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Kinship and Gender As Political Processes Among the Miskitu Of University of London Kinship and Gender as Political Processes among the Miskitu of Eastern Nicaragua by Mark Angus Jamieson A thesis submitted to the Anthropology Department of the London School of Economics and Political Science for the degree of Ph.D. 1995 UMI Number: U084589 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U084589 Published by ProQuest LLC 2014. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 &to N > 6 JS % o <■* 72 V \$ H L OF POLITICAL AND ,£^ic ’Marriage is in early stages of society a civil contract Thus, among the wild hunting-tribes of Nicaragua, the lad who wishes a girl for a wife kills a deer and lays it with a heap of firewood at the door of her parents' hut, which symbolical act is his offer to hunt and do man's work; if the gift is accepted, it is a marriage, without further ceremony.' E. B. Tylor (1937 [1881]: 132) Anthropology: an introduction to the study of man and civilization (2 vols). London: Watts and Co. This custom has a great influence in softening the manners of the men, and places the ladies in a very commanding position; indeed daughters are at a premium, instead of being at a discount, as with other savage tribes' Bedford Pirn and Berthold Seemann (1869: 306-307) Dottings on the roadside in Panama, Nicaragua and Mosquito. London: Chapman and Hall. ABSTRACT This thesis is concerned with local concepts of kinship and personhood in a small Miskitu village named Kakabila in eastern Nicaragua, and examines how gender identities are organised around a culturally specific variant of the set of practices which anthropologists have glossed as 'brideservice'. Personhood in Kakabila is focussed on the establishment of a stable conjugal partnership. Men usually attach themselves to the households of their conjugal partners, and attempt to legitimate their claims to their wives by uxorilocal postnuptial residence and the practice of long term brideservice. The central concern of many Kakabila men therefore is with demonstrating that they conduct themselves with their affines harmoniously in accordance with village ideals. For many men, however, the eventual objective is to detach their wives from the influence of consanguineal kin, and this produces a tension between the need to project affinal harmony and the concern that actions may be construed in terms of elopement. Kakabila women, however, tend to be much more concerned with constructing networks of symbolic exchange and mutual assistance among themselves, particularly with their consanguineal kinswomen. In many cases, therefore, women resist the attempts of husbands and sons-in-law to disrupt these networks, and organise their actions around ensuring that errant husbands and junior male affines adequately supply them with sufficient symbolic capital to adequately maintain and cultivate these networks. This thesis, therefore, suggests a very specific formulation of the logic of gender identities in Kakabila, where brideservice is as much a style of distribution as it is a 'style of consumption1 (Collier and Rosaldo 1981: 275), based on a particular disjunction between men's and women's motivations. This thesis also considers the changes in Miskitu kinship in terms of changes which have taken place among the Miskitu during the last three hundred years, particularly the marked trading and political imbalances brought about by long term contact with the English speaking Caribbean countries. The disappearance of the historically attested distinction between cross and parallel cousins and the serial exchange of offspring and siblings, and the emergence of uxorilocal postnuptial residence, are analysed in terms of a gradual historical reformulation of Miskitu notions of affinity which owes a great deal to these regional contacts. An ethnographically and historically informed analysis for these transformations is considered, which in turn is used to shed light on gender identities and the practice of brideservice in present day Kakabila. I am especially indebted to Danilo Salamanca who accepted my request to join CIDCA as an affiliate researcher, and whose interest in my work and practical help was a great encouragement throughout my stay in Nicaragua. At the CIDCA - Managua office I would particularly like to thank Betty Munoz, Alvaro Rivas and Dennis Williamson for their stimulating company and ideas, and Marlyn Webster and Danilo Perez for their concern and practical assistance. At CIDCA - Bluefields I take pleasure in acknowledging debts of thanks to Professor Hugo Sujo, Roberto Rigby and Karen Levy for their patience and help, and for sharing their knowledge of the Bluefields and Pearl Lagoon areas with me. In Managua, Marcos Mimbrenos of the Sociology Department of the Universidad de Centroam6rica also took an interest in my ideas about kinship, while Ken Hale and Tom Green, both linguists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gave me a great deal of useful advice about doing fieldwork among the Miskitu. I learned a great deal from Mister Max Attily, Miss Deborah Schwarz, Dr Marc Isler, Lance Leverenz, Jonathan Hogg and Simon the keycutter in Bluefields and El Bluff, while in Pearl Lagoon and Haulover the same is true of Mister Charles Archibald, Eric Timar, Miss Lucille Bloomfield, Mister Sam Hebbert, Steve and Brian (from the sawmill), Mister Kem Hebbert, Miss Ingrid Cuthbert, Patrick Christie, Stephanie Barbee and Mister Mackie Tinkam. I would also like to thank Hans-Peter Buvollen, Hai Almquist and Silvia for hospitality, good company and transport in Puerto Cabezas, and for sharing some of their considerable knowledge of the RAAN with me. In Awastara I would like to thank Pastor Victor Fenley for his hospitality, as well as Reynaldo "R&faga" Reyes and Mister Bowman Huffington, while in Saklin I owe a very special debt of thanks to kuka Odely. My greatest debt, of course, is to the people of Kakabila who put up with me for fifteen months. I believe I owe a debt of thanks to each and every one of them for one reason or another, and it is only for reasons of space that I do not thank them all by name. I feel that most Kakabila people would be horrified that I should be calculating debts for hospitality and friendship; nevertheless there are some of whom I feel I must make special mention. Firstly, I would like to thank my landlord and landlady Mister Mercado Garth and Miss Evinette Garth for their generous consideration and attentions. Secondly, I must mention my special friends, all of whom made my stay particularly enjoyable in one way or another; in no particular order these are Compadre Palford Theodore, Mister Rafael Bonilla, Miss Beulah Bonilla, Mister Bemadino Schwarz, Miss Rachel Schwarz, Mister Herman Humphries, Miss Virginia Humphries, Mister Charlie Humphries, Miss Loisa Theodore, Mister Eddie Garth, Silvia Archibald and Neysi Theodore. I would also like to thank dama "Prophet” Florentin Joseph for his treatment of my fractured arm and for imparting to me a little of his incomparable knowledge of the Miskitu way of doing things correctly. Above all, however, I acknowledge my huge debt to Mister John, Miss Chavela Schwarz and their daughter Comadre Loma Theodore Schwarz. John Schwarz, Miss Chavela and my Comadre made me both a friend and a member of their family, and without them this thesis would have been immeasurably poorer. It is to John, Miss Chavela and Comadre Loma that this thesis is dedicated. Language notes This thesis contain words and phrases from Nicaraguan English and Spanish as well as Miskitu. Words and phrases in Nicaraguan English and Spanish, such as "plantation” and "testigo", are placed in double quotation marks. Miskitu words, however, such as lamlat, appear in italics. Readers should also note that quotations recorded verbatim, including those in Miskitu which are also italicised, are also placed in double quotation marks. Translations of Miskitu and Nicaraguan English utterances, as well as quotations from published sources, appear in single quotation marks. The standardised Miskitu orthography developed by the Moravian linguists and used here, is very straightforward, and Miskitu pronounciation is entirely predictable from this orthography. There are three vowels in Miskitu: a, i and u, the values of these being identical to those with the same orthographic representation in Spanish. The consonants p,b,I,d,t,k,m,n,w and s, and the semi-vowel y, however, have the same values as they do in English. The reader should note that letter s always represents the unvoiced sound, that the letter r represents a flapped rather than a retroflex sound, and that the letter h, which always appears in syllable final position, represents a palatalised fricative, sometimes almost assuming a [s] value in Kakabila pronounciation. One should also note however that vowels and consonants from Nicaragua English, supposedly unlicensed in Miskitu, occasionally feature in Miskitu language utterances in Kakabila, particularly the consonant f and the vowels e and o which have the same value as they do in Spanish. Finally it is important to be aware that stress invariably occurs on the first syllable in Miskitu (see Heath 1913,1927,1950; Conzemius 1929; Heath and Marx 1961, 1983; CIDCA 1985). In this thesis I make no attempt to capture Nicaraguan English pronouncations, the sound pattern of which in fact is rather like that of other Western Caribbean varieties of English.
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