“Divorce is a bad omen.” Marital separations in the Tarabuco area today, with emphasis on the culture of the Yampara nation.

Abstract

In this article I present the results of the analysis of divorce in the Tarabuco area, with emphasis on the ongoing process of recovery of the identity of the Yampara nation. I call divorce or separation in the Tarabuco area the rupture of the process of consolidation of the couple, which would explain the low frequency of divorces registered in the Court and the high frequency of demands for family assistance/pension, intensified by the phenomenon of youth emigration. It is argued that the silence on divorce in academic sources responds to an epistemological problem: The functionalist order as an ontological principle underlies most Andean anthropologies throughout the 20th century, in which marriage and family appear as two solid rocks for analysis. The article has two parts: a first, theoretical one, in which I present the anthropology of divorce (pts. 1-2) and a second, empirical one, with data from field work in the area (pts. 3-5), and a conclusion (pt. 6) and bibliography (pt. 7).