The Owners of Kinship
Asymmetrical Relations in Indigenous Amazonia
Distributed for HAU
With a Foreword by Janet Carsten
320 pages
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24 halftones, 5 maps, 2 line drawings
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6 x 9
Review Quotes
Marilyn Strathern (University of Cambridge), author of Before and After Gender
"A major contribution to anthropological theorizing, this impressive work quietly disposes of many conceptual assumptions abroad in anthropology, less through interrogating Western ideas (via other Western ideas) than through brilliant ethnographic exegesis. The author follows through the consequences of ‘feeding’ as a signature of Amazonian ownership. Observational and analytical sophistication aside, the result offers a kind of scholarly commensality that emphatically enhances the trenchant and radical consequences of the book’s achievement as the body-owner of the arguments it gives us. If Kanamari taught the author this etiquette, we would not do so badly in finding we had a need for it."
Anne-Christine Taylor (CNRS, Musée du Quai Branly), author of An Abuse of Dreams: Kincraft and Imagination in an Amazonian Society
"Ownership without property, mastery without domination: this is the paradox explored by Luiz Costa in his brilliant analysis of the so-called master-subject bond among the Kanamari. This is a relation that plays a crucial role in indigenous Amazonian cosmopolitics, insofar as it is the primary generative force at work in the world. Beyond its insightful description of Kanamari sociality, this work thus sheds new light on the principles underlying kinship formation and political action in the Lowlands."
Roy Wagner (University of Virginia), author of Coyote Anthropology
"This book is a paradigm shifter. That the distinction between sharing and exchanging (here, commensality and feeding) is as important to the understanding of reciprocity as that between the maternal and paternal descent lines is to the understanding of kinship has long been received knowledge in Melanesia. Unfortunately due to the influence of Lévi-Strauss, it has been missing from the canon in Amazonia. Thanks to Luiz Costa’s brilliant The Owners of Kinship, this oversight will soon be corrected."
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Anthropology: General Anthropology
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