Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses how the San Blas Kuna use magic to overcome the hostility between hosts/visitors. How are guests turned into kin through magic as children are made humans through daily practices? And what if the guest is an anthropologist? Umbilical cord relations and magic are means to think through Kuna ways of conceiving the relations between hosts/guests and parents/children.

Paper long abstract:

Recent ethnographies on kinship studies in Lowland South America describe on how the relation between parents/children is equated to that of host/guests and how quotidian practices turn guest/strangers/children into kinspersons. What if kinship is created through the use of magical means? This paper offers an ethnographic account to think through the ambivalence of host/guest relations, the host being a Kuna family in village of Okopsukkun (San Blas Archipelago, Panamá) and the guest an anthropologist, caught in the net of magic. This ethnographic paper discusses how the Kuna use magic to overcome the ontological hostility immanent to the relations between hosts/visitors. How are guests turned into kin through magic as children are made humans through daily practices? And what if the guest is an anthropologist? Starting from a personal case where I was caught into magic - and for this reason keen to provide gifts to my hosts - I explore how the San Blas Kuna conceive blood relations as the product of 'umbilical cord relations' (mudup), characterized by sentiments of memory, generosity and sorrow for other kin, induced through quotidian practices as well as, rapidly, through magic. This paper shows that relations between hosts and guests are analogous to relations between parents and newborns, hosted in the womb or in the house of their matrilateral grandparents. It shows that kinship or host/guest relations can be made through magic - thus cosmology as well as quotidian practices may be well an issue to be considered to understand kinship.