Lo bello y lo común: desigualdades de valor y jerarquía rotativa entre los kayapó

Abstract

In order to explain the hierarchical organisation of the indigenous peoples of Amazonian and Central Brazil, like the Kayapo, The author argues that such hierarchical systems, (in the absence of “economies”) are based upon the reification and objectification of female functions and women’s maternal role, and can be only fully understood as “political economies of persons” . That is, a system in which a material surplus is not appropriated, but a surplus of objectified forms of value: “power” and “beauty”. It is a “revolving” hierarchical system in which the Kayapo persons produce themselves as such through a common process, conformed by “units of socially necessary production time” formally defined and recognised by collective rituals of passage. The male control upon female sexuality at household level, which is the basis of this system, transcends all the community when the family and the extend family group structure are symbolically projected on the community in rites of passage, ceremonies and communal groups who celebrate it, even in the layout and cosmogram of the Kayapo village. Would this be an attempt to “encompass” personal, emotional and sexual ties between genders, ties that conform the lower level in the social structure, that could be a threat to the Kayapo social organisation, its stability or its communal peace?