Performing Kinship: Narrative, Gender, and the Intimacies of Power in the AndesIn the highland region of Sullk'ata, located in the rural Bolivian Andes, habitual activities such as sharing food, work, and stories create a sense of relatedness among people. Through these day-to-day interactions—as well as more unusual events—individuals negotiate the affective bonds and hierarchies of their relationships. In Performing Kinship, Krista E. Van Vleet reveals the ways in which relatedness is evoked, performed, and recast among the women of Sullk'ata. Portraying relationships of camaraderie and conflict, Van Vleet argues that narrative illuminates power relationships, which structure differences among women as well as between women and men. She also contends that in the Andes gender cannot be understood without attention to kinship. Stories such as that of the young woman who migrates to the city to do domestic work and later returns to the highlands voicing a deep ambivalence about the traditional authority of her in-laws provide enlightening examples of the ways in which storytelling enables residents of Sullk'ata to make sense of events and link themselves to one another in a variety of relationships. A vibrant ethnography, Performing Kinship offers a rare glimpse into an compelling world. |
From inside the book
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... affective, social, political, and economic bonds. This story and other stories threaded throughout the book illuminate the notion that relationships (between husbands and wives; brothers and sisters; parents and children; neighbors ...
... affective , social , and political bonds that link people together . Integrating Gender and Kinship Feminist anthropologists had already begun to question universal categories and the naturalness of particular relationships when they ...
... affective bonds and arenas of contestation that are crucial to understanding the daily burdens and benefits of relatedness more gen- erally. As much as a married couple is viewed as a unit, referred to as qusawarmi (husband-wife) ...
... affective relationships is coupled with an emphasis on developing an analyti- cal framework that takes account of how kinship is lived among people with diverse experiences of identity and inequality, within and between households and ...
... affective and social context through which they are made into kin . Sullk'atas draw upon layers of personal experience , local and national dis- courses , and the relations of power and privilege that these entail , as they nego- tiate ...
Contents
1 | |
27 | |
Circulation of Care A Primer on Sullkata Relatedness | 55 |
Narrating Sorrow Performing Relatedness A Story Told in Conversation | 79 |
Storied Silences Adolescent Desires Gendered Agency and the Practice of Stealing Women | 99 |
Reframing the Married Couple Affect and Exchange in Three Parts | 129 |
Now My Daughter Is Alone Violence and the Ambiguities of Affinity | 161 |
Conclusion Reflections on the Dialogical Production of Relatedness | 183 |
Chapter 5 Narrative Transcriptions in Quechua and in English | 197 |
Chapter 6 Interview Transcriptions in Quechua | 205 |
Notes | 209 |
Glossary | 225 |
Bibliography | 229 |
Index | 257 |