Replication and growth in cassava cultivation and uxorilocal women’s relations among the Waiwai: a mother's reckoning with death and social change
Document Type
Article
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
10.70845/2572-3626.1382
Journal Title
Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America
Publication Date
5-2024
Abstract
Through an ethnographic examination of the shared capacities of cassava and womanhood for what I term growth and replication, I argue that Waiwai sociality seeks to curtail the trajectory of life towards finite death through the intervening act of cutting and replanting or replicating life in a vegetatively inspired form of the “episodic present” (Strathern 2021). An extended vignette demonstrates how these features of Waiwai sociality take shape in mother-daughter and sister relations at the core of uxorilocal residential living, and in a senior woman’s reckonings with illness, death, and social change.
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Recommended Citation
Mentore, Laura H. (2024). "Replication and growth in cassava cultivation and uxorilocal women’s relations among the Waiwai: a mother's reckoning with death and social change", Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America: Vol. 20: Iss. 1, 103-128.
Comments
This open access article is available through the hard work of Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.