The Anthropology of Marriage in Lowland South America

Traditional treatments of marriage among indigenous people focus on what people say about whom one should marry and on rules that anthropologists induce from those statements. This volume is a cultural and social anthropological examination of the ways the indigenous peoples of lowland South America/Amazonia actually choose whom they marry. Detailed ethnography shows that they select spouses to meet their economic and political goals, their emotional desires, and their social aspirations, as well as to honor their commitments to exogamic prescriptions and the exchange of women. These decisions often require playing fast and loose with what the anthropologist and the peoples themselves declare to be the regulations they obey. Inevitably then, this volume is about agency and individual choice in the context of social institutions and cultural rules. There is another theme running through this book—the way in which globalization is subverting traditional hierarchies, altering identities, and eroding ancestral marital norms and values—how the forces of modernization alter both structure and practice. The main body of the book is given over to eleven chapters based on previously unpublished ethnographic material collected by the contributors. It is divided into three sections. The first collects essays that describe the motives behind breaking the marriage rules, the second describes how the marriage rules are bent or broken, and the third gathers chapters on the effects of globalization and recent changes on the marriage rules.

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 180-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis F. Angosto-Ferrández

The unprecedented enfranchisement of Venezuela’s indigenous population is partly a result of the formation of a state-sponsored indigenous movement. This movement prioritizes access to social services, economic development, and political participation in state structures over certain goals of free determination. Other forms of collective action with different priorities are evidence of the existence of diverging interests and goals among indigenous people. These divergences are a reflection of the way in which the indigenous population partakes in the shaping of contemporary Venezuelan politics. La inclusión social de las comunidades indígenas de Venezuela no tiene precedentes y se debe, en parte, a la formación de movimientos indígenas auspiciados por el estado. Estos movimientos le dan prioridad al acceso a los servicios sociales, al desarrollo económico y a la participación política en las estructuras estatales por encima de ciertas metas de libre determinación. Otras formas de acción colectiva con prioridades diferentes revelan la presencia/existencia de intereses y objetivos divergentes entre las comunidades indígenas. Estas diferencias son un reflejo de la manera en que las poblaciones indígenas participan en la formación de la política venezolana contemporánea.


2020 ◽  
pp. 22-47
Author(s):  
Thomas M. Lekan

This chapter examines the early career of Bernhard Grzimek, who became the director of the Frankfurt Zoo in 1945 after serving as a veterinarian and agricultural minister for the Third Reich. Grzimek became famous for transforming the zoo from a bombed-out shell into one of Europe’s most successful zoological gardens by combining insights from ethology and ecology to help the animals thrive in captivity. Behind his carefully crafted public image as savior of animals, however, Grzimek revealed in memoirs and writings about animal behavior a much darker self, haunted by fears of extinction, eugenic decline, and wartime displacement that signaled an inability to come to terms with his and his country’s Nazi experience. Grzimek’s concern about the spread of Western “degeneracy” to Africa explains the urgency of his quest to save animals and their habitats there—and the indifference he often displayed toward local and indigenous peoples who stood in the way of his pursuit.


2021 ◽  
pp. 43-65
Author(s):  
Jean Baptista

This paper is dedicated to presenting four notes taken from my field and research notebooks on the relationship between museums, museology and indigenous sexualities dissenting from the western heterosexual matrix. Above all, it seeks to promote a theoretical relationship between LGBT Museology and Indigenous Museology, as well as other ways of thinking about museums related to indigenous peoples. The first note deals with the anti-object of the heterocentered indigenous, that is, the way of understanding the original peoples without sexual dissent from the heterosexual matrix of the West; the second presents the historical contributions about the invention of indigenous sexual dissidences, discussing from colonial records about the ruptures imposed on indigenous societies with regard to the colonization of their se xualities; the third presents the solid basis of the theoretical field of Sociomuseolgia where it would be possible to think of an Indigenous Museology from its intersection with the LGBT Museology; finally, it analyzes some of the main experiences of indigenous outings carried out in the Peruvian Travesti Museum, in the Americans GLBT Historical Society and Field Museum and in the headquarters of the SOMOSGay group, in Paraguay, indicating, with this, cases where the relationship between sexual dissidents, indigenous peoples and Museology were problematized in an efficient or promising way. At the same time, I question the power and possible paths of an LGBT Museology intersected with an Indigenous Museology. This relationship is justified by the need to overcome the violent colonial inheritances that the process of inventing indigenous sexual dissidences has left today. Keywords: Indigenous people; Museology; LGBT; Queer Theory


2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Paiz Hassan ◽  
Mohd Anuar Ramli

Majority of the indigenous people who are the original inhabitants in Malaysia inhibit the remote area of tropical forest which is rich in natural resources. Their lives are separated from the outside community due to several factors such as geography, low literacy, negative perceptions of the surrounding community, and the closed-door attitude of the indigenous people. Consistent preaching activities have changed the faith of the indigenous people from animism orientation towards believing in the Oneness of God. The practice of Islam as a way of life in the lives of indigenous peoples is found to be difficult to practice because the fiqh approach presented to them does not celebrate their local condition. In this regard, this study will examine the socio-cultural isolation of indigenous peoples and their impact on the interpretation of Islamic law. To achieve this objective, the researchers have applied the library research method by referring to the literatures related to the discussion of Islamic scholars in various disciplines of fiqh and usūl al-fiqh. The research found that there is rukhsah and taysir approach given to isolated people as well as with local background to facilitate the religious affairs of the indigenous people. Abstrak Majoriti masyarakat Orang Asli yang merupakan penduduk asal di semenanjung Malaysia mendiami kawasan pedalaman di hutan hujan tropika yang kaya dengan khazanah alam. Kehidupan mereka terasing daripada masyarakat luar disebabkan beberapa faktor seperti geografi, kadar literasi yang rendah, pandangan negatif masyarakat sekitar dan sikap tertutup masyarakat Orang Asli. Gerakan dakwah yang dijalankan secara konsisten telah membawa perubahan kepercayaan sebahagian masyarakat Orang Asli daripada berorientasikan animisme kepada mempercayai Tuhan yang Esa. Pengamalan Islam sebagai cara hidup dalam kehidupan masyarakat Orang Asli didapati agak sukar untuk dipraktikkan lantaran pendekatan fiqh yang disampaikan kepada mereka tidak meraikan suasana setempat mereka. Sehubungan itu, kajian ini akan meneliti keadaan isolasi sosio-budaya masyarakat Orang Asli dan kesannya terhadap pentafsiran hukum Islam. Bagi mencapai objektif tersebut, pengkaji menggunakan kajian kepustakaan sepenuhnya dengan menelusuri literatur berkaitan dengan perbincangan sarjana Islam dalam pelbagai disiplin ilmu fiqh dan usul fiqh. Hasil kajian mendapati terdapat rukhsah dan pendekatan taysir diberikan kepada mereka yang hidup terasing serta berlatar belakang budaya setempat bagi memudahkan urusan keagamaan masyarakat Orang Asli.


2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy M. Mikecz

Ethnohistorians and other scholars have long noted how European colonial texts often concealed the presence and participation of indigenous peoples in New World conquests. This scholarship has examined how European sources (both texts and maps) have denied indigenous history, omitted indigenous presence, elided indigenous agency, and ignored indigenous spaces all while exaggerating their own power and importance. These works provide examples of colonial authors performing these erasures, often as a means to dispossess. What they lack, however, is a systematic means of identifying, locating, and measuring these silences in space and time. This article proposes a spatial history methodology which can make visible, as well as measurable and quantifiable the ways in which indigenous people and spaces have been erased by colonial narratives. It presents two methods for doing this. First, narrative analysis and geovisualization are used to deconstruct the imperial histories found in colonial European sources. Second it combines text with maps to tell a new (spatial) narrative of conquest. This new narrative reconstructs indigenous activity through a variety of digital maps, including ‘mood maps’, indigenous activity maps, and maps of indigenous aid. The resulting spatial narrative shows the Spanish conquest of Peru was never inevitable and was dependent on the constant aid of immense numbers of indigenous people.


Moreana ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 47 (Number 181- (3-4) ◽  
pp. 9-68
Author(s):  
Jean Du Verger

The philosophical and political aspects of Utopia have often shadowed the geographical and cartographical dimension of More’s work. Thus, I will try to shed light on this aspect of the book in order to lay emphasis on the links fostered between knowledge and space during the Renaissance. I shall try to show how More’s opusculum aureum, which is fraught with cartographical references, reifies what Germain Marc’hadour terms a “fictional archipelago” (“The Catalan World Atlas” (c. 1375) by Abraham Cresques ; Zuane Pizzigano’s portolano chart (1423); Martin Benhaim’s globe (1492); Martin Waldseemüller’s Cosmographiae Introductio (1507); Claudius Ptolemy’s Geographia (1513) ; Benedetto Bordone’s Isolario (1528) ; Diogo Ribeiro’s world map (1529) ; the Grand Insulaire et Pilotage (c.1586) by André Thevet). I will, therefore, uncover the narrative strategies used by Thomas More in a text which lies on a complex network of geographical and cartographical references. Finally, I will examine the way in which the frontispiece of the editio princeps of 1516, as well as the frontispiece of the third edition published by Froben at Basle in 1518, clearly highlight the geographical and cartographical aspect of More’s narrative.


SUHUF ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-72
Author(s):  
Ahmad Fathoni
Keyword(s):  

The object of the study of the knowledge of the variety of the Quranic reading  is the  Qur'an itself. The focus is on the difference of the reading and its articulation. The method is based on the riwayat or narration which is originated from the Prophet (Rasulullah saw) and its use is to be one of the instruments to keep the originality of the Qur’an. The validity of the reading the Qur’an is to be judged based on the valid chain  (sanad ¡a¥ī¥)  in accord with the Rasm U£mānÄ« as well as with the  Arabic grammar. Whereas the qualification of its originality is divided into six stages as follow: the first is mutawātir, the second is masyhÅ«r, the third is āhād, the fourth is syaz, the fifth is maudū‘, and the six is mudraj. Of this six catagories, the readings which can be included in the catagory of mutawātir are Qiraat Sab‘ah (the seven readings) and Qiraat ‘Asyrah  (the ten readings). To study this knowledge of reading the Qur’an (ilmu qiraat), one is advised to know about special terms being used such as  qiraat  (readings), riwayat (narration), tarÄ«q (the way), wajh (aspect), mÄ«m jama‘, sukÅ«n mÄ«m jama‘ and many others.


Author(s):  
Giulia Sajeva

The conservation of environment and the protection of human rights are two of the most compelling needs of our time. Unfortunately, they are not always easy to combine and too often result in mutual harm. This book analyses the idea of biocultural rights as a proposal for harmonizing the needs of environmental and human rights. These rights, considered as a basket of group rights, are those deemed necessary to protect the stewardship role that certain indigenous peoples and local communities have played towards the environment. With a view to understanding the value and merits, as well as the threats that biocultural rights entail, the book critically assesses their foundations, content, and implications, and develops new perspectives and ideas concerning their potential applicability for promoting the socio-economic interests of indigenous people and local communities. It further explores the controversial relationship of interdependence and conflict between conservation of environment and protection of human rights.


2021 ◽  
pp. 144078332110011
Author(s):  
Scott J Fitzpatrick

Suicide prevention occurs within a web of social, moral, and political relations that are acknowledged, yet rarely made explicit. In this work, I analyse these interrelations using concepts of moral and political economy to demonstrate how moral norms and values interconnect with political and economic systems to inform the way suicide prevention is structured, legitimated, and enacted. Suicide prevention is replete with ideologies of individualism, risk, and economic rationalism that translate into a specific set of social practices. These bring a number of ethical, procedural, and distributive considerations to the fore. Closer attention to these issues is needed to reflect the moral and political contexts in which decision-making about suicide prevention occurs, and the implications of these decisions for policy, practice, and for those whose lives they impact.


Author(s):  
Stephen Wilmot

AbstractIn recent years there have been several calls in professional and academic journals for healthcare personnel in Canada to raise the profile of postcolonial theory as a theoretical and explanatory framework for their practice with Indigenous people. In this paper I explore some of the challenges that are likely to confront those healthcare personnel in engaging with postcolonial theory in a training context. I consider these challenges in relation to three areas of conflict. First I consider conflicts around paradigms of knowledge, wherein postcolonial theory operates from a different base from most professional knowledge in health care. Second I consider conflicts of ideology, wherein postcolonial theory is largely at odds with Canada’s political and popular cultures. And finally I consider issues around the question of Canada’s legitimacy, which postcolonial theory puts in doubt. I suggest ways in which these conflicts might be addressed and managed in the training context, and also identify potential positive outcomes that would be enabling for healthcare personnel, and might also contribute to an improvement in Canada’s relationship with its indigenous peoples.


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