Kinship

Godparenthood, an institution where a family seeks sponsorship for their child established through a religious ritual, can be analyzed on several levels. On one level, it is a form of allo-parenting, an adaptive strategy that ensures better survival of one’s child by creating an alliance with a biologically non-related person. On the sociological level, it is a strategy for forging in-terfamily alliances. Godparenthood can be instrumentalized to promote political goals through reciprocal exchanges. In this paper I argue that this is achieved on the cognitive level by metaphorical extensions of kinship terminology to unrelated individuals through the use of the universal linguistic feature of markedness. I analyze compadrazgo in the town of Pitumarca, Perú, as a test case of all three aspects of godparenthood.