Caribbean Kinship as Instituted Process.

Islands are colonized by organized groups of people. This paper examines the ways in which the economy of colonizing groups is embedded in kinship institutions. This perspective emerged from substantivist and institutional economics, which both recognize economizing as embedded in kinship. Moreover, the formalist/substantivist debate highlighted the differences between empirical and theoretical perspectives, and the importance of societal norms in structuring rational decision-making (albeit the former emphasized profit maximization and the latter material want-satisfaction). None of these approaches fully integrated kinship analysis in their approach. This paper examines the Early Ceramic Age Caribbean (ECAC) from the perspective of kinship as an institution. The framework is drawn from ethnographic studies of matrilineal kinship because this is the descent system that most closely approximates evidence for the ECAC. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate certain insights gained from the investigation of kinship in the pre-Columbian Caribbean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]