(Re)thinking complementarity

This chapter complements the theoretical debates revisiting the anthropological studies on kinship among Aymara groups in the territories of the Andean Tri-border. Several worldviews that will appear in the ethnographic chapters of the volume are described and explained. First, the logics of Aymara symbolic complementarity are addressed. Their relationships to the patterns of kinship, mobility, and territorial occupation in different orographic platforms of the Atacama Desert are also discussed. Then, Aymara marriage (chachawarmi) and its connections with patterns of gender conflict are addressed, thus explaining the persistence of hierarchical forms of masculine domination. By exploring these debates, the chapter retrieves the current political debate of Indigenous women leaders in Bolivia, which makes visible the inequities reproduced when idyllic visions of gender equality in Aymara communities become mainstream political ideas

Biology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Migration, Education, Indigenous Social Dynamics · Politics and Society in Latin America · Psychology