The Elementary Structuring of Patriarchy

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Based on an ethnographic study on the Andean Tri-border (between Chile, Peru, and Bolivia), this volume addresses the experience of Aymara cross-border women from Bolivia employed in the rural valleys on the outskirts of Arica (Chile's northernmost city). As protagonists of transborder mobility circuits in the Atacama Desert, these women are intersectionally impacted by different forms of social vulnerability. With a feminist anthropological perspective, the book investigates how the boundaries of gender are constructed in the (multi)situated experience of these transborder women. By building a bridge between classical anthropological studies on kinship and contemporary debates on transnational and transborder mobility, the book invites us to rethink structuralist theoretical assertions on the elementary character of family alliances. The women's life histories and the ethnographic data analyzed show that the limits of gender are configured as a triad between gender violence, kinship restrictions, and female mobility for the study's protagonists. This contributes to denaturalizing both the androcentrism of the classic arguments on kinship and the emphasis on the experiences of circulation of contemporary theories. Consequently, this book also contributes to the field of border studies by overcoming the insistent invisibility of the role of women in border regions through a model of analysis that privileges female discourses, experiences, affections, and practices. The book's focus on the reproductive tasks performed by the women allows a rethinking of the relationship between gender violence and female care as a key element to the survival of indigenous groups in border areas.