Premium
Eating With Your Favourite Mother: Time And Sociality In A Brazilian Amerindian Community
Author(s) -
DE MATOS VIEGAS SUSANA
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
journal of the royal anthropological institute
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.62
H-Index - 62
eISSN - 1467-9655
pISSN - 1359-0987
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9655.t01-2-00002
Subject(s) - sociality , favourite , kinship , ethnography , socialization , sociology , frame (networking) , sacrifice , gender studies , social psychology , psychology , ethnology , anthropology , history , political science , law , ecology , telecommunications , archaeology , computer science , biology
This article is based on an ethnographic account of parent‐child relations in a Caboclo‐Indian community of south Bahia, Brazil. Raising a child by providing care and food is valued to such an extent that a child's mother may be the woman the child has chosen to be its mother. Choice is not understood as an act of free will, but as a time‐frame in the sense that choosing one's mother is a way of emphasizing the possibility of the unmaking or reversibility of parent‐child links. The article suggests a ‘sociality of becoming a being‐in‐the‐world’ as an alternative not only to the notion of socialization but also to the theoretical link between kinship and society. The Kid has changed the world and myself.
Not in the beginning
But bit by bit,
As I became attached to him
Andrei Tarkovskij, The sacrifice