COMPADRAZGO IN PITUMARCA, PERÚ: THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE TINKERBELL WATCH
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COMPADRAZGO IN PITUMARCA, PERÚ: THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE TINKERBELL WATCH

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https://doi.org/10.5070/K74263969Creative Commons 'BY' version 4.0 license
Abstract

Godparenthood, an institution where a family seeks sponsorship for their child established through a religious ritual, can be analyzed on several levels. On one level, it is a form of allo-parenting, an adaptive strategy that ensures better survival of one’s child by creating an alliance with a biologically non-related person. On the sociological level, it is a strategy for forging in-terfamily alliances. Godparenthood can be instrumentalized to promote political goals through reciprocal exchanges. In this paper I argue that this is achieved on the cognitive level by metaphorical extensions of kinship terminology to unrelated individuals through the use of the universal linguistic feature of markedness. I analyze compadrazgo in the town of Pitumarca, Perú, as a test case of all three aspects of godparenthood.

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