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. |
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... relatedness . Although Sullk'ata relatedness may seem just like " ours , " in many ways the underlying assumptions and dispositions or grounding of relatedness are quite different . In this chapter I argue that relatedness for Sullk ...
... Relatedness Relatedness emerges in the cycles of giving and receiving among people that may begin before birth but do not end there . The ways in which parents and children constitute relatedness — and brothers do not - have ...
... relatedness also illuminates questions of kinship and gender more generally . A reader might see Sullk'ata notions of relatedness as quaint , misguided , or simply incorrect , in spite of my best efforts to the con- trary . Yet ...
Contents
Acknowledgments | v |
A Note on Orthography | xiii |
ONE Introduction | xv |
Copyright | |
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