The Absence of Social Categories Founded on the Idea of Mixing Among the Guna of Panama

Abstract

This paper is part of a larger study devoted to the conceptualization of the idea of mixing in different societies. The point of depart of this article is the idea that whereas humans always migrated and mated, transgressions of socio-cultural group boundaries not necessarily engendered new categories of classification for mixed offspring. By one hand, this article will discuss the possible causes that explain the absence of notions related to mixture, and, by the other, the conceptualisation of the foreign in the Comarca of Guna Yala (an autonomous region on the Atlantic coast of Panama in which, according to the latest population census, 99.5 percent of the population is self-defined as guna). This analysis is based on a diachronic perspective and ethnographic view on the sociopolitical structure, ontology, the conception of kinship and parenthood in the social guna world.