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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

symbolic, kinship, K'iche', socio-cultural, filial interrelations, Nahuala

College

Family, Home, and Social Sciences

Department

Anthropology

Abstract

Kinship studies was a central concern of socio-cultural anthropology for decades. The centrality of kinship within the discipline was due to the traditional anthropological practice of studying social structure among small-scale societies. Social anthropologists found that kinship provides people with an effective form of organization in the absence of a state. In many small-scale societies, descent determines the economic, political, religious, and social position of individuals. By the second half of the twentieth century kinship studies faced a rapid decline within social anthropology, in part because some anthropologists found that kinship studies were based on Western presuppositions about the biogenetic nature of filial relatedness. Kinship studies within anthropology was largely nonexistant during the 1970’s and 1980’s. Recent years have seen a resurgence of kinship studies among anthropology spurred by interest in gender studies and new reproductive technologies. In studying kinship, contemporary anthropologists try to describe the ways in which people understand their own filial interrelations. These relations can be both biological and social. In this study I have tried to take up these contemporary concerns in the context of Nahuala, a Maya town in the Guatemalan highlands. I argue here that the K’iche’ of Nahuala understand their own filial relations according to several modes. Individual K’iche’ families combine these common modes of relatedness in complex and idiosyncratic ways according to their own experience and understanding.

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