Negotiating familial ideals through conversational narrative: Relationships of exchange in a Quiteño family

Abstract

This thesis utilizes data collected during the summer of 2005 to present a case-study ethnography of one middle-class mestizo family from Quito, Ecuador. It focuses on material and cultural constructions of ideal family roles and relationships fashioned and negotiated through stories told by family members to me and to each other, always in conversation. These conversational constructions, or tropes, discursively define the family and simultaneously structure decision-making. My focus rests on economic decision-making, and I investigate two key tropic constructions: cariño (care), which collapses economic and affective familial logics, and paternalism, in which a father, actual and symbolic, cares for an entire lineage—both his own direct kin and the families of his siblings—through the distribution of cariño. These tropes shape family members’ behavior and their relationships with each other. I end with a discussion of the potential for change, first detailing temporal transformations in tropes of the ideal father and then offering an example of the potential for the narrative contestation and transformation of tropic constructions of the ideal family.

Advisors: Jeffrey Cohen and Sabra Webber