Stephen Beckerman – författare

"Foremost scholars of indigenous Amazonia explore the vast and interesting gap between rules and practice, demonstrating how sociocultural systems endure and even prosper due to the flexibility, creativity, and resilience of the people within them."--Jeremy M. Campbell, author of Conjuring Property: Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon"A landmark volume and a major contribution to the study of kinship and marriage in Amazonian societies, an area of the world that has been pivotal to our understanding of the biocultural dimensions of cousin marriage and polygamy."--Nancy E. Levine, author of The Dynamics of Polyandry: Kinship, Domesticity, and Population on the Tibetan Border

This volume reveals that individuals in Amazonian cultures often disregard or reinterpret the marriage rules of their societies—rules that anthropologists previously thought reflected practice. It is the first book to consider not just what the rules are but how people in these societies negotiate, manipulate, and break them in choosing whom to marry.

Using ethnographic case studies that draw on previously unpublished material from well-known indigenous cultures, The Anthropology of Marriage in Lowland South America defies the tendency to focus only on the social structure of kinship and marriage that is so common in kinship studies. Instead, the contributors to this volume examine the people that conform to or deviate from that structure and their reasons for doing so. They look not only at deviations in kinship behavior motivated by gender, economics, politics, history, ecology, and sentimentality but also at how globalization and modernization are changing the ancestral norms and values themselves. This is a richly diverse portrayal of agency and individual choice alongside normative kinship and marriage systems in a region that has long been central to anthropological studies of indigenous life.

Paul Valentine is professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of East London. Stephen Beckerman is adjunct professor at the University of Utah. Together, Valentine and Beckerman have coedited Revenge in the Cultures of Lowland South America and Cultures of Multiple Fathers: The Theory and Practice of Partible Paternity in Lowland South America. Catherine Alès is director of research at the National Center for Scientific Research, Paris, and is the author of Yanomami, l’ire et le désir.

This volume reveals that individuals in Amazonian cultures often disregard or reinterpret the marriage rules of their societies—rules that anthropologists previously thought reflected practice. It is the first book to consider not just what the rules are but how people in these societies negotiate, manipulate, and break them in choosing whom to marry.Ethnographic case studies drawn on previously unpublished material from well-known indigenous cultures show that the peoples of lowland South America select spouses to meet their economic and political goals, their social aspirations, and their emotional desires. Contributors also look at how globalization and modernization are changing ancestral norms and values. This volume is a richly diverse portrayal of agency and individual choice alongside normative kinship and marriage systems in a region that has long been central to anthropological studies of indigenous life.

Inhabiting the rainforest of the southwest Maracaibo Basin, split by the border between Colombia and Venezuela, the BarÍ have survived centuries of incursions. Anthropologist Roberto Lizarralde began studying the BarÍ in 1960, when he made the first modern peaceful contact with this previously unreceptive people; he was joined by anthropologist Stephen Beckerman in 1970. The Ecology of the BarÍ showcases the findings of their singular long-term study.Detailing the BarÍ’s relations with natural and social environments, this work presents quantitative subsistence data unmatched elsewhere in anthropological publications. The authors’ lengthy longitudinal fieldwork provided the rare opportunity to study a tribal people before, during, and after their aboriginal patterns of subsistence and reproduction were eroded by the modern world. Of particular interest is the book’s exploration of partible paternity-the widespread belief in lowland South America that a child can have more than one biological father. The study illustrates its quantitative findings with an in-depth biographical sketch of the remarkable life of an individual BarÍ woman and a history of BarÍ relations with outsiders, as well as a description of the rainforest environment that has informed all aspects of BarÍ history for the past five hundred years. Focusing on subsistence, defense, and reproduction, the chapters beautifully capture the BarÍ’s traditional culture and the loss represented by its substantial transformation over the past half-century.

Studies in Anthropology: The Versatility of Kinship focuses on the dynamics involved in the special class of interpersonal ties that bind individuals to others. The selection first offers information on the variant usage in American kinship, uses of kinship in Kwaio, Solomon Islands, and incest and kinship structure. Discussions focus on incest categories in Cachama and Mamo, childhood bonds and adult residence, kinship with the dead, kinship, social identities, and behavior, and models of relatedness. The text then explores the biological, linguistic, and cultural aspects of the Hopi-Tewa system of mating in First Mesa, Arizona and the Navajo exogamic rules and preferred marriages. The publication ponders on the Kpelle negotiation of marriage and matrilateral ties and kinship and descent in the ethnic reassertion of the Eastern Creek Indians. Topics include social and cultural history, genealogy as social instrument, crystallization of the Eastern Creek community, Kpelle marriage and matrilateral ties, ethnographic background, and the negotiation of marriage and matrilateral ties. The selection is a valuable reference for anthropologists, sociologists, and readers interested in the dynamics of kinship.