Tributes to Human Endurance

• Published in: Contemporary sociology (Washington) 1986-09, Vol.15 (5), p.698-700
• Main Authors: Fernandez-Kelly, M. Patricia, Bunster, Ximena, Chaney, Elsa M., Smith, Raymond T.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Kinship; Latin America; Peru; Review Essays; Working Women
• ISSN: 0094-3061; 1939-8638
• DOI: 10.2307/2071017

A review essay on Ximena Bunster's & Elsa M. Chaney's Sellers and Servants: Working Women in Lima, Peru (New York: Praeger, 1985); & Kinship Ideology and Practice in Latin America (Smith, Raymond T. [Ed], Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 1984 [see listings in IRPS No. 35]). The lack of choices for poor Peruvian women is described compassionately in Sellers and Servants; the only employment possibilities for most of them are as servants or street vendors. As servants they may find considerate treatment but are almost sure to be dismissed if they become pregnant. As street vendors, on the other hand, although harassed by authorities, middlemen, & more established merchants, they can keep their children with them. The study is judged to be a commendable, unsentimental piece of work. In Kinship Ideology and Practice in Latin America, the idiom of kinship in selected areas of Latin America & the Caribbean is described, as well as its varying meaning according to SC & ethnicity. While the wealthy use kinship to maintain resources, power, & influences, the poor resort to kinship to extend & maximize their access to basic subsistence. Kinship Ideology and Practice in Latin America is found to be "that rarest of findings, an anthology with a thorough treatment of a unifying theme.". S. McAneny