Parenté et organisation sociale chez les Wayùu. Retour sur la question

Abstract

In this paper, the author revisits some debated or scarcely explored issues regarding the field of kinship and of social organization among the Wayuu of the Guajira peninsula (Northern Colombia and Venezuela). I take as a starting point the disagreement between Goulet and Saler on the existence and the place that descent categories and groups hold in the Wayuu social world, supporting the latter’s view that they can be grasped not only in myths about the origin of Wayuu society but also in the several ways and concepts that refer to the common uterine ancestry of a group of relatives as well as to the processes of development, reproduction and subdivision of matrilineal descent groups. In the second part of the paper, I deal with a number of questions posited by the ethnographic information about Wayuu kinship terminology: the differences existing among scholars’ reports, the availability of different terminological options both to address or to refer to a same kin-type, the interpretation of the social correlates of its Crow-type features. I argue that most of these issues require to undertake, along with an ethnographical approach, a diachronic as well as historic approach in the study of Wayuu social organization.