The bridegroom's abduction in the wedding ceremony and in everyday kinship

Discover the third session of the 2024-2025 Americanist Anthropology Seminar: The bridegroom's abduction in the wedding ceremony and in everyday kinship: a pragmatic analysis of co-residence and consubstantiality among the Guna in Panama.

"The experience of uxorilocality, as observed in Gunayala, is a total social fact. Focusing on the traditional ceremony of marriage through the bridegroom's abduction, we examine the anthropological problem of exogamy in such a system through the mythological, ritual and sociological foundations of post-marital residence. With matricasa seen as a trap, i.e. a nexus of agency and intention condensed into a material device (i.e. vernacular architecture and its practical symbolism), Guna kinship is analyzed as a prosaic relational experience, deriving from the habitual sharing of reproductive resources in the context of consubstantiality and determined by situated strategies or interpersonal conflicts in co-residence disputes. The consequences of residential aesthetics and its relational ethos on the formation of the masculine ethos are finally discussed. In the personal songs addressed to them, male children are warned from an early age that they will leave their natal home and no longer live with consanguineous wives, after marriage; and married men are instructed, as part of marriage counseling, to direct their thoughts in favor of the wife and her own children (living in the marriage home) as an indispensable condition for definitive settlement in the post-marital home of residence. From the marriage ritual to everyday kinship, the bridegroom's abduction translates into a “domestic economy of affects” for the Guna."

• Diego MADI DIAS (Faculdade de Saúde Pública, Universidade de São Paulo)
• Cedric Yvinec (CNRS-Mondes Américains-CRBC)