Sunday, November 3, 2013

The Awa Tribe and Kinship

The Awa tribe live in extended family groups in which they include all relatives of the family. They would all go on gathering trips together where everyone helps gather nuts and berries. The Awa people, both the men and women are allowed to have many marriages. The gender differences are related to the tasks they perform. The Awa men typically hunt bigger game and the Awa women gather and hunt small prey. The Awa women are also responsible for the child bearing and breasting feeding their own babies as well as being surrogate mothers for baby monkeys. The Awa tribe chief is an elder woman in the tribe. She lives in a central hut in the middle of the settlement.  Her duties vary from arranging marriages in the tribe to delivering new born babies. The Awa tribe demonstrate a Dravidian type of kinship. However, because the tribe is very much un-contacted and almost extinct it is hard to trace back the former kinship of the original populations.

Arona, Lauren 2013, Indigenous Group: Awa. Electronic Document. http://prezi.com/w_250yiv-lio/indigenous-group-awa/, accessed November 3, 2013.

Posted by at

1 comment:

  1. UnknownNovember 5, 2013 at 12:49 PM

    I think that the Awa tribe has a great way of respecting both genders as they allow both men and women to get married multiple times. Their relationship with their environment and the animals around them is a beautiful one. Especially how they embrace monkeys as their own kin, breast feeding and raising them from birth. It is unfortunate however, that because of extinction and the lack of contact the original kinship of the group is hard to track. It is clear though that the Awa tribe value the family bond as they do many things together such as going on gathering trips. It is as though the tribe is one family now seeing that their populations have dwindle as much as they have.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)