Performing Kinship
Narrative, Gender, and the Intimacies of Power in the Andes
In 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.
Performing Kinship makes a valuable contribution to the study of kinship, but its particular strength lies in the way it bridges an anthropology of relatedness and emotions to issues of political economy and globalization; it is also a wonderful ethnography of Andean life in its own right.
Krista E. Van Vleet is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bowdoin College. She lives in Bath, Maine.
- Acknowledgments
- A Note on Orthography
- Chapter 1. Introduction: Relative Intimacies, Storied Lives
- Chapter 2. Sullk'ata Contexts: Reflections on Identities and Localities
- Chapter 3. Circulation of Care: A Primer on Sullk'ata Relatedness
- Chapter 4. Narrating Sorrow, Performing Relatedness: A Story Told in Conversation
- Chapter 5. Storied Silences: Adolescent Desires, Gendered Agency, and the Practice of Stealing Women
- Chapter 6. Reframing the Married Couple: Affect and Exchange in Three Parts
- Chapter 7. "Now My Daughter Is Alone": Violence and the Ambiguities of Affinity
- Chapter 8. Conclusion: Reflections on the Dialogical Production of Relatedness
- Appendix A. Chapter 5 Narrative Transcriptions in Quechua and in English
- Appendix B. Chapter 6 Interview Transcriptions in Quechua
- Notes
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
