ALL IN THE JUNKAB’AL: THE HOUSE IN Q’EQCHI’ SOCIETY Ashley Kistler Rollins College Introduction “Loq’on, loq’on!”, ‘Buy, buy!’, I called in early 2004, as I sat on the floor of Chamelco’s market with a basket of raxtul, assisting Doña Valeria1 , one of the market’s most prominent vendors. I had recently arrived in Chamelco and was learning about Q’eqchi’ market women by trying my own hand at marketing. Although I sold few pieces of fruit this day, I established rapport with Valeria. In the coming months, our relationship grew through my assistance in the market and she soon began to refer to me as, “walib’,” ‘daughter-in-law’. Other market women soon identified me as their “daughter”, “cousin”, “sister”, or “daughter-in-law”, as we created memories by working in the market and attending rituals together. I was no longer simply a gringa outsider, but became part of the community as a member of many Q’eqchi’ families.2 While I initially wondered how my market involvement qualified me as a type of kin, I realized that by working in the market, attending ritual celebrations with market women, making overnight visits to their homes, and sharing in their family celebrations, I had partially filled the criteria of Q’eqchi’ kinship. The Q’eqchi’ category of the junkab’al, which glosses as ‘one home,’ represents the center of family life. Individuals residing there become family without necessarily sharing a blood connection. Instead, the Q’eqchi’ establish kinship, they say, by forming relationships of trust, affection, and solidarity. During my years in the field, I earned a place in many women’s families by performing the shared substance of kinship through my continued involvement in the market and in their family lives. This fundamental insight into Q’eqchi’ kinship helped me to understand my own standing in the community and to consider the crucial relationship between kinship and other social realms. In this paper, I explore Q’eqchi’ junkab’als and analyze Q’eqchi’ kinship . I argue the junkab’al is the dominant category of Q’eqchi’ kinship and that the Q’eqchi’ identify individuals with whom they develop trust, confidence, and affection, earned through shared residence and market activities, as kin. While consanguinity plays a role in governing Q’eqchi’ kin relations, it is not the only, nor the most important, criteria for kinship . Instead, I argue that Q’eqchi’ women use market exchange, among other activities, to create and perform relationships of shared substance. They not only bring new individuals into their families through marketing, constituting and strengthening the junkab’al, but also use their junkab’al affiliations to legitimize themselves as marketers. I argue that for Chamelco’s marketers and their families, kinship and marketing are inextricably connected social systems. C 2012 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 85 The Latin Americanist, June 2013 First, I review the existing body of literature on Maya kinship that posits a patrilineal basis for Maya kinship. Next, I explain the junkab’al as a Q’eqchi’ kin category and examine the connection between kinship and marketing in Chamelco. This article’s comprehensive analysis of Q’eqchi’ kinship suggests that scholars should focus on the local categories that Maya communities use to define local kinship. It also reveals that one must explore kinship as connected to other prominent institutions, including gift and alienated exchange networks. From Blood and Biology to Houses and Homes Early kin studies identified lineal descent and consanguinity as universal determinants of kinship (Radcliffe-Brown 1952:70; Evans-Pritchard 1940; Fox 1967:41). These works suggest that lineage members inherit property , titles, and wealth from blood-related ancestors through whom they trace descent (Evans-Pritchard 1962: 272–296). More recent analyses of kinship, however, challenge descent theory and argue that lineage-based models of kinship cannot explain the nuances of indigenous kinship (Kuper 1988; Schneider 1984). Such works argue that genealogical descent is not a useful framework for studying kinship because it does not represent “folk models which actors anywhere have of their own societies” (Kuper 1982: 92). Kinship is not a natural institution, but rather a symbolic system...