Abstract
As they grow, Cashinahua boys and girls acquire gendered human agency through their embodied experiences and the conscious work of their kin and close affines. Men and women come to occupy specific relations with the interior and the exterior of the social domain they construct through their daily productive and consumptive activities, such that women are associated with the former and men with the latter in the constitution of sociality. A classic ethnological depiction might say that, in the first instance, relations with the exterior are conducted by men, take the form of predation or of exchange and use the language of affinity. Yet what happens when the outsider has the form of a female? This article discusses my own incomplete transformation from Nawa (Outsider) to Ainbu Kuin (Real Woman), thus re-examining the relationship between alterity and the embodiment of gender in the light of my own experiences.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 2 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1-24 |
| Number of pages | 24 |
| Journal | Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Publication status | Published - 2009 |
Keywords
- gender
- Cashinahua
- alterity
- Indigenous peoples
- Amazonia