The fish people: linguistic exogamy and Tukanoan identity in northwest Amazonia

Jackson, Jean E. (Jean Elizabeth)

Book

The fish people: linguistic exogamy and Tukanoan identity in northwest Amazonia

Cambridge University Press • (39) • Published In 1983 • Pages: xix, 287

By: Jackson, Jean E. (Jean Elizabeth).

Abstract
This book is primarily a study of the Bará or Fish People, one of several Tukanoan groups living in the Colombian Northwest Amazon. These people '…form part of an unusual network of intermarrying local communities scattered along the rivers of the region. Each community belongs to one of sixteen different groups that speak sixteen different languages, and marriages must take place between people not only from different communities but with different primary languages. In a network of this sort, which defies the usual label of 'tribe', social identity assumes a distinct and unusual configuration. In this book, Jean Jackson's incisive discussions of Bará marriage, kinship, spatial organization, and other features of the social and geographic landscape show how Tukanoans (as participants in the network are collectively known) conceptualize and tie together their universe of widely scattered communities, and how an individual's identity emerges in terms of relations with others' (back cover). Also discussed in the text are the effects of the Tukanoan's increasing dependency on the national and global political economy and their decreasing sense of self-worth and cultural autonomy.

Speech

Linguistic identification

Regulation of marriage

HRAF PubDate

1998

Region

South America