Kashinawa - Marriage and Family

Marriage. The ideal is for two male double first cross cousins to exchange sisters in marriage (i.e., each man marries a woman who is both his mother's brother's daughter and father's sister's son and each woman is married to a man who is both her mother's brother's son and father's sister's son. Since the ideal rarely obtains, a first cross cousin is preferred over more distant members of the linked marriage section. Sexual relations with persons other than those in the appropriate marriage section are considered incestuous, but only incest with primary kin is prohibited. Polygyny is considered desirable by most Kashinawa, both male and female, but only seventeen of sixty-four males were in polygynous unions in Peru between 1955 and 1968; one man had four wives, one had three, and fifteen had two wives. The ideal polygynous marriage is for a man to marry two or more actual sisters.

Domestic Unit. The Kashinawa recognize the nuclear family or, in the case of polygynous unions, a woman and her children and the husband she shares with another woman, as the basic building block of the society. But for social, economic, and political purposes, this unit has little autonomy because it almost always operates as part of a larger unit, the extended family. Postmarital residence is with the parents of the wife; the husband is obligated to assist his parents-in-law and support them politically and economically. A man makes a garden for each of his wives and provides each of them with game from the hunt. His wives cook some of the meat but distribute much of it to their mothers, sisters, and other kin. In polygynous families, each wife has her own cooking hearth and utensils and prepares food for herself, her children, and her husband. Generosity and sharing of food is a hallmark of Kashinawa sociality. Men and, to a lesser extent, women share work activities and the products of those efforts. Thus, although the nuclear family is basic to the production process, the extended family and, to a degree, the entire community are the basic unit of consumption.

Inheritance Men and women own the tools they make, use, and/or exchange. They are expected to be generous with these possessions during their lifetime, but at death their possessions are buried with them; steel axes, machetes, knives, and shotguns are often exempt from this practice. Names are inherited; a man gets his names from his father's father, a woman from her mother's mother.

Socialization. Children are socialized within the context of the extended family household. Although parents, particularly the mother, have primary responsibility for training children, the maternal grandparents and paternal grandparents, if resident in the village, play a significant role in socialization, as do older sisters, who have considerable responsibility for assisting their mothers with child care. Corporal punishment is rarely used; it usually occurs when a parent has become exasperated with a child's intransigence. An adult who strikes a child (or even another adult) is thought to have committed an offense worse than the one that precipitated the physical attack.