Makushi women feed: the body & social change in Guyana's Indigenous hinterland

Thesis

This thesis describes the everyday feeding practices of Makushi women enacted at different moments across their life courses. It moves between the moments surrounding childbirth and marriage, to the places of forest farm swiddens and cassava houses, adolescence and secondary school, the clinic and moments of death, and dying, mourning and funerary rites. In the first two chapters, I begin by describing Makushi cassava cultivation and processing. I show how these forms of labour constitute a variant of feeding practice that effectively interweaves productive and reproductive capacities within women’s bodies and in tandem with place. Tracing the idioms through which Makushi people discuss social change, I show young, menarcheal women’s bodies as the central site through which these transformations are embodied and discussed. It is a bodily site, which is particularly appropriate because, as I suggest, it is precisely when reproductive capacities might be interwoven or made distinct from productive ones. I suggest that the school is a primary agent in rendering these capacities distinct and further show that these transformations occur not only in young women’s bodies but also in the places where these re/productive capacities are bound or severed. Finally, this thesis considers how some Makushi women experimented with feeding practices to make everyday intervening actions, especially during the moments surrounding illness and death. I suggest that these interventions work to claim generative outside vitalities and reconstitute social boundaries on which the health of shared bodiliness depends. I close this thesis by showing how Makushi people, even given these significant transformations, continue to enact their most highly valued social dispositions - demonstrating how these everyday and domestic interventions simultaneously allow for new collective possibilities to emerge.

Authors: Hoskins, C

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-n6kkjkqwv
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Makushi; Guyana; Amazonia; gender; corporality
• Subjects: Rupununi (Guyana)--History; Anthropology; Macusi Indians