Replication and growth in cassava cultivation and uxorilocal women’s relations among the Waiwai: a mother's reckoning with death and social change

Authors

Laura H. Mentore, University of Mary WashingtonFollow

Keywords

Cassava; Manioc; Uxorilocality; Episodic time; Replication; Women; Waiwai

Abstract

Through an ethnographic examination of the shared capacities of cassava and womanhood for what I term growth and replication, I argue that Waiwai sociality seeks to curtail the trajectory of life towards finite death through the intervening act of cutting and replanting or replicating life in a vegetatively inspired form of the “episodic present” (Strathern 2021). An extended vignette demonstrates how these features of Waiwai sociality take shape in mother-daughter and sister relations at the core of uxorilocal residential living, and in a senior woman’s reckonings with illness, death, and social change.

Recommended Citation

Mentore, Laura H. (2024). "Replication and growth in cassava cultivation and uxorilocal women’s relations among the Waiwai: a mother's reckoning with death and social change", Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America: Vol. 20: Iss. 1, Article 5.
Available at: https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/tipiti/vol20/iss1/5