Demography and anthropology in counterpoint: the Enawene-Nawe and their matrimonial drifts

Abstract

This article has a twofold objective, one is of documental character and the other of theoretical nature. On the one hand, it aims to provide information that allows to outline the demographic profile of an Amerindian people in the Brazilian Southern Amazon, and contrast this quantitative data with anthropological information, in the key of the native ideas and values that are, in some ways, implicated in this profile. It is expected that such a combination may yield meanings that are lacking when these series of data are considered separately, as is the case in a musical counterpoint. On the other hand, the article draws attention to the analytical interest of an empirical phenomenon that is rarely explored, though frequently intuited in ethnographic research: the networks of “matrimonial rings” weaved by these peoples. The study of these networks brings to the forefront a region of interdisciplinary frontier that demands a deepening of the dialogue between the demography of small scale societies and the anthropology of kinship, both concerned, in their own ways, with the forms of reproduction of these collectives.