About
The journal Kinship offers a scholarly site for research publications dedicated to the ethnography and theory of kinship and covers current systematic efforts using new data or new ideas, including the use of these data and ideas to revisit and rework earlier assumptions in the field. It covers a wide range of kinship-based cross-cultural practices ranging from incest to marriage, to avoidances, to kin terms, to succession, to contemporary forms of motherhood, fatherhood, and family, and more. The journal Kinship, as the design of the front cover seeks to convey, is dedicated to the study of kinship in all of its facets, is international in scope, and will publish original work in English, though publications in other languages will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
Volume 4, Issue 2, 2024
Articles
COMPADRAZGO IN PITUMARCA, PERÚ: THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE TINKERBELL WATCH
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.
A FURTHER NOTE ON GEG MARRIAGES
Marriages between groups of siblings-in-law, which, using kinship conventions, I call ‘GEG marriages’, resemble cross-cousin marriage or prescriptive alliance but lack the repeatability of such alliances in the immediately following generation(s). Although mentioned in passing quite frequently in ethnographic accounts, theory explaining them is largely lacking. Building on previous work, in this note I address the possible reasons for such marriages, both indigenously (and therefore locally) and as a possible waystation on the path to a society abandoning cross-cousin marriage.