This volume reveals that individuals in Amazonian cultures often disregard or reinterpret the marriage rules of their societies-rules that anthropologists previously thought reflected practice. It is the first book to consider not just what the rules are but how people in these societies negotiate, manipulate, and break them in choosing whom to marry. Ethnographic case studies drawn on previously unpublished material from well-known indigenous cultures show that the peoples of lowland South America select spouses to meet their economic and political goals, their social aspirations, and their emotional desires. Contributors also look at how globalization and modernization are changing ancestral norms and values. This volume is a richly diverse portrayal of agency and individual choice alongside normative kinship and marriage systems in a region that has long been central to anthropological studies of indigenous life.

Inhabiting the rainforest of the southwest Maracaibo Basin, split by the border between Colombia and Venezuela, the Bari have survived centuries of incursions. Anthropologist Roberto Lizarralde began studying the Bari in 1960, when he made the first modern peaceful contact with this previously unreceptive people; he was joined by anthropologist Stephen Beckerman in 1970. The Ecology of the Bari showcases the findings of their singular long-term study. Detailing the Bari's relations with natural and social environments, this work presents quantitative subsistence data unmatched elsewhere in anthropological publications. The authors' lengthy longitudinal fieldwork provided the rare opportunity to study a tribal people before, during, and after their aboriginal patterns of subsistence and reproduction were eroded by the modern world. Of particular interest is the book's exploration of partible paternity-the widespread belief in lowland South America that a child can have more than one biological father. The study illustrates its quantitative findings with an in-depth biographical sketch of the remarkable life of an individual Bari woman and a history of Bari relations with outsiders, as well as a description of the rainforest environment that has informed all aspects of Bari history for the past five hundred years. Focusing on subsistence, defense, and reproduction, the chapters beautifully capture the Bari's traditional culture and the loss represented by its substantial transformation over the past half-century.