Toward An Anthropology of Ingratitude: Notes From Andean Kinship

Comparative Studies in Society and History 2013;55(3):554–578.
0010-4175/13 $15.00 # Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2013
doi:10.1017/S0010417513000248
Toward an Anthropology of Ingratitude:

Notes from Andean Kinship
J E S S A C A B. LE I N AW E AV E R
Department of Anthropology, Brown University
I begin this essay with the words of my neighbor Deysi, a working-class store-
keeper with an infectious smile. When she learned that I had returned to the
Peruvian city of Ayacucho to conduct research in a local home for the indigent
aged, she remarked casually that its elderly residents ultimately had been insti-
tutionalized because they did not “give their children a profession and a good
education.” By contrast, Deysi explained, if a parent had provided a child with
a good education leading to a career, the child “with gratitude always loves his
parents, and thanks them.” When I impertinently inquired whether her children
might one day put her in the institution, Deysi said within the hearing of at least
three of her seven, “I don’t think they’d be that ungrateful.”1
Deysi’s words made me think differently about how the relationship
between parents and children is characterized in the urban Andean context.
To begin with, I found it noteworthy that as I tried to figure out who should
be caring for old people, remarks like Deysi’s kept pulling me back in time
to urge an understanding of how those old people had cared for their own chil-
dren. This suggested that the phenomenon of kinship care must be considered
Acknowledgments: Several colleagues graciously read various iterations of this article and offered
invaluable comments: Nicole S. Berry, Marcy Brink-Danan, Bianca Dahl, Paja Faudree, Marida
Hollos, Jeffrey Jurgens, Yukiko Koga, Catherine Lutz, Simone Poliandri, Elizabeth F. S.
Roberts, Becky Schulthies, Elana Shever, Andrew Shryock, Daniel Jordan Smith, and Joshua
Tucker. Several anonymous CSSH reviewers also made suggestions that have immensely improved
the article. Portions of an earlier version were presented at the Society for Latin American and Car-
ibbean Anthropology Meeting (Santa Fe, 2009); the American Ethnological Society/Canadian
Anthropological Society Joint Meeting (Vancouver, 2009); the Latin American Studies Association
Meeting (Rio de Janeiro, 2009); and a workshop at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro in
2009. I thank the audience members at those sessions for comments and suggestions. This article is
based on research funded by a Fulbright IIE grant, a Wenner-Gren Foundation grant, a National
Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant, and a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship. Additional
funding was provided by the University of Michigan, the University of Manitoba, and Brown Uni-
versity. With no irony intended, I am forever grateful to those in Peru who have contributed to my
research.
1
All names are pseudonyms. Quotes are my translations from the words I originally recorded in
my fieldnotes: in this case, “no les dieron profesión, no les dieron buena educación” … “en agra-
decimiento siempre aman a sus padres, agradecen” … “no creo que serán tan desagradecidos.”
554
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T O WA R D A N A N T H R O P O L O G Y O F I N G R AT I T U D E 555
using a life-course perspective, for actions of caregiving for an aged parent in

the present may be seen as responsive to other moral actions taken by that
parent in the past, just as actions of caring for a small child in the present
may be seen as gesturing toward a future in which the actions will be repaid.
Secondly, given the almost calculated formulation I have just outlined in
which care is demarcated as reciprocal, I would not have expected gratitude to
be as closely involved as Deysi insisted it was. My own folk understanding of
kinship, gratitude, and obligation led me to think that kinship relations are
thought to entail obligations, and that actions performed in consonance with
obligations do not require a response of gratitude.2 I took this understanding
not only from my own experience but also from conversations with middle-
class friends in Ayacucho. During my fieldwork in Peru’s governmental adop-
tion program a few years earlier (Leinaweaver 2008b), for example, a staff
member in Ayacucho had articulated for me her formulation of kinship as
rooted in a naturalized kind of duty and obligation, rather than gift and grati-
tude: “Sons and daughters are obliged to tend to and care for their parents.
It’s a natural obligation, you see? So no one demands it of them—the relation-
ship itself is what pushes them to tend to one another.”3 To be sure, the adoption
office is a site where much effort is invested in creating relationships between
parents and children that align with middle-class norms of kinship.4 Deysi’s
words suggested that there might be other ways to make sense of parent-child
relationships.
Where the adoption office employee naturalized kinship obligations,
Deysi’s words denaturalized them: If the parent provides the child with edu-
cation and career, then the child loves the parents. In so doing Deysi empha-
sized one of the most widely noted attributes of Andean kinship, namely,
that its participants experience it as constructed or produced (Van Vleet
2008; Weismantel 1995). By bringing together this sense that kinship is
actively constructed with statements like Deysi’s about the precise kinds of par-
ental care that incite children to feel grateful and to respond accordingly, we can
2
The U.S.-based psychology literature argues that gratitude can only occur when the recipient
believes the gift was freely, intentionally given rather than springing from an obligation or duty
(Roberts 2004: 61; McCullough and Tsang 2004: 126; Emmons 2004: 5–6). Yet since I have
been writing this essay I find myself identifying unexpected formulations of gratitude in everyday
exchanges—the “Just doing my job” response to a thank you implies that gratitude is not required
for obliged actions, and my colleague Paja Faudree reminds me that “Thank you for your service” is
commonly spoken to members of the military.
3
Yet it is now a legal obligation for grown children to care for their aged parents, as of 2006,
when Peru’s congress passed Law 28803, the Ley de las Personas Adultas Mayores. The legislation
of this “natural” obligation is one hint that it is not universally perceived as such.
4
When gratitude language appears in the adoption office, I think it is reflective not solely of
local ideas about parent-child relations but of broader discourses of adoption as rescue (Dubinsky
2010). For example, the social worker quoted above asked me to convey in English to a U.S. mother
of two Peruvian children that “we never tire of thanking her family,” because their having adopted
the girls was “a change in the girls’ destiny.”
556 J E S S A C A B . L E I N AW E AV E R
see shifts in kinship obligations in Ayacucho within a context of social trans-

formation and differentiation.
For Deysi, gratitude is central to kinship obligations, and the referent of
the gratitude—the “benefit” that the child is receiving from the parent—is cru-
cially linked to local notions of progress that encompass education and profes-
sionalization. In present-day Ayacucho, ideologies of progress are widely
shared and education is seen as powerfully transformative—in some interpret-
ations it has the power to whiten (de la Cadena 1998; Degregori 1997; García
2005; Leinaweaver 2008b; Whitten 1981). One of the ways Ayacuchanos make
sense of their relationships to aging parental figures is to equate them with—
and to highlight the critical importance of—a good job, a good education,
and a good upbringing. Those whose parents did not provide their children
with such things blame their parents for their own suffering, and their lack of
gratitude can undergird a refusal of responsibility for the aging parent. Stated
more broadly, gratitude should flow only from exchanges that are perceived
as giving opportunity to the younger person. And the eventual return of care-
giving from a younger to an older person should only occur if it is truly a
return, that is, if the older person’s initial acts of care benefited the younger
person in ways that are viewed as locally significant. Focusing on gratitude
and ingratitude, as Deysi insists I do, has helped me to answer why, and
under what conditions, people care for one another in this particular context
(compare Cohen 1998 for India; Tripp 1997: 105 for Tanzania). As I will
argue below, the context that ingratitude and gratitude help me to understand
is one of social change and economic inequality, concretized in changes in
family roles and generational misunderstandings.
The notion I am interested in here, in its positive form, is that glossed by
agradecer in Spanish. A dictionary definition would follow this word down
two paths, one of feeling gratitude, and the other of expressing or showing
gratitude, practices, or performances of gratitude.5 In both instances,
however, gratitude is understood to be a sentiment that should arise from the
bestowal of something that benefits the person who ultimately feels it;
5
This implies that true gratitude can only exist in settings where people believe they can discern
others’ true motivations (Ricœur 2005: 105–6). Such a definition recognizes that while the inner
state is relevant, equally so is the demonstration of the ostensible inner state. Webb Keane’s analysis
of sincerity as an aspect of linguistic ideology (2002: 74) unpacks the history of this assumption; I
thank Elizabeth F. S. Roberts for this reference. In other words, whether or not one feels grateful,
one can display what appears to be gratitude in the hopes of remaining in the good graces of the
giver. This can be done verbally, with gratitude language, or non-verbally, as one sees in Appadur-
ai’s work on Tamil (1985: 238–39). The distinction between ostensible inner and outer states
reminds us that gratitude can be studied in a variety of ways. We can take a psychological or neu-
roscientific approach that invites us to read gratitude as an inner state (i.e., a “feeling”: a sentiment
thought to arise from receiving a gift, service, or kindness; Roberts 2004: 61). Conversely, we can
consider what it might mean to show or to refuse to show gratitude: what are the social locations,
meanings, and consequences of expressions of gratitude and accusations of ingratitude (Lutz and
Abu-Lughod 1990; Lutz 2002: 205; Reddy 1999)?
demonstrating gratitude conveys the beneficiary’s recognition that he or she has

indeed benefited.6 A response (the demonstration of gratitude) is required for
social life to work as it should. The important distinction between feeling
and demonstrating gratitude becomes clearer when considering the negative
forms, which tend to appear in speech in noun rather than verb form, labeling
accusatorily: ingrato/a (ingrate), malagradecido/a, desagradecido/a (ungrate-
ful one).7 Again turning to the dictionary, such ungrateful people do not
repay, respond to, or in some cases even recognize the benefit that they have
received.8 As is often the case, then, the negative example of ingratitude
helps clarify precisely what gratitude is—it involves recognizing (as Ricœur
tells us, 2005) that something was given, and responding in a culturally and
socially appropriate fashion.
In what follows, I ethnographically locate gratitude and ingratitude in two
related arenas. One is child circulation (informal fostering), in which young,
distant kin are brought into and tend a household, producing complex and
ambivalent relationships. The second is an institution for the elderly, a site
where older people reflect upon why they are not at home with their adult chil-
dren. Both of the examples I offer have women as their protagonists: the care-
givers and care-recipients are both women, and the cases were described to me
mainly in terms of the women’s encounters with one another.9 The two
examples I offer below are necessarily partial, based on the recollections of a
few of the people involved, but taken together they can illustrate the ways
that gratitude and ingratitude appear to index new fault lines within kinship.
Such a comparison of child care and elder care is unusual within the
anthropological literature, but Deysi and others made it clear to me that they
must be considered together to fully understand how caregiving decisions are
made, with an eye to the past or to the future. And indeed, both kinds of
kinship relationships can involve expressions of gratitude or ingratitude that
in turn index and draw in other unequal social relations like gender, generation,
6
Gratitud is defined as “a sentiment that obliges us to appreciate what was done or intended
toward us, and to respond accordingly” (“Sentimiento que nos obliga a estimar el beneficio o
favor que se nos ha hecho o ha querido hacer, y a corresponder a él de alguna manera”). A grateful
thing “repays or responds favorably to the work or effort that is dedicated to it” (“[O]frece compen-
sación o responde favorablemente al trabajo o esfuerzo que se le dedica”). Of course, in English a
thing cannot be grateful, so a more apt translation would be something that responds appropriately
to the care it is given. The example offered in the dictionary is a grateful stomach (Real Academia
Española 2001).
7
Spanish adjectives are gendered, and I use the o/a ending to indicate that the word may take
either form: so, for instance, ingrato refers to an ungrateful male and ingrata to an ungrateful
female.
8
“No corresponder debidamente al beneficio recibido; desconocer el beneficio que se recibe”
(Real Academia Española 2001).
9
Caregiving is often viewed as an explicitly gendered act, work that is done by women, a
framing of caregiving that erases the work of men. For classic discussions of this issue, see
Smith-Rosenberg 1975; di Leonardo 1987; and for the Andean context, Van Vleet 2008.
and social class. By focusing on gratitude and ingratitude, the sticking points of
family relationships in which duty and obligation are contested are revealed. I
will argue that gratitude and ingratitude are useful tools for analyzing the
socially unequal dimensions of kinship practices. Close attention to gratitude
and ingratitude, I suggest, may also be productive for analyzing other situations
of inequality.
The setting of the ethnographic examples presented below is an urban
regional capital in highland Peru. Ayacucho, located nine hours from Lima
over ground, is a city of about 125,000. It grew dramatically in the past few
decades when falling agricultural yields and the draw of wage labor in the
city brought large numbers of rural migrants to the area. During the 1980s
the city further swelled when the Shining Path insurgent group began a cam-
paign of terror against peasants in the countryside, matched only by the ferocity
of the government’s counter-insurgent troops that similarly targeted the rural
poor. Families’ abilities to care for related children and for aging parents
were sharply circumscribed by the events of the war, even as many more chil-
dren and older people found themselves unsupported when the kin they would
normally count on were killed or disappeared.
Borneman has called on anthropologists to document “the actual situ-
ations in which people experience the need to care and be cared for and to
the political economies of their distribution” (2001: 43). Responding to this
call, in the two examples that follow, I identify the gratitude and ingratitude
that arise in caregiving relations and analyze them in their political economic
context. Though the war is over, general mistrust lingers in Ayacucho (see
especially Theidon 2004). The possibilities for relating to others, gratefully
or not, are further constrained by the region’s continuing poverty and underde-
velopment due to its agricultural base, historic relations of production in the
region, and remote location. Social inequality is apparent throughout this field-
site: child circulations are frequently motivated by subtle class differentials
between sending and receiving families, and aging Peruvians are slotted into
different configurations of care based on the economic possibilities of those
upon whom they depend.
G R AT I T U D E , I N G R AT I T U D E , A N D T H E FA U LT L I N E S O F K I N S H I P
Claims that kin have acted ungratefully reveal much about the edges and fault
lines of kinship that would not otherwise be apparent. Relatedly, they show us
much that is unexpected about gifting—about expectations of what should be
given and how it should be received. In this article, I follow the lead of distin-
guished anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss (1969) and Marilyn
Strathern (1985) in exploring the ways in which kinship and exchange are
mutually constitutive, and how kinship, in particular, is composed of gifts,
exchanges, obligations: of gratitude and ingratitude alike.
In invoking “the gift,” of course, I raise a phenomenon as central to the

development of social relations as it is to the development of anthropological
theory. In this literature (Malinowski 1961; Mauss 1990 [1954]; Gregory
1980; 1982; Parry 1986; 1989; Laidlaw 2003, following Derrida 1992; and
Candea and Da Col 2012 on hospitality), the gift’s contribution to sociality
(and its appeal for anthropology) is that it initiates or continues an economic
and hence social cycle of exchange. Such sustained thinking about gifts,
exchange, and reciprocity has borne much fruit for scholars of the Andean
region. Ayni is the classic example—a Quechua word encompassing various
kinds of reciprocity, such as days of work traded between two neighbors
(Alberti and Mayer 1974; Mayer 2002).10 But as Enrique Mayer has noted,
the rules of Andean reciprocity have usually been considered as productive
of relationships between rather than within households (2002: 131–32; see,
however, Isbell 1977).11
Like the gift, kinship relations are also (and relatedly) an anthropological
concern of long standing. Contemporary kinship studies (Strathern 1992;
Carsten 2000; Edwards 2000; all responding in one way or another to Schnei-
der 1980 and 1984) explore how people conceive of their relatedness to one
another, what relatedness is made to do, and how it plays out in relation to
other domains of analysis such as gender, class, ethnicity, or labor. Kinship
and marriage relations certainly organize multiple facets of Andean life: in
the rural, agricultural settings that are some of our primary research locations
(Bolton and Mayer 1977; Isbell 1985 [1978]; Arnold 1997; Bolin 2006; Van
Vleet 2008), in impoverished urban settings (Swanson 2010), and in transna-
tional contexts (Miles 2004; Pribilsky 2007). In each of these settings, social
inequalities (class, gender, ethnicity, urbanity) are in tension with ideologies
of kinship connectedness to constrain and shape the ways that people expect
to relate to one another, and how they actually do. I draw from these rich litera-
tures on the gift and on kinship to develop my argument about how a changing
context of inequality affects expectations of kin obligations.
There are two ways in which my ethnographic material from the Andes
suggests that kinship and gifts should continue to be read together. First,
they are both arenas in which ambivalence reigns. The social relations made
possible through gifts are sometimes uncomfortable. Gifting can create a
kind of close interdependence that is both necessary and dangerous, helping
10
Scholars recognize that ayni, despite its definition in the popular sphere, is not a benign and
egalitarian reciprocity but rather shot through with inherent insecurities and doubts about whether
reciprocation will in fact be forthcoming (Mannheim 1986; Orlove and Custred 1980: 35–36).
11
Scholars of the rural Andes generally contend that the parent-child relationship is perceived
not as an exchange but rather as a hierarchy (Anderson 2010). However, Krista Van Vleet
(2008) has argued that ayni may in fact be the primary framework through which kinship relation-
ships are produced and made sense of in rural Bolivia, and Olivia Harris (2000) has presented gen-
dered reciprocity as central to Andean social life.
to create familiarity but also ensuring that the relationships remain under con-
stant examination: “Treat your affines with caution, even suspicion; but you do
need and want to have affines. Try to avoid importunate demands from your
acquaintances; but make your own on them” (Laidlaw 2003: 630). Close
kinspersons, like parents and children, may also be considered within such
an ambivalent analysis. Writing on both the gift and on kinship identifies
ambivalence as a centrally useful analytic (see, e.g., Peletz 1995). Specifically,
attending to expressions regarding ingratitude can reveal expectations that are
not in alignment with one another about obligation and duty. Doing so within a
kinship context is especially useful, given that kinship invokes notions of obli-
gation and duty more so than do many other kinds of relationships. As Jeffrey
Jurgens notes for Turkey, “A person’s status as an upstanding parent, child,
relative or friend often rides on the degree to which she or he meets others’
expectations in relations of exchange” (2009; see also White 1994).
Second, “kinship and economy popularly tend to be defined as exclusive
of each other” (Strathern 1985: 193), and as such anthropologists have
occasionally replicated this opposition in our own theoretical models
(Medick and Sabean 1984). Consequently, it is important to identify sites
where, despite anxious talk to the contrary, kinship and economy are simul-
taneously co-produced. Viviana Zelizer has made this observation with
regard to the increasing “sacralization” of children over the course of the twen-
tieth century in North America, which actually resulted in a further commercia-
lization of their lives (1985: 15). Jonathan Parry has followed this argument to
its logical conclusion in a fascinating analysis of Mauss’ work, where he notes
that “an ideology of the ‘pure gift’ is most likely to arise in highly differentiated
societies with an advanced division of labour” (1986: 466–67). Parry’s analysis
suggests that an expectation of gratitude following customary parental or filial
actions might index an increasing differentiation of economic relationships
from other social ties. Hence, claims of ingratitude may be useful as indexes
either of shifting socioeconomic patterns more broadly, or of conflict over
whether those actions should in fact be viewed as customary.
During fieldwork, I frequently witnessed performances of gratitude and
allegations of ingratitude during routine social interactions. Following the
work of anthropologists who examine how culture emerges in real time (e.g.,
Tedlock and Mannheim 1995), I consider here performances of gratitude or
ingratitude and their invocation in everyday interactions rather than gratitude
or ingratitude as primarily related to affect and emotion, though I recognize
this approach has been extremely useful in other settings (for classical
approaches see Chodorow 1978; Gilligan 1993 [1982]; Ruddick 1989; for
more recent uses see Rebhun 1999; Padilla 2007; Russ 2008). I am concerned
here with how people convince others that they feel grateful, or ascribe states of
ingratitude to others. Michael Lambek has termed kinship acts such as these
“ethical,” because they involve “acts of bestowal, reception, initiative, and
the affirmation of responsibility for oneself and on behalf of others and, equally,
of exercising judgment with respect to those others” (2011: 11). Such ethical
acts make statements about what is expected or obliged, about the quality of
the relationship, or about what was given. By being attentive to moments
when people are called ungrateful, we are granted insight into current or chan-
ging social norms.12 In its ability to incite discourses of moral failure and
responsibility, then, ingratitude is far more revealing than gratitude.
I N G R AT I T U D E I N U R B A N A N D E A N C H I L D C I R C U L AT I O N
My first example is a case of child circulation, a phenomenon that I studied for

nearly two years (2001–2003) in Ayacucho and Lima, Peru (Leinaweaver
2007; 2008b; 2008c; see also Walmsley 2008; Weismantel 1995). By “child cir-
culation” I refer to the temporary incorporation of a young person into a new
house and family, often that of a relative.13 It is quite common, particularly
among poorer families, who feel both economic and social pressures to send
a child to a slightly better off family member. In this way they can allay
some of the expenses of raising a child, or free themselves from child care obli-
gations in order to seek out wage labor in faraway cities, mines, or plantations.
But, just as importantly, they create or strengthen social connections with well-
placed family members, creating or fulfilling obligations that keep those ties
active. From the perspective of the receiving family, a young newcomer may
be able to assist with the household chores or keep company with the family
members. Crucially, the young person must understand circulation as involving
an opportunity for education or progress—perhaps school fees will be paid or
relocation will mean the chance to attend a better, urban school. Because of the
poverty and inequality that is the background for these circulations of children,
they become particularly fraught sites within which expressions of gratitude
and ingratitude take on heightened meaning.
I suggest here that such expressions of gratitude and ingratitude are highly
useful tools for identifying local evaluations of socioeconomic difference,
responsibility, and moral behavior. In other words, the appearance of gratitude
and ingratitude in narratives of child circulation reflect assumptions about
social relationships. An expression of ingratitude means that both parties feel
wronged or unappreciated. In the case that follows, the adult thinks she is
doing the child a favor and is disappointed and resentful when her evaluation
is not confirmed. The child thinks the adult is exploiting or taking advantage
of her; she perceives that the adult thinks she should be grateful, but this
12
In this sense gratitude and ingratitude are “judgmental emotions” (Solomon 1984, cited in
Jurgens 2009).
13
There is no native term, so this is an analytical term drawn from French research on informal
fostering (Lallemand 1993). There is, however, a Quechua term, apra, for the first grandchild who
is often sent to live with grandparents whose household has been depleted of members through out-
marriage and labor migration.
only further angers her because the quality of what has been given her is so
inferior, implying that the adult thinks very little of the young person and
what she has offered in return (her presence, her company, her labor).
Teresa, a middle-class woman in Ayacucho, expressed to me that Juana, a
girl who had come to live with her, had been ungrateful. She drew on her
history with Juana’s family to explain. Many years ago, Teresa told me, she
had received Juana’s aunt Eulalia into her home. Eulalia lived with and
worked for Teresa’s family before marrying and setting up her own household.
In the mid-1990s, Eulalia came to Teresa to plead that she take in Juana, Eula-
lia’s niece, who was suffering because her stepfather would not give her money
for clothing. (Juana told me that she did not know her genitor; her stepfather
acted as her father.) According to Teresa, Eulalia described Juana’s poverty
in painful detail: she wore her mother’s hand-me-down shoes and a skirt
pieced together out of scraps of her mother’s own skirt. Teresa agreed to
receive Juana, then age twelve, who came to live with her. In other words,
Teresa was helping Juana, and the implication would be that Juana should
appreciate this.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the emphasis in Teresa’s “arrival narrative” differs
from that in Juana’s. Juana told me that after she and her family migrated from
their rural village to Ayacucho, Eulalia told Juana to go accompany Teresa.
“‘She’s a good woman,’ she told me…. I didn’t want to but I was afraid my
stepfather would beat me again.” Juana’s reluctance and fear reveal her ambiva-
lence toward this arrangement. Juana recounted how she lived with Teresa, her
husband, and her two daughters, attending to the middle-class family’s various
needs. Teresa eventually became Juana’s godmother for her first communion,
and Teresa’s daughter became Juana’s godmother for her confirmation. God-
parenthood is an extremely important relationship in the Andes and throughout
Latin America (Ossio 1984; Mintz and Wolf 1950).14 For Juana to become
doubly integrated through godparenthood into Teresa’s family was a way for
both to further establish their relationship as kinship rather than
employer-servant.
14
Godparenthood is ostensibly about spiritual guidance given from the godparent to the god-
child. In practice, however, it means a godparent should help out a godchild when possible (with
money and gifts, for example, but also with advice and discipline when necessary), and a godchild
should visit the godparent on special occasions such as the godparent’s birthday, bearing occasional
gifts like beer, bread, or agricultural produce. As this description no doubt suggests, godparenthood
is largely vertical in this context (Mintz and Wolf 1950: 342), and social superiors are invited to be
godparents. The relationship between parents and godparents is also an important aspect of this. As
Weismantel relates, “…the lifelong partnerships of the compadrazgo system … provide one with
business partners, loan services, and agricultural labor, in differing amounts according to the
degree of symmetry in the relationship. Young people begin with only padrinos to whom they
owe labor; they will gradually acquire compadres with whom they can exchange services, but it
will be many years before they will become padrinos themselves” (Weismantel 1988: 82).
The relationship between Juana and the rest of the family was not always
or even often smooth, however, and after two years of what she experienced as
numerous unjustified complaints and critiques, she moved back to her mother’s
house. When Juana graduated from high school four years later, she returned to
carry out household chores for Teresa during the days but this time slept at
home. By 2002, when I became close to the family, Teresa and her husband
were in their sixties, and their daughters, who lived with them, were both
employed in professional positions. Juana’s presence in Teresa’s home
became erratic and she finally confessed that she had enrolled in vocational
classes in the mornings and thus could only come in the afternoons. Teresa
insisted she needed Juana there in the mornings, and tried to convince Juana
to change her class schedule. Instead Juana left for a second time, underscoring
her desperate but tenuous grasp on education as the only way to move
forward.15
Juana’s departure caused Teresa to perceive her as ungrateful. It put a
strain on Teresa and her husband, who as they aged faced both physical diffi-
culties and the social challenge of finding a new young person to help her in the
home. Teresa and Juana’s complex relationship is not just that of a patron and
servant, or a benefactress and recipient of aid, but also of godmother and god-
daughter, and of two women who have lived together. It is thus partly the refu-
tation of this closeness that Teresa resents. Secondly, in child circulation, young
people are told that they should appreciate the beneficence of the adults who
took them in.16 For Teresa, her kindness meant opportunity for Juana—
freedom from physical violence and being able to afford clothing. Thus,
Teresa felt Juana owed her gratitude and should prioritize her commitment to
Teresa over her education. Teresa read Juana’s departure from her home as a
sign of sullen ingratitude. By contrast, Juana would not describe herself as
ungrateful. Instead, she pointed to the family’s moral failings to demonstrate
how there was nothing for her to be grateful for, saying, “I don’t want to go
back there and have the same things happen that happened before—as my god-
parents they shouldn’t have been that way.” From Juana’s perspective, it was
Teresa’s duty to support her, not only as her godmother but also as someone
previously linked to the family through Eulalia’s presence. Thus, Teresa
expects gratitude, and Juana resents Teresa’s assumption.
Such muted tensions are common enough in child circulations. The osten-
sible line between maid and circulated child is often unclear or nonexistent.
Albert Schrauwers has found a similar phenomenon among To Pamonans in
15
I only came to know Juana well after she had left Teresa’s home for the second time, when she
came to visit me on her own initiative, seeking help with English lessons. By that point she referred
to Teresa as “señora Teresa” and revealed the unpleasant side of living there. Unfortunately, I have
only her and Teresa’s recollections of what the relationship was like before Juana left.
16
By contrast, in other caregiving settings it is the parent who should show gratitude to paid
caregivers (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997: 561).
Indonesia: domestic exploitation that takes place within kinship “is not a simple
perpetuation of historical relations of servitude but a form of labor mobilization
that has emerged in the niches of the capitalist transformation of the highlands”
(1999: 21). Live-in service is prevalent in Peru, where young children who are
circulated are sometimes done so in order to provide household service. A dis-
agreement over Juana’s role in the household grounds the disagreement
between Teresa and Juana over whether gratitude is required. That is, the
very undefinability of her role (because child circulation and servitude are
not easily distinguished) permits wildly differing interpretations of the social
expectations that surround it. In other cases I recorded, young people were
(eventually) grateful for what they received from the older ones when they sub-
sequently recognized it as a life lesson. One young woman was belatedly grate-
ful for an aunt and uncle who forced her to speak Spanish instead of Quechua
during the time she resided with them (Leinaweaver 2008b: 131). Another
young man thanked the caregiver who beat him with the buckle end of his
belt; at the time he hated the man, but he now gratefully tells the former care-
giver that being beaten made him who he is and kept him from going down a
bad path of drinking or theft.17 In this sense, young people can express grati-
tude, even if delayed, for receiving tools and treatment that enable them to
achieve the good life.
But in the case of Teresa and Juana, this ideal—that the responsible older
party should discipline and shape the younger one into a successful adult—was
flouted, in Juana’s view, when Teresa asked her to prioritize her household
work and caregiving over her vocational classes. Teresa’s dismissal of
Juana’s attempts to improve herself through education went too far, in the
local ideologies of the region where education is prized above almost every-
thing else as an almost magical route out of poverty. The politics of gratitude
and ingratitude are used by both the powerful and the weak, as both parties
to a relationship try to manipulate it toward more favorable terms. In this
case, Teresa perceived Juana as ungrateful, and correctly identified that
Juana—unable to speak up for herself because of her position within this micro-
hierarchy—was nonetheless complaining through the powerful signal of
demonstrating ingratitude. In other words, Juana, perceiving that Teresa felt
she should be grateful, refused to collude in portraying Teresa as generous.
By refusing the gratitude that Teresa anticipated, Juana also effectively
denied an ongoing exchange relationship between Teresa and herself,
17
This is in contrast to Juana, who told me that she left her stepfather’s care for fear of being
beaten again. Beatings can be seen as cruel physical abuse or as a discipline ultimately revealed
as educational and supportive. The identities (particular the gender identity) of the giver and the
receiver of the beating, as well as the past and ongoing nature of their relationship, help to determine
how a beating is read and ultimately reread. Social differentiation and power relations can be sus-
tained by beatings rendered normative (Reddy 1999: 258). I thank an anonymous reviewer for this
observation.
potentially laying the groundwork for her more permanent exit from Teresa’s
household.
Ayacuchanos who identify with the perspective of the socially and econ-
omically superior adult in such relationships assume that circulated children
should feel grateful. From this perspective, young people should show this
gratitude by remaining loyal and obedient, and properly prioritizing their
goals. The problem at the root of this assumption is seen in the way that an
accusation of ingratitude highlights very different perceptions that the young
person and the receiving adult have of the framework of their relationship.
The different perceptions have to do with the idea of responsibility and duty:
whether it is a duty or a kindness for an adult to take in a young person will
determine how she responds. From the young person’s perspective, it is critical
for the successful functioning of the relationship to view it as a duty rather than
a kindness (compare van Dijk 2012: 36). The alternative would require her to
understand herself as a recipient of charity, a role that, in the Andean context,
implies the asocial positionality of not being able to participate in an exchange
relationship (Leinaweaver 2008b: 80). And it would imply that the relationship
on whose grounds she had left her family and changed residences was not in
fact one of kinship, but something more contractual and perhaps, potentially,
less justifiable as a result.
I N G R AT I T U D E A N D T H E H O M E F O R T H E A G E D
While child circulation often draws from and approximates parent-child

relations, many of the children who move in this way feel their new
relationships to be much closer to servitude than to kinship. But my
second example of the use of discourses of ingratitude anchors this discus-
sion even more squarely in the realm of parent-child relationships. Anthro-
pological kinship studies have long demonstrated that despite deeply held
ideologies about such relationships, even the most cherished and symboli-
cally significant relations have stresses and fractures. Despite the wide-
spread ideology that Andean families take care of elderly relatives in the
home (Weismantel 1988: 170), for a few decades now there has been a
home for the aged in downtown Ayacucho, the Asilo de Ancianos (or
“elderly asylum”), where I conducted participant observation and interviews
in 2007 (see image 1).
The asilo is run by a sisterhood of nuns (the Sisters of the Abandoned
Elderly) and is occupied by about a hundred old people from the region—a
very small sample indeed, but a revealing one. The majority of residents are
poor, indigenous women. Most of them come from families unable to
provide for them, and in this way demonstrate—as one of the nuns explained
to me—the way that obligations to aging family members wane and wax
depending on a nation’s economic standing, so that the population of the
asilo swelled during times of particular austerity or outright violence in
IMAGE 1 A home for the aged in downtown Ayacucho, the Asilo de Ancianos (or “elderly
asylum”), where I conducted participant observation and interviews in 2007 (author’s photo).
recent Peruvian history.18 However, even those whose presence in the insti-
tution is not ascribed to poverty or tragedy reveal how relationships between
parents and children may be understood (Leinaweaver 2008a).
One of the residents of this institution is Felicitas, a retired schoolteacher.
In contrast with the full skirt and long braids most of the female residents wore,
Felicitas’ pants and short hair marked her as urban and non-indigenous, and her
former profession is locally quite respectable. This is an interesting case, in part
because it is so clearly an outlier. So many of the elderly in the institution are
poor, and their abandonment can be understood in those stark economic terms.
But Felicitas has no economic reason to be there, according to prevalent under-
standings of race and class in the region. So I wondered, what could explain her
presence in the asilo?
Felicitas does not live at home because, as she told me rather cryptically,
“Women prefer their husband to their mother.” While I was not entirely sure
what she meant by this, I had already heard that—precisely because it is so
important for aging parents to be cared for in the home—marital relations
can suffer when tensions surface about whose parents will reside with the
18
I had also anticipated that some of the residents would be there because their grown children
had emigrated, considering the high rates of out-migration in Peru (Díaz Gorfinkiel and Escrivá
2012), but I only found one case of this.
couple. Some couples resolve this friction through negotiation, others, separ-
ation; a few resolve it through leaving aging parents at the institution.
From a friend of mine who used to be Felicitas’ neighbor, I heard more
details: that Felicitas’ eldest daughter, Natividad, had married a man she met
on-line, and “Senora Felicitas didn’t like him at all. He’s dark-skinned, not
handsome; you don’t know what family he’s from—and Felicitas is from
one of the best families in Ayacucho.” My friend explained that Natividad
paid attention only to her husband—she had essentially abandoned her
mother, whom she did not even feed adequately. Natividad is ailing, and her
new husband takes good care of her. “So partly she favors him because of grati-
tude, and of course there is also affection, love for this man. Natividad wants to
have a life with her husband, and she has that right.” Felicitas felt that she
should receive preferential treatment due to her role as mother and homeowner
(the house was divided into independent apartments, and Felicitas’ daughters
each occupied one).19 This made it sting all the more when she was displaced
by this newcomer.
Felicitas, unhappy, visited her neighbors daily in order to escape the
unpleasant conditions within her house, to the extent that her neighbors
began to pretend they were not home. On one such visit, she asked my
friend to take her to the asilo, which prompted my friend to admonish Felicitas’
daughters to look after her better, while at the same time responding to Felicitas
that she could not take this extraordinary step, for what would her daughters
say? While admitting that Felicitas had a “strong personality” and might not
have been easy to live with, my friend’s sympathies were clearly with Felicitas
and against Natividad, who did not seem to be fulfilling her moral obligations.
Felicitas concluded that her life was hell, and so one day, without saying a word
to anyone, she packed her things and took a taxi to the institution.
Felicitas’ story is unusual in many ways but in other ways it shares fea-
tures with stories of other older people in the asilo; I heard more than one of
them remark that grown children, or an estranged spouse and grown children,
had cravenly installed the aged parent in the asilo in order to have the house to
themselves. One older man, Diosdado, said of his children who are living in the
house he built for them (Leinaweaver 2009), “They only come visit when they
need something.” Although he did not use the word “ungrateful,” he implied it
through the contrast he drew between his self-interested children and his own
labor in constructing them a home. Diosdado’s paternal actions of building a
house for his children were surely at least partly meant to ensure that he
would be cared for in his old age. Following my neighbor Deysi’s kinship
theory, then, he had done what was required by giving his children something
19
The case is actually even more complicated; Felicitas has three daughters, but the youngest
two were born out of wedlock to Natividad and adopted by Felicitas. Natividad also has a son.
The children are all grown up and live in independent apartments in their mother’s home.
they needed to succeed, and thus the children should rightfully be grateful, and
care for him in the future. Felicitas, too, had provided her children with a house
and felt that they ought to be grateful and act accordingly.
For Deysi, “ungrateful” would be an appropriate accusation from an
elderly person (who fulfilled everything they ought to have done) to their
child who places them in an institution. “Ungrateful” only arises when
norms are violated and it in turn throws the implicit norm—gratitude—into
relief through its breach. When Felicitas stated, “Women prefer their
husband to their mother” she was making a critical evaluation of a daughter
who had mis-prioritized her social responsibilities. That Natividad should
feel grateful to her husband for the care he provided her, rather than her
mother for everything she had done over the accumulated years, only added
to the disappointment.20 Felicitas’ case is even more interesting because it
was she herself, not Natividad, who interned her in the asilo. This action articu-
lated Felicitas’ rejection of the inferior care her daughter offered her, but
required that she actively depict Natividad as ungrateful in order to explain
her self-internment. Had her daughter placed her in the asilo, as many other
residents’ grown children had, Felicitas would not even need to make the
case—Natividad’s ingratitude would be apparent.
I have no doubt that Felicitas indeed has a strong personality and that this
case is best described as the doings of an unusually unhappy family. Yet I find it
quite significant that Felicitas’ friend could describe such a specific case in
broader terms of gratitude and ingratitude, of duty and obligation. The fact
that such a framing exists and is easily accessible even for a case that is
clearly quite complicated suggests that accusations of ingratitude directed
from aging parents to grown children are a common feature of the Ayacucho
landscape. Institutionalized aging parents like Felicitas think their children
should feel grateful for the care they offered—and that this gratitude should
translate into an obligation to reciprocate caregiving. This case, even more
so than the example of Juana and Teresa, demonstrates what Komter has
argued: that gratitude can be seen as “the moral basis of reciprocity … indebt-
edness is not in any way contrary to gratitude, but rather is its moral core”
(2004: 208).
A N A L Y S I S : T H E A M B I VA L E N C E O F G R A T I T U D E
Gifts have long been identified by anthropologists as containing ambivalent

messages and powers. For example, as Laidlaw has observed, “Gifts evoke
obligations and create reciprocity, but they can do this because they might
20
It is striking that the story I collected does not go back further into childhood. I do not know
Natividad’s perspective or her recollections of her childhood—perhaps Felicitas let her down. The
silence around this point could be due to many factors, but here I highlight the fact that the opposi-
tion of a marital relationship to a filial one is one with great moral strength in this region.
not” (2003: 628). Ambivalence has also, if more recently, been identified as
central to kinship systems. This is a sentiment Michael Peletz illustrates with
the salty words of a Malay man who described ungrateful relatives with the
phrase “kasih bunga, balas tahi,” translated by Peletz as “you give flowers,
you get shit in return” (2001: 413). Peletz traces the importance of ambivalence
in kinship to a variety of phenomena, including the “potentially time-
consuming, arduous, and/or alienating (if only because frustrating and/or
unrequited) emotional labor associated with the invariably precarious trans-
formation of duty into authentic emotional motivation” (ibid.: 434). Indeed,
it is precisely the relationship between (contested understandings of) obligation
and (sincerely or grudgingly given) gratitude that these examples of ambivalent
Andean kinship relations demonstrate.
This ethnographic material shows that ambivalent social relations in the
process of negotiation may be identified and analyzed through a search for
when and why accusations of ingratitude emerge. Gratitude and ingratitude
thus express ideas about obligation, relatedness, and responsibility. Focusing
solely on gifts and exchange obligations on one hand, or on kinship practices
on the other, would not fully do justice to this ethnographic material, but to
enter through a kind of back door, by looking at ingratitude, gives new
insight into both parties’ positions.
I have already mentioned the overemphasis on women’s roles in such
cases due to a framing of caregiving as gendered feminine that erases men’s
roles. For example, although I knew both Teresa and her husband quite well,
my notes regarding Juana’s ingratitude come entirely from conversations
with Teresa. But both of these cases involve other kinds of social difference
as well: generational and socioeconomic, above all (see Cole and Durham
2006 for an insightful analysis of generation). In generational terms, these con-
flicts are among women of different generations whose expectations are not in
accordance with one another. Thus gendered inequality—the expectation that
women do the carework—intersects here with generational inequality—the
expectation that once the period of initial childhood dependence has come to
an end, younger people care for older ones.
Social class differences are central to my interpretation of these cases.
Kinship relations are unequal, despite frequent ideological insistence to the
contrary, and in both these cases, we see a poorer or hierarchically disadvan-
taged younger woman expected to care for a better off or more established
senior woman. When the care she offers does not meet the expectations of
the senior, better-off woman, she is labeled ungrateful. It would be difficult
to know without further comparative study whether gratitude is expected in
an equal degree from younger, disadvantaged men (but see Jurgens 2009).
What is certainly clear from these cases is that an accusation of ingratitude—
which itself denotes that gratitude was originally expected by the senior
party owing to the nature of the relationship—points to a discrepancy
between understandings of what was given, what can be chalked up to duty and
obligation vis-à-vis generosity and kindness, and how the offerings in question
align with tensions that already imbue cross-class, cross-generational
relationships.
Appadurai has suggested based on his work among Tamil in India that
gratitude is in many ways merely a token representing a plan to reciprocate
in a socially appropriate way in the future (1985). So too, for these middle-class
elders, it is clear that gratitude should lead to future reciprocation. This supports
the local kinship theory put forth by my neighbor Deysi: that grown children
should tend their parents or benefactors out of gratitude for the care they
once received. It suggests—to put it plainly—that obligation is actually consti-
tutive of gratitude. But the reciprocation Appadurai identifies can only work
when participants are on a comparable social level. So, for instance, for Felici-
tas to accuse Natividad of ingratitude might imply that she views Natividad as a
relative social equal, as befits two women related through such close kinship
ties. In cases of extreme imbalance there is little chance that a gift or service
or kindness can ever be repaid in kind.
The imbalance of socioeconomic inequality, so often present in child cir-
culation, is what leads to the deep ambivalences highlighted in narratives like
Juana’s. The imbalance of age hierarchy—that between parents and children—
is ultimately temporary and reversible such that grown children may legiti-
mately become obligated to their aging parents (compare Weiner 1976: 125–
26). If gratitude represents a promise to reciprocate in the future, then those
who will never be in a position to appropriately reciprocate—which happens
in cases of stark social inequality—can never be grateful. That is, perhaps
the tension arising within relations of temporary inequality can be eased by
gratitude only within a narrow range of socioeconomic difference. If what
Teresa provided Juana was valuable, and Juana will never be able to offer a
meaningful reciprocation of what Teresa provided her, Juana cannot be grate-
ful. This imbalance is different in significant ways from the classic analysis of
reciprocity as a gift that continues to generate social relations precisely because
it can never be fully repaid (Valeri 1994).21 Relationships like Juana and
Teresa’s are unevenly mediated by kinship and co-residence but are character-
ized most dramatically by stark social inequalities, meaning that Juana will
never have the chance to repay Teresa. Interactions between people of different
social classes within a kinship context require particular frameworks in order to
be commensurable, and the notion of gratitude does not provide such a
framework.
I see two possible explanations for this situation, which are in all likeli-
hood intertwined: on one hand people in Ayacucho may be undergoing
21
I thank Elizabeth F. S. Roberts for this observation.
broader social and economic transformations that constitute new forms of kin
relations, and on the other they may be undergoing a shift in how they experi-
ence such relations as given or built up. The dramatic social and economic
transformations described in the introduction to this essay suggest that we
can look to historical context to understand why older people are demanding
a particular form of behavior and younger people are unable or unwilling to
offer it. For example, vast numbers of indigenous people have relocated to
Peruvian cities and, through urbanization and education, become less
“Indian” while they are there. That shift translates to changes in how family
life is experienced, from the mannered but generous exchanges within indigen-
ous families to what Mary Weismantel calls “ill-defined exchanges filled with
unresolved guilt and resentment” that characterize bourgeois family inter-
actions grounded in an ideology of natural feeling (2001: 140).
I also suspect that these socioeconomic and experiential transformations
are grounding new senses of modern subjectivity in a post-war Ayacucho.
As younger people strive toward social mobility, they may feel it necessary
to cut off relations with those who are unable to do so (Leinaweaver 2010;
Thornton 2001: 454). Accusations of ingratitude—that is, discrepancies
between expectations and performances of gratitude—are particularly fraught
when social roles and positions are surrounded by uncertainty or negotiation,
and when parties are at odds over how the relationship should be defined
and played out (McCullough and Tsang 2004: 127; Komter 2004: 207). Ingra-
titude thus may point to one party’s changing understanding of social relations.
When social standing is consistently being assessed and reevaluated, if individ-
uals’ expectations are not met, they may experience this as disrespect or ingra-
titude (Ricœur 2005: 200–5). Thus, to properly understand accusations of
ingratitude is to situate them within a social landscape—any interaction or
exchange will be evaluated by each party, and aligned with his or her expec-
tations in order to assess the other’s understanding of each social position.
As my neighbor Deysi suggested to me when I first began inquiring into
these phenomena, gratitude and ingratitude can reveal how people make sense
of kinship. The rather surprising outcome of this examination is that kinship is
not only read as naturally grounding obligation, despite the contention of the
adoption office staff member I spoke with. Instead, as Deysi indicated, grati-
tude is a particularly productive way to think about how people either
comply with or extricate themselves from their social responsibilities of care-
giving under conditions of social change and relational inequality. For those
who experience or contest others’ expectations of gratitude, it is also an ambig-
uous phenomenon, one which heightens participants’ attention to their own
understandings and their interpretations of others’ understandings regarding
what behaviors or obligations ought to result from an unanticipated kindness
or act of benevolence. My larger argument is that, in a context of social inequal-
ity and change where people are working out their understandings of social
responsibility toward one another, we—and they—can look to whether or not

others perceive that they should feel grateful in order to index local attitudes
about care and relatedness.
CONCLUSIONS: UNCOVERING NEW MORAL ECONOMIES
If gratitude and ingratitude spring from instantiations of relationships of

exchange then they are aspects of a “moral economy,” defined as the local
meanings of exchange, reciprocity, and success (Ong 2006: 199; see also
Scott 1976; Thompson 1971). By using accusations of ingratitude to tease
out the competing expectations that people have for one another, the moral
stances they take, we gain access to the moral economies circulating in Ayacu-
cho, amid socioeconomic and demographic changes that are transforming how
people are being cared for. Jane Collier has incisively analyzed transformations
in kinship in Andalusía, arguing that in the 1960s kinship care was provided to
parents just as it was to children out of duty, while by the 1980s kinship care
was said to be given not out of duty but out of love (1997). In Ayacucho, a
middle-class or bourgeois kinship ideology in which parents and children are
expected to care for one another as part of their role-based duties coexists
with a working-class kinship ideology in which proper and normative parenting
and caregiving must include the unequivocal support of educational and pro-
fessional trajectories. Under such circumstances, references to gratitude and
ingratitude are concrete evidence for the ways in which personal relations
shift in a particular direction in response to larger social changes. Within a
context of persistent poverty and social hierarchy, families in Ayacucho are
working out competing notions of social responsibility even as relatively dis-
advantaged (such as young or old) individuals within those families express
a position that gratitude is not freely given but earned.
I have argued here that gratitude and, particularly, ingratitude may in
certain contexts be key symbols that allow us to identify social expectations,
kinship responsibilities, and changing understandings of obligation. Gratitude
and duty, rather than being opposed social forces, coexist and are deeply inter-
twined; however, their relationship only becomes salient and a subject of dis-
cussion when implicit norms are violated. The accusation of ingratitude is a
particularly revealing lens into the fraught nature of kinship relations as they
intersect with hierarchies of gender, class, and generation in present-day Aya-
cucho. Such failures of kinship may be related to changing social mores within
the middle class wherein grown children, rather than caring for their parents out
of obligation, may elect to offer or withdraw care based on their own assess-
ments of what their parents provided them in life. Here, the political
economy of ingratitude links to changes in family roles and a breakdown in
communication between generations about expectations of care and affection.
Much as anthropologists have continued to view witchcraft accusations as
a key site for identifying social tensions (Evans-Pritchard 1937; Sanders 2008;
Smith 2008; Favret-Saada 1980; Turner 1964), so also claims and recastings of
ingratitude can be said to do similar (if less exotic) work.22 Within the sphere of
kinship, in Elizabeth F. S. Roberts’s study of in vitro fertilization in Ecuador,
she found younger kinswomen donating eggs to their senior kinswomen
partly out of gratitude for what the older women had previously provided
them (2009: 114). In my recent work on international adoptions, I have docu-
mented competing senses of gratitude—on one hand that adoptees owe some-
thing to their parents, or, by extension, to society at large (Leinaweaver 2011:
393 and n.d.) and on the other that adoptive parents are grateful to those
involved in the miraculous gift of a child, a sentiment that can in some cases
be directed at a birth family but is almost always directed at the child’s
nation of origin, the adoption office staff, and God. Yet gratitude and ingrati-
tude may be indexical of contentious dimensions of other kinds of social
relations as well. Elsewhere in Latin America, broader relations of clientelism
and patronage allow whole classes of people to be interpreted as politically
ungrateful (Han 2004). Relations between donor and recipient in international
aid formations are frequently glossed in terms of gratitude (Hattori 2003). In
this article, I have argued that evaluations of informal child circulations and
grown children’s connections to aging parents in urban highland Peru reveal
the potential richness of gratitude as an analytical heuristic for identifying
unequal dimensions of relations understood to fall within the domain of
kinship. These brief examples from further afield suggest that a focus on grati-
tude may potentially be productive in other unequal settings as well.
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Abstract: In this article I examine gratitude and ingratitude as valuable analytical

tools for determining how social inequalities inform kinship practices. Accusing
one’s kin of ingratitude reveals the edges and fault lines of kinship, as well as
closely related expectations about what should be given, how it should be
given, and how it should be received. As such, this essay follows in an esteemed
anthropological tradition of unifying analyses of the gift and of kinship. It argues
that expressions of and talk about gratitude and ingratitude closely index dimen-
sions of social relations such as gender, generation, and social class, and simul-
taneously reveal tensions within kinship relations where duty and obligation
are contested. Ethnographic examples are drawn from fieldwork in Ayacucho,
a small city in the Peruvian Andes, where informal fostering and the fraught
relations between grown children and their aging parents provide two related
arenas for expressions of ideas about gratitude and ingratitude. Analyzing these
two examples, I argue for gratitude and ingratitude as analytical heuristics,
useful to identify and focus upon dimensions of relations understood to fall
within the domain of kinship, and potentially useful in other settings as well.

Toward An Anthropology of Ingratitude: Notes From Andean Kinship

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Toward An Anthropology of Ingratitude: Notes From Andean Kinship

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Comparative Studies in Society and History 2013;55(3):554–578.

Toward an Anthropology of Ingratitude:

using a life-course perspective, for actions of caregiving for an aged parent in

see shifts in kinship obligations in Ayacucho within a context of social trans-

demonstrating gratitude conveys the beneficiary’s recognition that he or she has

In invoking “the gift,” of course, I raise a phenomenon as central to the

My first example is a case of child circulation, a phenomenon that I studied for

While child circulation often draws from and approximates parent-child

Gifts have long been identified by anthropologists as containing ambivalent

responsibility toward one another, we—and they—can look to whether or not

CONCLUSIONS: UNCOVERING NEW MORAL ECONOMIES

If gratitude and ingratitude spring from instantiations of relationships of

Mauss, Marcel. 1990 [1954]. The Gift. New York: Routledge.

Abstract: In this article I examine gratitude and ingratitude as valuable analytical

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