The Owners of Kinship – Asymmetrical Relations in Indigenous Amazonia

The Owners of Kinship investigates how kinship in Indigenous Amazonia is derived from the asymmetrical relation between an "owner" and his or her dependents. Through a comprehensive ethnography of the Kanamari, Luiz Costa shows how this relationship is centered around the bond created between the feeder and the fed. Building on anthropological studies of the acquisition, distribution, and consumption of food and its role in establishing relations of asymmetrical mutuality and kinship, this book breaks theoretical ground for studies in Amazonia and beyond. By investigating how the feeding relation traverses Kanamari society from the relation between women and the pets they raise, shaman and familiar spirit, mother and child, chiefs and followers, to those between the Brazilian state and the Kanamari The Owners of Kinship reveals how the mutuality of kinship is determined by the asymmetry of ownership.

About the Author :
Luiz Costa is associate professor of anthropology at the Institute of Philosophy and Social Sciences and the Graduate Program in Sociology and Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Review :
"Fascinating. . . [A] valuable ethnography whose comparative possibilities with other areas could well help us to understand the Amerindian variations, not only concerning property, kinship or authority, but also of the role of intimacy, dependency and control in relations between men and non-human entities such as land or cattle."-- "Anthropos (Translated from Spanish)" "A major achievement. Incorporating decades of Amazonianist anthropology as its conditions of conceptual and analytical possibility, it stands as a compelling example of a form of scholarship that has become fully realized only in recent years. Costa's attunement to Amazonian ethnology turns his ethnography of Brazil's Kanamari people into a transformative engagement with core regionialist theories. It is this centripetal/centrifugal orientation--inward to Kanamari specificities and outward to Amazonia-wide themes--that makes The Owners of Kinship a perfect answer to the question of why Amazonianist anthropology has become one of the discipline's most unique and inventive subfields. . . . Ultimately, Costa's careful yet creative syntheses are what make The Owners of Kinship so easy to appreciate. By putting the Kanamari into open-ended conversation with so many other Amazonians, Costa affirms, transforms, and adds to the conceptual models that regional specialists use to interpret their data. If I could suggest one ethnography to bring to the field for a neophyte Amazonianist, it would be The Owners of Kinship. It asks so many questions, offers so many answers, and makes so many suggestions about where one might look, what one might find, and how one might make sense of it."-- "sociologia & antropologia"