MAKING KIN - KINSHIP THEORY AND ZUMBAGUA ADOPTIONS

The biological definition oi family at the root of functionalist kinsh ip theory has been rightly criticized by contemporary feminist and sym bolic anthropologists, but in retreating into an antinatural position such critiques simply recapitulate the limitations of an opposition be tween nature and culture in which the former is prior and essential, t he latter secondary and historical. From the perspective of Zumbagua, where people become parents by feeding and caring for children over ex tended periods of time, both schools of thought are not only inadequat e to explain fully the material bases of local practice but are repres entative of a specific Western-bourgeois ideology that indigenous peop le actively oppose.