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Shamans, Wives, Families: An Isoseño Case Considered Using Turner On Kayapo Dominance And Beauty, Kathleen B. Lowrey

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

In this essay I describe what I have seen elapse over twenty years in the lives (and sometimes deaths) of two shamans and their respective wives in Isoso, an indigenous community of Guarani-speaking people in the Bolivian Chaco. These shamans’ two different kinds of shamanic practice, their two different sorts of marriage, and the two different life-trajectories of their wives resonate with the dual nature of Isoso itself and its historical constitution. The reproduction of a hierarchical Arawakan way of life through feminine submission to a Guarani “egalitarianism” of masculine dominance has been, I suspect, a dynamic of long standing …