Equivalence, Personhood and Relationality: Processes of Relatedness Among the Hoti of Venezuelan Guiana

The Hoti are a small group of isolated Amerindian hunter‐horticulturalists living in central Venezuelan Guiana. They are arguably amongst the most egalitarian people described in Amazonian ethnography. Hoti place great emphasis on settlement endogamy, and the imperative to marry ‘people of the same kind’ (rather than strangers), coupled with the small size of settlements and the absence of any notion of genealogical relatedness between persons, means that marriages often take place within close genealogical range and in many cases even between siblings. For Hoti neither the notion of ‘incest’ nor its ‘prohibition’ is meaningful, for without genealogy how can there be incest? Rather than focus on the lack of an ‘incest prohibition’, I explore Hoti ways of relating, which are revealed by this intriguing ‘absence’. Hoti relationality is experiential and not genealogical, and rests upon cosmological knowledges that appear to underlie the Hoti's distinctively egalitarian sociality.