childless, might seem to
confirm it; but if we expand our acquaintances to include Heloisa's brother Alfonso, who thinks
himself fortunate to have more than one family, a more complicated story emerges.
fieldwork * Alfonso greets his brother
When I left the parish in 1985, Alfonso, his wife, and two young daughters lived in the
household of his father, Juanchu Chaluisa, a strong man in his sixties with an ironic sense of
humor. During my last visit I found that as Juanchu's health had begun to fail, the older man
no longer presided in the main house; he spent most of his time in bed in a smaller building
behind it, where he greeted me, as always, with an admonition to eat-or, more accurately, to
allow myself to be fed. (In early 1994 I received a letter from Nancy informing me of his death.)
In typical Andean ultimogeniture, Alfonso had inherited both the main house and the primary
responsibility to care for Juanchu in his declining years. But although Alfonso's life had become
completely enmeshed with that of Juanchu and his household, he had another family as well.
I had lived amongJuanchu's children7 for more than a year before I even learned of the existence
of these other ties. One day, walking together into town, we were hailed by a young man who
chided both of us for not coming to visit more often. "Don't be a stranger," he admonished us.
"We miss you." And he called me kumari (from Spanish comadre or co-mother), a reference to
688 american ethnologist
This content downloaded from
147.251.6.77 on Tue, 14 Sep 2021 03:39:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
my status as achi mama (Quichua for godmother) to Alfonso's daughter, and an implicit
confirmation of his own membership in Alfonso's family.
As soon as he had gone, I asked Alfonso in astonishment who he was: "Did you say that was
your brother? I've never seen him before." He laughed at me:
Tayta [father] Juanchu is my father, and that is why I live with him in Yanatoro. But before, when I was
little, his sister was my mother; she's the one who lives in Saraujsha. That guy is my Saraujsha brother; I
haven't seen him in a while, though. He's right; we should go visit.
And he chatted happily about what a good family it was, how much I would like them, and
how lucky he was to have them as kin.
As I began to ask more about his life, and later to do genealogies of other relations, the
biological connections I had assumed held together the families I knew unraveled more and
more. Of the five adults I had known as "Tayta Juanchu's children," only one actually believed
him to have been her genitor; at the same time, Juanchu cheerfully enumerated for me at least
a dozen people to whom he had been father for varying periods of time, beyond the four who
were his heirs.8
Every adult seemed to have several kinds of parents and several kinds of children. They
remembered a man who fathered them, but another who "husbanded" their growth; they
remembered a woman who gave birth to them, but others who fed them and taught them to
speak and to know. Most adoptions are Iike Nancy's or Alfonso's, taking place within the family,
rearranging preexistent consanguineal ties and, in the process, bringing kin even closer,
overdetermining relatedness. Nancy is sister to Alfonso's other children but addresses as
"mother" the woman whom they call "aunt." Alfonso is son to Tayta Juanchu but also to
Juanchu's sister; the young man who greeted us on the path is both cousin and brother to
Alfonso. Adoption in Zumbagua, then, is neither rare nor a last resort when biology fails. It is,
instead, an importanttool used by families, households, and individuals to shape social identity:
providing each child not only with immediate care but also with the all-important dense web
of kin needed to survive the vicissitudes of life on the economic periphery (Weismantel 1988).
The second, more sophisticated argument in defense of the primacy of the biological family
contends that, despite enormous cross-cultural variation in how social networks are constructed,
all peoples differentiate between "real" and "fictive" relationships, the former being
based on biology while the latter are "merely" social (e.g., Gellner 1987[1973]; Malinowski
1930, 1957; Scheffler 1991). This idea, which can be found as early as Maine's conceit that
adoption was the first legal fiction (Schneider 1984:1 72), resonates closely with folk beliefs of
Euro-America, although proponents insist on its universality.
In Zumbagua, however, this kind of thinking is clearly associated with a hegemonic Hispanic
culture.9 While living in the parish, I heard the language of "true" kinship not from local residents
but enunciated by an agent of the state employed to help local people-and, in the process, to
change them.
fieldwork * the younger Iza entertains some gringos
Yanagisako (1979:167) has observed that analysts' failure to distinguish between biological
and social reproduction has blinded them to the many tactics by which people exercise control
over household size and composition, one of which is adoption. Certainly rich Zumbagua
families, like the Izas of Cocha Uma, would agree with her. In a society where "orphan" is
synonymous with "poor," a defining characteristic of wealth and success is the ability to fill the
house with children. Families like the Izas are big families, strategically assembled from a
widespread web of close and distant kin through a variety of economic and social tactics.
making kin 689
This content downloaded from
147.251.6.77 on Tue, 14 Sep 2021 03:39:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The source of the Izas' prosperity is one man, Segundo Iza. He is widely considered to be
the greatest living yumbo (shaman) outside of Santo Domingo de los Colorados; even wealthy
whites from the coast seek him out, and his prices are exorbitant. Alfonso's landless brother-inlaw,
Jose Manuel, loves to talk about Segundo Iza; Iza is so rich, according to Jose Manuel, that
he has a car and a pickup truck-unimaginable wealth in a community where few can afford
so much as a bicycle.
Yumbo Iza may or may not have bought two vehicles, but he has certainly accumulated
human capital: in the baptismal registry in the parish church, every entry from Cocha Uma
listed him as godfather. And, like other wealthy and influential families, the Izas did not limit
themselves to compadrazgo (fictive kinship) as a means of acquiring kin; other children, and
their families, are bound to them through adoption.
It was Padre Toni who took me to meet the famous Iza. When we arrived at his house one
morning in 1986, there was no sign of any cars or trucks or of the shaman himself. We were
welcomed into the kitchen by a man in his thirties who Toni said was Segundo's son; we found
him talking politely to another visitor who had arrived before us. She was a nurse from the clinic
who had stopped there on her rounds, a young woman from Quito assigned to the parish for a
year of "rural service" required by the government of all health professionals. Utterly out of
place in the indigenous culture of the parish, she apparently thought of the Izas as one of a few
families "civilized" enough to merit a purely social call; but she seemed to be finding small talk
difficult. Young Iza was clearly bored, and was glad to see Toni, with whom he shared a passion
for religious arcana.
But it was only when a sleepy little boy entered the kitchen from his nearby bed that the
young Iza really came alive. The man served the child hot soup, and sat back beaming, happily
watching him empty the bowl. "He was an orphan, a poor boy, so I brought him here to live
with me as my son," he explained. "Where he was living there wasn't enough to eat."
The nurse was horrified; she gestured to him frantically to lower his voice. "Don't talk like
that in front of the boy," she whispered. "He's very young; maybe, if he's lucky, he'll forget
about his own parents and grow up believing you're his real father." Iza, puzzled and offended,
responded by raising his voice instead of lowering it. "I am going to be his father," he said
irritably. "Aren't I feeding him right now?"
The nurse's urgent need to hide the fact of adoption is based upon the assumption that in the
absence of a "blood" tie the relationship between man and child is fundamentally a pretense.
The family as she envisions it is both biological and social in origin. If biological reproduction
takes place outside of the social bond of marriage, an illegitimate child is the result: a "natural"
son. But with Iza's attempt to establish a bond with a child whose mother he did not impregnate,
it is the parent who becomes illegitimate: in the nurse's eyes, Iza could never be the "real" father
of this child.
The nurse uses a language of biological "truth" common in speech about family in the
Euro-American world, where the use of consanguineal terms to talk about adoption is understood
as a fiction. Scheffler (1991:368-369) insists that this kind of usage is not confined to
Western systems: although many languages use the same polysemous term to refer both to
biological and nonbiological relationships, he holds that the biological referent is inevitably
"the structurally primary or logically most basic sense" of the term (1991:369).
But neither young Iza nor the nurse would agree. From an indigenous perspective, insistence
on the primacy of biological kinship is one of a large set of beliefs and practices that
governmental and religious workers attempt to impose upon local people. The bourgeoisie find
fault with indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian cultural traditions for failing to delimit the nuclear
family, a failing they characterize as an impediment to development and an indication of a
fundamental incompatibility with modernity.10
690 american ethnologist
This content downloaded from
147.251.6.77 on Tue, 14 Sep 2021 03:39:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
In Zumbagua there is absolutely no privileging of the relationship a child has with the genitor
or genitrix over others who are called parents. Often, in fact, the reverse is the case-as it is
with Alfonso, who clearly places much more importance on his relationship with Tayta Juanchu
and his adopted siblings than on his "Saraujsha family." Zumbagua customs, then, pose a
challenge to Malinowskian assertions of the primacy of nature within the kinship domain, and
suggest that those critics who find Eurocentric ideas at the base of these theories are correct
(e.g., MacCormack 1980; Schneider 1984; M. Strathern 1980, 1992a).
It may be a mistake, however, to overemphasize the importance of natural kin ties in
functionalist thought; unlike Malinowski, his peers argued that because of its ahistorical,
essential nature, the elementary family should be unimportant to anthropologists. What
mattered was the social edifice erected upon this natural base, Meyer Fortes's "jural dimension"
(1969). This distinction and its philosophical roots have been much critiqued, most completely
by feminist writers discussing its gendered dimensions (e.g., Harris 1981; Yanagisako 1979). In
a related discussion, economic anthropologists have caricatured the notion of the household
as a "black box" removed from study (Wilk 1989).
Of specific interest here are the implications of this distinction for a specific theory of
procreation associated with functionalist thought, succinctly summarized in John Barnes's
(1973) famous "genitrix : genitor :: nature: culture" formulation. Keesing elaborates:
Humans everywhere observe the same processes of sex and reproduction. A female has sexual intercourse.
. . . Once she is pregnant, it is ultimately obvious that she is, and that the infant is connected to
her by the most physical of bonds-by the umbilical cord, by childbirth, by the milk of her breasts. But
the connection of the one or several men who had intercourse with the mother ... to the process of
pregnancy and childbirth is far from obvious ... [creating] a gulf between "social" and "physical" kinship,
or between pater (the legitimate social father) and genitor (the presumed physical begetter of the child).
[1975:11-12]
Writers who discuss the distinction between pater and genitor are with few exceptions quite
explicit that no feminine version exists. Like Keesing, most insist upon the self-evident character
of maternity (an exception is Gellner [1987(1973):191], who mentions cases from European
history in which women pretended to be pregnant or to give birth). It is at this level that the
essentialist argument is most clear: while their respective reproductive roles free men (but not
women) to transcend biology, this difference nevertheless originates within biology, not culture.
Whatever edifice of social kinship may be erected upon it is therefore universal and
inescapable.1'
But the Zumbagua kinship system does not discriminate between mother and father in this
way. Birth mothers are free to give up their children if they do not wish to raise them, as are the
genitors; it is also possible to establish a more limited relationship with a child one wishes
neither to abandon nor to parent. By the same token, the choice not to raise children engendered
early in life does not limit one's ability to become a parent in later years for either women or
men. Other limitations do of course exist: the wealthy acquire children while the impoverished
lose theirs, and older, established couples have a more secure claim on children than do the
young. But gender is not a factor in these matters.
In this sense, Heloisa strikingly exemplifies the possibilities inherent in the system. Somewhat
well-off by parish standards, she is nevertheless a poor woman in a peripheral rural area within
Catholic Latin America; she thus lacks the elite power so often found in women who assume
masculine prerogatives (e.g., Amadiume 1987). Yet she seems to have given up little or nothing
in exchange for avoiding marriage and physiological motherhood, and in fact she has gained
a great deal: she has a business, a child, and is sexually active. Heloisa's life, which seems to
have as its dominant theme the exertion of a powerful volition over all matters including
reproductive issues, poses a challenge to Keesing's and Barnes's representation of the biological
female as helpless to avoid her physiological fate, while the biological male exerts an active,
imaginative will over his.
making kin 691
This content downloaded from
147.251.6.77 on Tue, 14 Sep 2021 03:39:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Many readers are by now convinced that only simple contrariness could explain this
unnecessary search through the landscape of elementary families and natural mothers. The
criticisms I have offered are hardly new: they were first made in another and for the most part
more recent body of writings about kinship (as I will discuss below). This second body of work,
many contemporary anthropologists would argue, has clearly superseded theory based upon
the natural family. Originating in symbolic anthropology, this approach to kinship and gender
has long established that the "natural" aspects of reproduction should not be seen as immutable
facts with universal power over female destiny, but as a rich body of metaphor and meaning
from which humans construct their systems of signification, free of any constraints beyond those
of their imagination. And, indeed, this second school of thought offers a much better approximation
of Zumbagua lives, in which both women and men use their social resources to reshape
the opportunities provided by biology. A closer examination of Zumbagua thinking on the
subject, however, reveals that symbolic approaches, too, contain limitations that prevent them
from fully expressing parish concerns.
theory * mythic fathers, unnatural mothers: kinship as metaphor
Many of the best and most powerful analyses of kinship in contemporary anthropology stem
from the work of Claude Levi-Strauss (1969:29, 31, 479, 480, 489, et passim) and David
Schneider (1984:172). But while the latter is perhaps best-known for his trenchant criticism of
the elementary family, the former is not. Indeed, the pervasiveness of the idea of the natural
family, its ability to prevail even within theoretical approaches at which it would seem wholly
at odds, is perhaps nowhere more striking than in the writings of Levi-Strauss. While he brought
to anthropology as a whole, and to kinship theory in particular, a sustained critique of the
unexamined naturalistic assumptions of previous scholars, the opposition between descent and
marriage in his own Elementary Forms of Kinship (1969) nevertheless rests upon a more
explicitly biologistic conceptualization than that of Radcliffe-Brown (1965) himself.12
It was Simone de Beauvoir's reading of Levi-Strauss that inspired Sherry Ortner's famous
assent to the question, "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?" (1974)-a logical proposition
that Ortner found to be the universal root metaphor for an equally universal patriarchy.
Recognizing the many excellent critiques of ethnocentric and essentialist premises hidden in
Ortner's work, some authors accept her mechanistic formulation of Levi-Straussian structuralism,
which overlooks the complexity and dialectical quality of his arguments.13 The best known
of these critiques, however, that of MacCormack and Strathern (1980), reveals the potential of
structuralist methodology as a tool for feminist analysis once it is rescued from the universalism
and biologism that mars Elementary Structures of Kinship.
The "antikinship" school of thought associated with David Schneider (1964, 1984) shares
with these authors a contention that specific symbolic orders, not universal biological facts,
shape human relations (see also Beattie 1964). Two aspects of Schneider's critique are of
particular interest here: first, his dissection of the Eurocentric bias of kinship theories (1984:1 74-
175, 193-194); and second, his desire to decenter sexual reproduction and the notion of kinship
itself as an autonomous sphere within culture (1984:165-1 77, 187-201).
Schneider interprets the supposed universal primacy of blood and birth in kin systems as a
fiction created by anthropologists unable to shed Euro-American folk conceptions. By incidentally
exposing the inherent mascu linist bias of these theories as well, Schneider endeared himself
to a later generation of feminists trying to establish new foundations for the study of kinship
(e.g., Collier and Yanagisako 1987:40; Delaney 1986:495). In Zumbagua the conversation
between the nurse and young Iza in Cocha Uma seemed to support this critique, since the idea
of blood ties was indeed rejected by an indigenous resident as the preoccupation of westernized
outsiders. Marilyn Strathern (1992a) contends that these preoccupations are not part of an
692 american ethnologist
This content downloaded from
147.251.6.77 on Tue, 14 Sep 2021 03:39:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
unchanging European or Western cultural tradition but are a specific historical phenomenon
characteristic of the late 19th to mid-20th centuries in Europe and America. Similarly, Zumbaguans
characterize white preoccupations with consanguinity as being symptomatic of a
particular kind of modernization effort to which local people are resistant.
To Schneider, sex and birth are significant only when they are used to furnish metaphors of
social relatedness; any other aspect of perceived reality might serve as well. The Izas and
Chaluizas-who make no discrimination between children born to women of the family and
those born elsewhere and incorporated into the family at a later date-would seem to be in
agreement. And Schneider's argument is close to my own assertion that "[i]n Zumbagua, the
hearth .. . supplants the marriage bed as the symbol of conjugal living and the bond of blood
as the emblem of parenthood: the Zumbagua family consists of those who eat together"
(Weismantel 1988:169; for similar arguments from elsewhere see Clark 1989; A. Strathern
1973).
An anthropology that succeeds in ridding itself of Eurocentric notions about the family, then,
as Schneider has attempted to do, leads to a better understanding of Zumbagua kin. The people
of the parish, however, like many poor people, are relentless materialists in their thinking about
important issues, including maternity and paternity. The idealist emphasis that remains at the
root of symbolic and structuralist theories is at odds with this materialism, and ultimately limits
their utility for thinking about social life in Zumbagua.
fieldwork * young Iza feeds the boy
For Scheffler, biology is primary; for Schneider, metaphor.14 For if Zumbagua notions of
parenthood are not derived exclusively from sexual reproduction, neither do they rest upon
purely social or symbolic understandings.
Schneider accuses kinship theorists of ethnocentrism, but his own concept of relationships
as established through symbolic words and acts may similarly find its origins in his cultural
background, with its logocentric emphasis and hierarchical political structure. At the core of
those sensational fights between biological and adoptive parents in the United States is the
courtroom drama: adults and children enter a room in which their fates will be decided in a
single pronouncement by a powerful agent of the state: a judge (and, in rare cases, a jury). Once
judgment has been passed, it becomes fact: all the toys and stuffed animals the would-be parents
bought, the name they chose, the time they may have spent with the child, mean nothing.15
Only the final statement matters, and only another judge's word, in another courtroom, could
overturn its power to determine whose relationships are real and whose mere pretense.
This jural approach to determining kinship seems to have colored the thinking of anthropologists,
who oppose to the biological dimension of kinship a single, conflated social/jural
dimension, as in the following definitions:
In discussing paternity ... one must distinguish between the role of genitor... and the role of pater.... A
pater is an individual who is granted jural rights over offspring ... The practice of adoption ... transfers
jural authority from one man to another. [Paige and Paige 1981:168, 1 721
Although anthropologists intend the word jural to have a far larger meaning than that implied
by the courtroom, the legalistic emphasis on rights and duties conferred through an external
authority and the logocentric emphasis upon verbal transactions remain strong in these
definitions.
In the parish, authority is diffuse: paternity is determined by all those directly concerned, and
then confirmed-or contested-through public discourse throughout the community; no single
arbiter representing an abstract political authority can grant it or take it away. By the same token,
the standard for judgment is different. In Zumbagua terms, our form of determining paternity
making kin 693
This content downloaded from
147.251.6.77 on Tue, 14 Sep 2021 03:39:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
misses a crucial dimension of materiality that people in the parish seek in judging whether
relationships exist: when looking to find parents and children, words are only a small part of
the accumulated evidence.
When Iza rejected the nurse's contention that he was not the boy's "real" father, he did not
do so on symbolic or jural grounds. He did not contend that he had become the boy's father
by undergoing a ceremony, pronouncing certain words, signing a document, or making a ritual
prestation of gifts to the child's previous family. In fact, he did not claim that he was the boy's
father at all-only that he wanted to be. But through his actions he expressed that intention
clearly.
In the parish, any act involving food performed in the presence of others expresses important
social facts. Young Iza's bowl of soup was no exception. When he fed the little boy soup out
of the same pot from which he himself had eaten, the yumbo's son demonstrated to us, before
he even spoke, his intention of creating a relationship between himself and the child. His actions
were deliberately overemphasized, but they were not atypical of Zumbagua men who thus
break gender rules to establish their social identity as fathers. While the burden of daily cooking
and feeding falls on women, men do take bowls of food and feed their children by hand in small
rituals of intimacy. Those who witness these acts then affirm the relationship in words: "Look
at him feeding his child," they say, or, teasing, "Look at the good father." It was this kind of
acknowledgment young Iza sought from us and did not receive. His irritation stemmed partly
from the nurse's attempt to impose her own values on him but more profoundly from the fact
that none of us, even Padre Toni (who had lived in the parish for years), fully understood his
act.
This particular act of feeding is clearly a ritual, a symbol through which the tie between man
and boy is established-especially since it is women, not men, who feed children and their
fathers on a daily basis. Indeed, just as Schneider said would happen once ethnocentric
assumptions were abandoned, we have simply found that a different aspect of biology-eating
rather than sex-provides key metaphors in the Andes.
But the act of feeding is not a disembodied ritual. If it were, a single mouthful of soup,
symbolizing the parent-child bond, might be sufficient to make strangers kin. In fact, however,
young Iza did not hope to do more than express an intent to become a father through his action;
a single meal was insufficient means to effect the transformation immediately. In the parish, the
relationship between parent and child has more than social and spiritual dimensions: the bond
is material in nature, created through corporeal means. For Iza, I ike those Euro-Americans who
define paternity as a biological link created by the transmission of sperm, fatherhood is the
establishment of a concrete and irreversible link between two human bodies.
It is this material link between himself and the boy that Iza wished to create. In so doing, he
would not merely become the boy's fictive kinsman, living a pretense that could one day be
thrust aside in the face of "real" ties. Instead, their relationship would be at once physiological
(a link between bodies, experienced as one of shared substance) and ideal (a Iink between social
identities, experienced as a shared fate in life). But although this relationship resembles paternity
in the Euro-American sense because of its basis in a fundamental physical reality, the nature of
the corporeal bond is not the same. Far from being prior to or transcending specific social
relations, it is deeply embedded within them.
In Zumbagua eyes, engendering a child is only one component in the lengthy process of
physical and social reproduction, and not necessarily the most important. Andean beliefs and
practices about illness, death, and healing reveal an underlying conception of the human body
as a material object built up over time through various substances and acts: ingesting food and
drink, sharing emotional states with individuals or spirits, being in close physical proximity to
people or objects. Bonds between people are created in the same way-gradually (Bolton 1977;
694 american ethnologist
This content downloaded from
147.251.6.77 on Tue, 14 Sep 2021 03:39:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Carter 1977). The two processes are interrelated: the bodies of individuals are linked through
shared substance to the bodies of family members (Allen 1978, 1988).
The physical acts of intercourse, pregnancy, and birth can establish a strong bond between
two adults and a child. But other adults, by taking a child into their family and nurturing its
physical needs through the same substances as those eaten by the rest of the social group, can
make of that child a son or a daughter who is physically as well as jurally their own.
Especially critical in this process is the sharing of meals. Flesh is made from food, and
especially from different grains and tubers, each of which has its own characteristic effect on
the human body. Eating cooked grains raised by a household on its own land and harvested
and processed through family labor results in a body and a self that have been shaped by work
and skill invested in the farm. When men bring home foods bought with wages, these foods
change the bodies of family members too (Weismantel 1988, 1989b). Those who eat together
in the same household share the same flesh in a quite literal sense: they are made of the same
stuff. It is when young Iza's boy has eaten so many meals with the family that his whole body
is made of the same flesh as theirs that the bond will be unquestioned and real to the boy and
his family.
This process is inherently physical, and yet it is not exclusively so. It is also social, symbolic,
and linguistic: the words people use to talk to and about one another are part of the accumulated
history through which relationships are established. But life in the parish makes it difficult not
to experience these, too, as material in nature. The Izas will make this boy theirs by talking to
him, sleeping near him, feeding and clothing him, and nursing his injuries. Eventually, he will
look like them, smell like them, laugh and gesture like them: when people look at him, they
will see an Iza. They will talk about him as an Iza to others, and it is at that moment that the
relationship will have become real in a public and social sense.
This recognition will free up the language used by the shaman's son, which was so carefully
provisional when we talked to him. Once securely the boy's father, young Iza will no longer
need to express his relationship in a language of future tenses, of intentionality, of not yet
accomplished desires, as he did in the conversation recorded above. He can use instead the
Quichua present tense that asserts a still-relevant past, an ongoing movement from what was
into actuality. One cannot, in reality, be a father in the parish without already having been one
for quite some time.
From the perspective of the parish, parenthood is restricted neither to a biological determination
rooted in insemination nor to a jural or symbolic definition based on metaphor. It is a
multidimensional and overdetermined category. In standard anthropological practice, these
multiple dimensions represent a challenge: they must be dissected to reveal one of two kinds
of truth. Either humans are constrained by the facts of nature, or they can transcend them; either
biology matters, or it does not. My disagreement with both extremes lies in their insistence that
a "case" like that of Zumbagua can only be read in this restricted fashion. The opinions of people
in the parish should not be interpreted by theorists simply as support for their own positions;
these opinions should be used to challenge the very terms on which academic debate is
conducted.
The fact that people in an Ecuadorian parish, or anywhere else, do not "acknowledge"
biological kinship has often been treated as a conundrum: why do they not "know" the "truth"?16
But however perplexing it may be that in society after society informants have insisted upon
propounding theories of reproduction that are not in accordance with what theorists held to be
immutable facts, this has not discouraged the latter from insisting that their own models do
nevertheless represent the inescapable reality of human existence (Delaney 1986). Gellner, for
example, urged his colleagues, whom he saw as confused by a misguided relativism, to "retain
a firm grip on the fact that" one cannot give an account of a society except by situating "its
making kin 695
This content downloaded from
147.251.6.77 on Tue, 14 Sep 2021 03:39:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
activities in and against the background of natural fact ... a physical-biological reality seen
through Western eyes" (1987[1973]:200).
Symbolic anthropologists critical of positions such as Gellner's are nevertheless equally
convinced that the words of informants cannot change the analyst's commonsense knowledge
about the world. The fact that non-European or nonbourgeois groups might insist upon a
material basis for the ties that link them to others is merely more data about other ideational
systems. Metaphorical by definition, informants' words are simply evidence to be used in the
analysis of yet another symbolic system. Only the writings of another scholar, offering another
interpretation of the same information, can challenge basic premises.
It is obviously possible to talk about Andean culture using the concepts of Western philosophy.
Andean people, too, sometimes think in terms of differences between natural and cultural
states of being. Processes of transition such as those of birth or adoption evoke oppositions
between a nonhuman wilderness and a socialized humanity (see Allen 1978, 1988; Harris 1978;
Isbell 1978; Weismantel 1988, 1989a). Olivia Harris, however, warns that "the resonances
attached to these English terms are not applicable to Andean representations"; to use them
precludes an understanding of what people are actually saying (1980:71). To reduce Andean
social practice and ideology to these terms involves a kind of flattening of meaning, a distortion
great enough to make unlike things sound alike. Young Iza is not speaking the same language
as either Schneider or Scheffler, and what he has to say cannot be fully expressed within their
discursive realm.
The lack of fit between Zumbaguan and anthropological conceptions of social life is not
accidental. It is not only that the roots of parish kinship systems lie in the non-Western world
of lo andino (indigenous Andean cu ture); in the intervening centuries, the people ofZumbagua,
forcibly brought up to the cold paramos (high-altitude grasslands) to work as unfree laborers,17
struggled to survive within one of the more destructive institutions of colonial capitalism. The
events that brought them political freedom in 1965 are indelibly marked in parish consciousness,
but so too is the recognition that the decades since then have brought new and in some
ways more devastating forms of economic exploitation, heightening the need to develop a social
system that can protect parish residents against the depredations of capital.
In contrast, much 20th-century kinship theory was formulated within societies fighting against
the perceived threat of historical materialism.18 Our debates have been limited to the opposition
between nature and law, not just because our position as the inheritors of the European tradition
condemns usto think in these essential and timeless categories, but also because of quite specific
historical circumstances. Structural-functionalist kinship theory originates in a sanitized Morgan,
stripped of those concerns with the material bases of human history that have made his
work so central to Marxist scholarship. The static and ahistorical character for which structuralfunctionalism
has so often been criticized (Fabian 1983) is not unrelated to its obsessive
reworking of the dichotomy of nature and culture: the debate was phrased in these terms largely
in exclusion of other notions similarly derived from the European Enlightenment but embodied
in the work of Marx and Engels-concepts of history and temporality, and of materiality and
production. And yet it is precisely these terms, time and work, upon which Zumbagua thinking
about relationships depends.
theory * real fathers, working mothers: conclusions
Implied in the Quichua words tayta (father), mama (mother), and taytamama (parents) is a
relationship that is both achieved and ongoing. These words hold great temporal significance
because they speak of future inheritance, but also because they take their meaning from the
present and the past.
696 american ethnologist
This content downloaded from
147.251.6.77 on Tue, 14 Sep 2021 03:39:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
To feed a boy for a day does not make one a legitimate father, nor does impregnating a woman
in a single night: not enough time and effort has been invested. It is when a man lives with a
woman throughout her pregnancy and birth, having sex with her repeatedly as the child grows
in her womb, feeding and caring for her and, later, for the newborn child, that he begins to be
a father to the child he has engendered; it is when a woman has not only suffered through the
labor of birth itself, but has also struggled to meet the incessant demands of growing children,
and begun to produce recognizably socialized offspring who speak and understand, that people
begin to address her with the honorific "Mama." If either conception or birth marks the end of
their involvement with the infant, as happens not infrequently, these people cannot later in life
make more than the most partial claims upon parenthood. The link between the material body
and social identity is not given and immutable from the moment of conception but is gradually
and laboriously produced. Evidence of this steady, constant investment of labor by an adult in
the life of a child, is the only real criterion for parenthood.
This emphasis upon the investment of time is one of the fundamental differences between
Zumbagua kinship theory and conventional western kinship analysis, where temporality is
suppressed. In Euro-American thought, natural or biological parenthood occurs only at a single,
specific moment-at the very inception of the relationship between parent and child; everything
that happens afterward works only to establish metaphorical, cultural, jural, or symbolic
relations. Biology-the only kind of materiality to be considered-is thus strictly ahistorical.
In its insistence upon a strictly genetic notion of physical relatedness, the Euro-American
model, unlike that of Zumbagua, denies the impact of history on the physical self, the regimens
of diet and exercise, and the stress and pathology through which societies produce specific
human bodies at specific points in time. The origins of this model derive from particular class
and gender perspectives. Conservative sexual politics embedded in both functionalist and
structuralist kinship studies have been well documented (Amadiume 1987; Sacks 1979); but
one aspect of this masculinist heritage that has remained largely unexamined is the emphasis
upon sexual intercourse as the single moment in which paternity becomes embodied. The
authors of classical kinship thereby universalized a heterosexual masculine perspective, derived
from traditional bourgeois life, in which men defined their role in the family primarily in terms
of sexual access to the wife and a distanced authority over the children. Extended nonsexual
physical contact, especially with children or in the provision of labor, service, or nurturance
for other family members, was defined as feminine and demeaning, lacking larger social import.
Butthis form of masculinity, in which physical and emotional contact are exclusively channeled
into sexual intercourse, and in which men take an active role as authority figures but are passive
recipients of emotional and physical nurturance, is alien to Andean experience, known only
through the gendered actions of outsiders. Theories of hierarchical opposition between cultural
and natural, mental and physical, masculine and feminine are similarly foreign.
The emphasis in kinship studies on a single opposition of nature and culture and on its
expression in a temporal structure in which the former is prior and essential and the latter
secondary and historical has limited our understanding of real kin relations by restricting the
terms of the debate. These definitions have been rightly characterized by contemporary critics
as implicitly patriarchal. As Haraway (1983:125) and Scheffler (1991) have pointed out,
however, such critiques too often end by retreating into an antinatural position, thus recapitulating
the split between nature and culture instead of embarking upon a reformulation of the
debate itself. A historically informed notion of materiality should be interposed between these
two artificially opposed terms.
Zumbagua ideas about parenthood are evenhanded in their treatment of women and men,
paternity and maternity. Economic circumstances permitting, women and men alike experience
a variety of forms of parenting. Women like Heloisa Huanotunu are not denied the pleasures
of motherhood by their inability to become pregnant or give birth, nor are other women, like
making kin 697
This content downloaded from
147.251.6.77 on Tue, 14 Sep 2021 03:39:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Nancy's birth mother Olguita, restricted to a lesser sphere of life because of their ability to do
so. Being a parent is not only possible, it is positively valued as a contribution to the public
good, rather than being viewed solely as a means of personal fulfillment. Men like young Iza
not only are able to feed a little boy and so make him their own; men and women mustbecome
parents if they hope to enjoy the full rights and privileges of social adulthood entailed in the
words Tayta and Mama. For women and men alike, involvement with social reproduction
through parenting enhances rather than diminishes opportunities for success in other spheres.
Zumbagua kinship relations are by no means Edenic, however. Adoption patterns are shaped
by the inequalities of generation and class that permeate parish social life. Young women and
men often must relinquish control of the children they engender to older, more established
couples; unmarried women, in particular, lose children to their own postmenopausal mothers.
And while adults with some economic resources gradually establish households that can
support dependents, and so are able to keep or acquire children, poor couples often give up
their children to wealthier relatives-a decision that many find agonizingly difficult.
My purpose, then, is not to idealize Andean society in its entirety, although I admire many
aspects of Zumbagua culture,19 but to suggest that close attention to the social theories
embedded in these reproductive strategies can provoke new thinking about conundrums that
have bedeviled the study of kinship. Zumbagua ideas about kinship stress the importance of
physical relationships between parents and children as these are expressed over time through
socially meaningful labor, without making any demeaning associations between the physical
body and femininity. This suggests that women's search for equality need not entail a retreat
into disembodied definitions of ourselves or of the relationships between parent and child. It is
the very physicality, the materiality, and the enduring character of these links, as well as their
symbolic import, that have made them so important to human life not only in the Andes but
throughout Europe and the Americas as well. Neither Schneider's skepticism about the universal
importance of physical reproduction and the bonds it creates between human beings nor the
claim that new technological innovations could render the creation of interdependent and
intimate relations between adults and children unimportant will lead to scholarship that can
contribute to the creation of more just societies. Indeed, the opposite is true. The developments
of late capitalism continue to erode the fabric of family, friendship, and community in both Los
Angeles and Zumbagua, even as accelerating economic linkages bring the places themselves
closer together. In this climate, in which the very ability to establish human ties seems to be
under attack, neither the strictures of biological determinism nor those of a disembodied and
hierarchical logocentrism seem desirable as starting points for an understanding of human
relationships.
notes
Acknowledgments. This article originated in a paper prepared for the 1993 International Conferenc
Kinship and Gender in the Andes, St. Andrews, Scotland. In addition to Denise Arnold and the
organizers, I wish to thank Sally Ness and Jay O'Brien, two Southern California scholars who were
enough to read and comment on earlier drafts of the article, and Stephen Eisenman, as always my
incisive critic. I would also like to thank Sarah Franklin, Michael Herzfeld, Ben Orlove, Elizabeth Chi
two anonymous reviewers for their extensive comments on the paper originally submitted to AE. I am
able to respond to their all-too-perceptive and important criticisms in the most cursory fashion here
hope to incorporate their insights into later work.
1. Zumbagua (Cotopaxi Province, Canton Pujili) is the name of both a rural parish and the town ce
of that parish. The word Zumbagua has also become something of a regional denomination for a larg
of western paramos in central Ecuador, inhabited by tens of thousands of indigenous Quichua-speak
people. The parish is located on the western edge of the Cordillera Occidental at approximately 1 ? S,
altitudes ranging from 3,200 to more than 4,000 meters above sea level (well above the upper lim
maize and vegetable cultivation at that latitude). Most of the more than 20,000 residents live in
dwellings scattered over some ten thousand hectares of parish land. A state-owned hacienda until the 1 96
the local economy today is based primarily on the cultivation of barley, fava beans, potatoes, and o
698 american ethnologist
This content downloaded from
147.251.6.77 on Tue, 14 Sep 2021 03:39:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
on small family farms on the lower slopes, together with sheep and llama pastoralism in the high paramos;
each of these zones comprises roughly half of the total area of the parish, with settlement concentrated in
the lower elevations. Households combine this largely subsistence agriculture with a variety of wage-earning
activities, the most significant of which in recent years has been male temporary migration to the capital
city of Quito; the strategy of sending a young family to live on the outskirts of the capital to provide a base
for other family members is becoming more common in the 1990s. Other, older strategies include wage
labor on small agricultural enterprises on the western slopes and involvement in the transportation of
contraband liquor. The area is characterized by extreme poverty relative toother highland populations, and
by the existence of a strong local indigenous culture shared with most inhabitants of the neighboring
parishes; this is recognizable in the use of a local dialect of Quichua, a characteristic clothing style including
distinctive handwoven striped ponchos, and, in the 1980s, an elaborated fiesta cycle (suffering some decline
in the early 1 990s).
2. In response to an astute observation by Elizabeth Chin about the agency of children, I want to
emphasize that Nancy was a-perhaps the-key actor in making Heloisa a mother. The same is true of other
cases, such as when Nancy's older sister Blanca remained with her birth mother rather than going to live
with her maternal grandparents: the volition of the child is a critical factor. The question of children's rights
in family decision making is more complicated in the matter of sibling opinions about adoptions.
3. Neither of the twin poles of "substance" and "code for conduct" that Schneider (1968) found to define
white middle-class American notions of kinship in the early 1960s seems to have declined in importance;
rather, each provides rallying points in the intensifying battles to define the family. At one extreme, Modell
(1 986) documents the vivid rhetoric of nature, blood, and biology used by a group of birth parents searching
for children relinquished to adoption; in contrast, Weston (1991) documents the effort by gay and lesbian
parents to claim legitimacy in very traditional terms for the unbiological families they have created. Often,
actors involved in specific kinds of innovative kinship practices cull imagery from both "the order of nature"
and the "order of law" (Schneider 1 968:26-27). Ragone, for example, in her study of surrogate motherhood,
found that the agencies that provide this service appeal to the strength of the blood tie and the sanctity of
the birth relationship on the one hand, and the unquestionable legitimacy of the nonbirth mother on the
other, in their efforts to define surrogate motherhood as "less a departure from than as a reaffirmation of the
importance of the family, parenthood, and biogenetic relatedness" (1994:2).
4. Court cases, public debate, and newspaper coverage provide only a limited and distorted view of
actual American family practices; both individual families and particular ethnic communities, regions,
religious groups, and social classes handle questions of relatedness in distinctive ways. Practices such as
African American informal adoption within the kin network (Taylor et al. 1990:1002) and Chicana
"nonexclusive mothering" (Segura and Pierce 1993) are cases in point. But the power of the courts to separate
parents and children forcibly-however these categories are defined-reminds us of the penalties that can
be inflicted on those who fail to conform to dominant ideologies of the family. Even when there is no official
intervention, the public pathologizing of alternative kinship strategies within national discourse is painfully
felt by those who practice them, as African American, Latino, and white working-class authors have
documented.
At the same time, however, one does not wish to downplay the ability of those excluded from the dominant
culture to resist its definitions. Martin (1 987) found in her study of Baltimore women's experiences of giving
birth that, while black and/or working-class women were subjected to greater abuses at the hands of hospital
personnel, they were also, to some degree, more consciously critical of misogynist medical beliefs and
practices than were better-educated and more privileged women. Stacey (1990) has argued that workingclass
families are more postmodern than their bourgeois counterparts, despite sometimes appearing to
embrace traditional, even patriarchal, ideologies of the family.
5. This article is part of a larger project in which I present more extensive ethnographic and theoretical
material. Here I concentrate on Zumbagua adoptions from the point of view of those who adopt, especially
those who do not or cannot give birth: two men and an unmarried woman. In another paper I shift focus to
the perspective of birth mothers who give up-or refuse to give up-their children. This allows me to talk
about the most common form of adoption in the parish in which the infants of unmarried girls are raised by
the girls' own mothers; it also permits more discussion of inherent conflicts. In the second paper I draw
more extensively on Marxist anthropology and Marxist feminism. As I suggest toward the end of this article,
Marxist theoretical conceptions provide a better starting point for the analysis of Zumbagua materials than
do those of liberal anthropology; but the debate over how to include reproduction in the concept of the
mode of production, while providing some fruitful directions, presents its own set of problems and
inadequacies.
6. Two important volumes on adoption in Oceania are Carroll 1970 and Brady 1976. Howard and
Borofsky summarize the Polynesian data on adoption as follows:
Both the form and the high frequency of adoption in Polynesia are remarkable, at least in comparison
with Western norms. In the United States adoption is numerically insignificant, involving less than 3
percent of all children (United States Children's Bureau Division of Research 1964). Typical rates in
Polynesia range from one-fourth to nearly the total population. For example, on Rangiroa atoll in the
Tuamotus, Ottino (1970) reports that 35 percent of the households had adopted children resident within
them and 73 percent of the households had been involved in an adoption transaction. Brady (1976b)
reports that 30 percent of the households on Funafuti contain adopted children, and estimates rates of 50
to 70 percent on other islands in the El I ice group .... [O]n Nukuroor... Carroll (1970) was able to locate
making kin 699
This content downloaded from
147.251.6.77 on Tue, 14 Sep 2021 03:39:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
only two married adults, representing just 2 percent of the resident population, who had no experience
with adoptive parenthood.... Howard et al. (1970) found this to be the case in 28 percent of
Hawaiian-American households studied. [1989:75]
7. The phrase "Juanchu's children" may inadvertently create the image of the patriarchal family as a
Zumbagua norm; but the Chaluizas were the exception in this regard. The long illness and early death of
Juanchu's wife had left the family without the matriarch who should have presided atJuanchu's side. It was
an absence he felt keenly.
8. For a fuller description of TaytaJuanchu's family, and of Zumbagua kinship in general, see Weismantel
1988, especially chapter 6. I also discuss aspects of family structure in Weismantel 1989a. I mention heirs
here quite deliberately; the traditional ultimate definition of full-fledged legitimacy is to be designated as a
major heir of land. It is especially noteworthy in terms of my overall argument that Tayta Juanchu, typically
for Zumbaguans of his generation, designated among his few primary heirs several adopted children,
including one who is not even distantly related to him biologically, while his natural children with women
other than his wife did not inherit anything. Changing economic patterns in the parish have complicated
the question of inheritance, as the land is less valuable and there is less of it relative to an expanding
population. Some parents consider it a wiser strategy to designate some children as heirs of land while using
scarce cash to provide others with formal education in the hope that they will be able to support themselves
in other ways; the money expended on this training is explicitly understood to be in lieu of inheritance in
land.
9. The hegemonic family ideologies of Ecuador are of course not isomorphic with those of the United
States, but they are complexly related on a number of levels. Their relationship is in some ways an
antagonistic one that reflects the larger problematic governing U.S.-Latin American relations. Many
middle-class Ecuadorians feel that their family traditions are endangered by the pernicious influence of a
decadent North American culture. They point to the high value placed upon the extended family rather than
the individual couple, as well as an emphasis upon close ties between parent and adult child specifically,
and upon intergenerational relationships more generally, as important qualities of Ecuadorian family life
being steadily undermined (Weismantel 1988:119-122). Nevertheless, middle-class families in the two
countries share many characteristics, including a strongly held conviction about the importance of
consanguinity.
10. It was frequently explained to me by urban Ecuadorians that the lack of boundaries in the indigenous
family prevented achievement, by bringing the successful few down to the level of the lazy and incompetent
majority. The indigenous extended family was pictured as a trap in which constant demands for loans and
assistance, and pressures to spend money on nonessential consumption items associated with indigenous
cultural life, prevented accumulation on the part of those who earned salaries (see Whitten 1985 for an
example of comparable thinking in the Oriente of Ecuador). The solution envisioned was a companionate
marriage between two like-minded and ambitious individuals who would turn their backs on their extended
families, instead saving money to give only to their own, biological children. Adopting the illegitimate babies
of relatives or the children of poverty-stricken neighbors, according to this scenario, is precisely the kind of
practice that needs to be discouraged among better-off Indians. (It is in fact indicative of the amount of
respect that the young nurse had for the Iza family that she refrained from expressing this larger criticism of
his decision to adopt the boy.)
11. This point of view is not by any means limited to male theorists or to antifeminist writings but also
characterizes some schools of feminist thought about motherhood as well (e.g., O'Brien 1989). Butler (1 990)
has criticized Kristeva's writings about motherhood on these grounds.
12. L6vi-Strauss 1969: 29, 31, 479, 480, 489 et passim; see also Schneider 1984:172 and Yanagisako
1979:187. This discussion concentrates only on Elementary Structures, and not on the entire corpus of
Levi-Strauss's work. Although Boon and Schneider (1 974) make an excellent point in discriminating between
various phases in the writings of this prolific and long-standing scholar, it nevertheless remains the case that
most American anthropologists discussing his kinship theory have confined themselves primarily to this text;
constraints of space require me to follow their example here.
13. The question of nature and culture in Levi-Straussian thought, even just within The Elementary Forms
of Kinship, is far more nuanced than Ortner admits. While L6vi-Strauss did insist that "the rules of kinship
and marriage are not made necessary by the social state and that they are the social state itself, reshaping
biological relationships and natural sentiments, . . . and compelling them to rise above their original
characteristics" (1969:490), his ruminations about nature and culture, taken in their totality, grant neither
final transcendence to culture, nor immanence to the dichotomy itself. His assertion that the contrast
between nature and culture is "neither a primeval fact, nor a concrete aspect of universal order," but "rather
an artificial creation of culture" (1969:xxix), has been much quoted; he goes on to speculate that despite
human attempts to assert the dominance of their culture over nature, ultimately, "the interrelationship
between nature and culture does not favour culture to the extent of being hierarchically superimposed on
nature and irreducible to it" (1969:xxx).
Ultimately, this dialectical approach to the relationship between nature and culture is more workable as
a starting point for feminist analysis than Ortner's own position. L6vi-Strauss rarely discusses questions of
gender directly; they are typically implicit rather than explicit in his work. And while much of his work is
hardly feminist in conceptualization, the frequently expressed criticism that he denies women agency is not
universally true. In the conclusions to Elementary Structures he distinguishes between what he, like Ortner,
sees as a universal patriarchal ideology, implicit in symbol and language, and a quite opposite reality. For
700 american ethnologist
This content downloaded from
147.251.6.77 on Tue, 14 Sep 2021 03:39:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Levi-Strauss, whatever meaning may be given to "women in general," each woman is always, in actual fact,
"a person ... a generator of signs ... never purely what is spoken about," but also one who speaks (1 969:xx).
While Ortner strives for a similar position from which to discriminate the reality of women's potential from
the myths that underwrite their subordination, the lack of a dialectic in her reading of myth leaves the reader
at a loss to imagine an alternative to patriarchy.
14. A complete bibliography of this debate and its many participants and versions would be impossible.
Other versions of the same positions have been held over the years by, among others, Barnes (1 961), Beattie
(1964), and Needham (1960) on one side, and Gellner (1987[1973]), Keesing (1975), Lounsbury (1965), A.
Strathern (1973:23), and Scheffler and Lounsbury (1 971) on the other. More recent feminist reformulations
have tended to cite Schneider as their primary influence in arguing a social constructivist position (see, for
example, Collier and Yanagisako 1987; Delaney 1986).
15. I do not mean to imply that these actions are completely unimportant in all cases; often-but not
always-they are taken into account by the judge in making a decision. Once the verdict has been
pronounced, however, they become meaningless unless and until another official finds them significant.
16. Delaney (1 986) and Shore (1992:296) review the debate on this question.
1 7. See Costales and Costales 1976; Weismantel 1988:38-86. For a well-known literary description of
the Ecuadorian system of huasipungaje servitude as it operated in the 20th century, see also Icaza 1 953.
1 8. These societies fought against other threats as well. Euro-American kinship categories themselves are
explicitly and implicitly ideological constructs that act to enforce heterosexuality; Weston (1991) has
recently written of the contrast between the "straight" notion of the biological family and an oppositional
category embraced by many members of the lesbian and gay community, which she calls "families we
choose."
19. My liking for those I know in Zumbagua and my admiration for their ability to survive and to crea
an indigenous society despite enormous obstacles are readily apparent in my writings and are things fo
which I do not apologize. I share the belief of Binford and Campbell (1993:13-14, 21, note 18) that a
openly sympathetic, politically engaged form of postmodern ethnography, without claiming "either scie
tific or political neutrality as its guideposts," is the most useful project possible for those of us writing abou
the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
references cited
Ahmad, Aijaz
1992 In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso.
Allen, Catherine Wagner
1978 Coca, Chicha and Trago: Private and Communal Rituals in a Quechua Community. Ann Arbor,
MI: University Microfilms.
1988 The Hold Life Has. Washington, DC: Smithsonian.
Amadiume, Ifi
1987 Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. London: Zed Books.
Barnes, John A.
1961 Physical and Social Kinship. Philosophy of Social Science 28:296-299.
1973 Genitrix: Genitor:: Nature: Culture. In The Character of Kinship. Jack Goody, ed. Pp. 61-74.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Beattie, John H. M.
1964 Kinship and Social Anthropology. Man 64:101-103.
Binford, Leigh, and Howard Campbell
1993 Introduction. In Zapotec Struggles: Histories, Politics, and Representations from Juchitan, Oaxaca.
Howard Campbell, Liegh Binford, Miguel Bartolome, and Alicia Barabas, eds. Pp. 1-21. Washington,
DC: Smithsonian.
Bolton, Ralph
1977 The Qolla Marriage Process. In Kinship and Marriage in the Andes. Ralph Bolton and Enrique
Mayer, eds. Pp. 217-239. Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association.
Boon, James A., and David M. Schneider
1974 Kinship vis-a-vis Myth: Contrasts in Levi-Strauss' Approaches to Cross-Cultural Comparison.
American Anthropologist 76:799-817.
Brady, Ivan, ed.
1976 Transactions in Kinship: Adoption and Fosterage in Oceania. Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press.
Butler, Judith
1990 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Cardoso, Ruth C. L.
1984 Creating Kinship: The Fostering of Children in Favela Families in Brazil. In Kinship Ideology and
Practice in Latin America. Raymond T. Smith, ed. Elizabeth Hansen, trans. Pp. 196-203. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press.
making kin 701
This content downloaded from
147.251.6.77 on Tue, 14 Sep 2021 03:39:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Carroll, Vern, ed.
1970 Adoption in Eastern Oceania. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Carter, William E.
1977 Trial Marriage in the Andes? In Kinship and Marriage in the Andes. Ralph Bolton and Enrique
Mayer, eds. Pp. 1 77-216. Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association.
Clark, Gracia
1989 Money, Sex and Cooking: Manipulation of the Paid/Unpaid Boundary by Asante Market Women.
In The Social Economy of Consumption. Henry J. Rutz and Benjamin S. Orlove, eds. Monographs in
Economic Anthropology, 6. Pp. 323-348. Lanham, MD: University Press of America/Society for
Economic Anthropology.
Clifford, James
1986 Introduction: Partial Truths. In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. James
Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds. Pp. 1-26. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Collier, Jane Fishburne, and Sylvia Junko Yanagisako
1987 Introduction. In Gender and Kinship: Essays toward a Unified Analysis. Jane F. Collier and Sylvia
J. Yanagisako, eds. Pp. 1-14. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Costales, Alfredo, and Piedad de Costales
1976 Zumbagua-Guangaje: Estudio socioeconomico. Quito: Instituto Ecuatoriano de Antropologia y
Geografia.
Delaney, Carol
1986 The Meaning of Paternity and the Virgin Birth Debate. Man (n.s.) 21:494-51 3.
Fabian, Johannes
1983 Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.
Fortes, Meyer
1969 Toward theJural Dimension. In Kinship and the Social Order: the Legacyof Lewis Henry Morgan.
Pp. 60-84. Chicago: Aldine Publishing.
Gellner, Ernest
1987[1973] The Concept of Kinship and Other Essays. London: Basil Blackwell.
Glenn, Evelyn Nakano
1994 Social Constructions of Mothering: A Thematic Overview. In Mothering: Ideology, Experience and
Agency. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey, eds. Pp. 1-32. New York:
Routledge.
Haraway, Donna
1983 Animal Sociology and a Natural Economy of the Body Politic, I: A Political Physiology of
Dominance. In The Signs Reader: Women, Gender and Scholarship. Elizabeth Abel and Emily K. Abel,
eds. Pp. 1 23-1 38. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Harris, Olivia
1978 Complementarity and Conflict: An Andean View of Women and Men. In Sex and Age as Principles
of Social Differentiation. Jean Sybil LaFontaine, ed. Pp. 21-39. London: Academic Press.
1980 The Power of Signs: Gender, Culture and the Wild in the Bolivian Andes. In Nature, Culture and
Gender. Carol MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern, eds. Pp. 70-94. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
1981 Households as Natural Units. In Of Marriage and the Market: Women's Subordination in
International Perspective. Pp. 49-68. London: SCE Book.
Harrison, Eric
1993 Her Dream Becomes a Nightmare: A Mother Who Sought a New Life in L.A. Loses Her Sons to
Her Former In-Laws in Mississippi. Los Angeles Times, September 21 :A1.
Howard, Alan, and Robert Borofsky
1989 Social Organization. In Developments in Polynesian Ethnology. Alan Howard and Robert Borofsky,
eds. Pp. 47-94. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Icaza, Jorge
1953 Huasipungo. Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada.
Isbell, Billie Jean
1978 To Defend Ourselves: Ecology and Ritual in an Andean Village. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Keesing, Roger M.
1975 Kin Groups and Social Structure. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Levi-Strauss, Claude
1969 The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Rev. ed. John Richard von Sturmer and Rodney Needham,
eds. James Harle Bell, trans. Boston: Beacon Press.
Los Angeles Times
1993 Judge Delays Hearings in Adoption Custody Case. August 21, V 112:B8.
Lounsbury, Floyd G.
1965 Another View of the Trobriand Kinship Categories. American Anthropologist 67:1 42-1 85.
MacCormack, Carol P.
1980 Nature, Culture and Gender: A Critique. In Nature, Culture and Gender. Carol MacCormack and
Marilyn Strathern, eds. Pp. 1-24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
702 american ethnologist
This content downloaded from
147.251.6.77 on Tue, 14 Sep 2021 03:39:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
MacCormack, Carol, and Marilyn Strathern, eds.
1980 Nature, Culture and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Malinowski, Bronislaw
1930 Parenthood-The Basis of Social Structure. In The New Generation. Victor Francis Calverton and
Samuel D. Schmalhausen, eds. Pp. 11 2-168. New York: Macaulay.
1957 Preface. In We the Tikopia, by Raymond Firth. Boston: Beacon Press.
Marcus, George E., and Michael M. J. Fischer
1986 Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Martin, Emily
1987 The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction. Boston: Beacon Press.
Modell, Judith
1986 In Search: The Purported Biological Basis of Parenthood. American Ethnologist 1 3:646-661.
Needham, Rodney
1960 Descent Systems and Ideal Language. Philosophy of Science 27:96-101.
O'Brien, Mary
1989 Reproducing the World: Essays in Feminist Theory. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Ortner, Sherry
1974 Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture? In Woman, Culture and Society. Michelle Rosaldo and
Louise Lamphere, eds. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Paige, Karen Ericksen, and Jeffery M. Paige
1981 The Politics of Reproductive Ritual. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Perry, Tony
1993a Unwed Father Loses Bid for Custody of Son. Los Angeles Times, October 19:A3.
1993b Unwed Father May Halt Custody Battle. Los Angeles Times, October 20:A1.
Radcliffe-Brown, A. R.
1950 Introduction. In African Systems of Kinship and Marriage. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and Darryl Forde,
eds. London: Oxford University Press.
1965 Structure and Function in Primitive Societies: Essays and Addresses. New York: Free Press.
Ragone, Helena
1994 Surrogate Motherhood: Conception in the Heart. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Sacks, Karen
1979 Anthropology against Women. In Sisters and Wives: The Past and Future of Sexual Equality. Pp.
24-64. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Scheffler, Harold W.
1991 Sexism and Naturalism in the Study of Kinship. In Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist
Anthropology in the Postmodern Era. Micaeala de Leonardo, ed. Pp. 361-382. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Scheffler, Harold W., and Floyd G. Lounsbury
1971 A Study in Structural Semantics: The Siriono Kinship System. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Schilkdraut, Enid
1973 The Fostering of Children in Ghana. Urban Anthropology 2:48-73.
Schneider, David M.
1964 The Nature of Kinship. Man 64:180-181.
1968 American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
1984 A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Segura, Denise A., and Jennifer L. Pierce
1993 Chicano/A Family Structure and Gender Personality: Chodorow, Familism, and Psychoanalytic
Sociology Revisited. Signs 1 9(1 ):62-91.
Shore, Chris
1992 Virgin Births and Sterile Debates: Anthropology and the New Reproductive Technologies. Current
Anthropology 33:295-301.
Stacey, Judith
1990 Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in LateTwentieth-CenturyAmerica. New York:
Basic Books.
Strathern, Andrew
1973 Kinship, Descent and Locality: Some New Guinea Examples. In The Character of Kinship. Jack
Goody, ed. Pp. 21-34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Strathern, Marilyn
1980 No Nature, No Culture: The Hagen Case. Nature, Culture and Gender. Carol P. MacCormack and
Marilyn Strathern, eds. Pp. 1 74-216. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
1992a After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
1992b Reproducing the Future: Essays on Anthropology, Kinship and the New Reproductive Technologies.
New York: Routledge.
making kin 703
This content downloaded from
147.251.6.77 on Tue, 14 Sep 2021 03:39:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Taylor, Robert Joseph, Linda M. Chatters, M. Belinda Tucker, and Edith Lewis
1990 Developments in Research on Black Families: A Decade Review. Journal of Marriage and the
Family 52:993-1014.
Weismantel, Mary
1988 Food, Gender and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press.
1989a Cooking Houses and Sleeping Houses: The Zumbagua Household as Constituted Process. In The
Household Economy: Reconsidering the Domestic Mode of Production. Richard R. Wilk, ed. Pp.
55-72. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
1989b The Children Cry for Bread: Hegemony and the Transformation of Consumption. In The Social
Economy of Consumption. Benjamin S. Orlove and Henry J. Rutz, eds. Pp. 105-124. Society for
Economic Anthropology Publications, 6.
Weston, Kath
1991 Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press.
Whitten, Norman E., Jr.
1985 Sicuanga Runa: The Other Side of Development in Amazonian Ecuador. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press.
Wilk, Richard R., ed.
1989 The Household Economy: Reconsidering the Domestic Mode of Production. Boulder, CO:
Westview Press.
Yanagisako, Sylvia Junko
1978a Introduction. Special Section: American Kinship. American Ethnologist 5:1-4.
1978b Variance in American Kinship: Implications for Cultural Analysis. American Ethnologist 5:15-29
1979 Family and Household: The Analysis of Domestic Groups. Annual Review of Anthropology
8:161-205.
submitted March 1, 1994
accepted August 9, 1994
debate
nourishing kinship theory: a commentary on Weismantel's
"making kin"
SUSAN MCKINNON-University of Virginia
In her article Mary Weismantel aims to "look at contemporary Zumbagua kinship, not
set of facts to be interpreted using 'our own' theories, but rather as a theory and a pract
its own right" (p. 687). Although the goal is admirable, its achievement is undermined by
of her own assumptions.
Weismantel demonstrates that the framework of classic kinship theory presuppose
foundational primacy of nature, blood, and biology in the definition of kinship and tha
makes it difficult to comprehend adoption, which contravenes the logic of biology altog
Consequently, she argues, the opposition central to Euro-American kinship theory betwe
primary, essentialized, biological base (nature) and a secondary, jural and historical s
edifice (culture) is totally inappropriate to the analysis of Zumbagua kinship theory.
It is therefore puzzling that in presenting this critique she simultaneously reproduces the
opposition in her analysis. She frequently evokes a distinction between symbols, cerem
disembodied ritual, words, metaphors, documents, the jural, the logocentric, the socia
the spiritual, on the one hand, and the material, physical, biological, and corporeal, o
other (pp. 694-695). Although the explicit purpose of Weismantel's article is to transcend
Taylor, Robert Joseph, Linda M. Chatters, M. Belinda Tucker, and Edith Lewis
1990 Developments in Research on Black Families: A Decade Review. Journal of Marriage an
Family 52:993-1014.
Weismantel, Mary
1988 Food, Gender and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl
Press.
1989a Cooking Houses and Sleeping Houses: The Zumbagua Household as Constituted Process. I
Household Economy: Reconsidering the Domestic Mode of Production. Richard R. Wilk, ed
55-72. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
1989b The Children Cry for Bread: Hegemony and the Transformation of Consumption. In The S
Economy of Consumption. Benjamin S. Orlove and Henry J. Rutz, eds. Pp. 105-124. Societ
Economic Anthropology Publications, 6.
Weston, Kath
1991 Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press.
Whitten, Norman E., Jr.
1985 Sicuanga Runa: The Other Side of Development in Amazonian Ecuador. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press.
Wilk, Richard R., ed.
1989 The Household Economy: Reconsidering the Domestic Mode of Production. Boulder, CO:
Westview Press.
Yanagisako, Sylvia Junko
1978a Introduction. Special Section: American Kinship. American Ethnologist 5:1-4.
1978b Variance in American Kinship: Implications for Cultural Analysis. American Ethnologist 5:15-29
1979 Family and Household: The Analysis of Domestic Groups. Annual Review of Anthropology
8:161-205.
submitted March 1, 1994
accepted August 9, 1994
debate
nourishing kinship theory: a commentary on Weismantel's
"making kin"
SUSAN MCKINNON-University of Virginia
In her article Mary Weismantel aims to "look at contemporary Zumbagua kinship, not
set of facts to be interpreted using 'our own' theories, but rather as a theory and a pract
its own right" (p. 687). Although the goal is admirable, its achievement is undermined by
of her own assumptions.
Weismantel demonstrates that the framework of classic kinship theory presuppose
foundational primacy of nature, blood, and biology in the definition of kinship and tha
makes it difficult to comprehend adoption, which contravenes the logic of biology altog
Consequently, she argues, the opposition central to Euro-American kinship theory betwe
primary, essentialized, biological base (nature) and a secondary, jural and historical s
edifice (culture) is totally inappropriate to the analysis of Zumbagua kinship theory.
It is therefore puzzling that in presenting this critique she simultaneously reproduces the
opposition in her analysis. She frequently evokes a distinction between symbols, cerem
disembodied ritual, words, metaphors, documents, the jural, the logocentric, the socia
the spiritual, on the one hand, and the material, physical, biological, and corporeal, o
other (pp. 694-695). Although the explicit purpose of Weismantel's article is to transcend
704 american ethnologist704 american ethnologist
This content downloaded from
147.251.6.77 on Tue, 14 Sep 2021 03:39:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms