"A major achievement. Incorporating decades of Amazonianist anthropology as its conditions of conceptual and analytical possibility, it stands as a compelling example of a form of scholarship that has become fully realized only in recent years. Costa’s attunement to Amazonian ethnology turns his ethnography of Brazil’s Kanamari people into a transformative engagement with core regionialist theories. It is this centripetal/centrifugal orientation—inward to Kanamari specificities and outward to Amazonia-wide themes—that makes The Owners of Kinship a perfect answer to the question of why Amazonianist anthropology has become one of the discipline’s most unique and inventive subfields. . . . Ultimately, Costa’s careful yet creative syntheses are what make The Owners of Kinship so easy to appreciate. By putting the Kanamari into open-ended conversation with so many other Amazonians, Costa affirms, transforms, and adds to the conceptual models that regional specialists use to interpret their data. If I could suggest one ethnography to bring to the field for a neophyte Amazonianist, it would be The Owners of Kinship. It asks so many questions, offers so many answers, and makes so many suggestions about where one might look, what one might find, and how one might make sense of it."

sociologia & antropologia

"Ownership without property, mastery without domination: this is the paradox explored by Luiz Costa in his brilliant analysis of the so-called master-subject bond among the Kanamari. This is a relation that plays a crucial role in indigenous Amazonian cosmopolitics, insofar as it is the primary generative force at work in the world. Beyond its insightful description of Kanamari sociality, this work thus sheds new light on the principles underlying kinship formation and political action in the Lowlands."

Anne-Christine Taylor (CNRS, Musée du Quai Branly), author of An Abuse of Dreams: Kincraft and Imagination in an Amazonian Society

"A major contribution to anthropological theorizing, this impressive work quietly disposes of many conceptual assumptions abroad in anthropology, less through interrogating Western ideas (via other Western ideas) than through brilliant ethnographic exegesis.  The author follows through the consequences of ‘feeding’ as a signature of Amazonian ownership.  Observational and analytical sophistication aside, the result offers a kind of scholarly commensality that emphatically enhances the trenchant and radical consequences of the book’s achievement as the body-owner of the arguments it gives us.  If Kanamari taught the author this etiquette, we would not do so badly in finding we had a need for it."

Marilyn Strathern (University of Cambridge), author of Before and After Gender

"This book is a paradigm shifter. That the distinction between sharing and exchanging (here, commensality and feeding) is as important to the understanding of reciprocity as that between the maternal and paternal descent lines is to the understanding of kinship has long been received knowledge in Melanesia. Unfortunately due to the influence of Lévi-Strauss, it has been missing from the canon in Amazonia. Thanks to Luiz Costa’s brilliant The Owners of Kinship, this oversight will soon be corrected."

Roy Wagner (University of Virginia), author of Coyote Anthropology

"Fascinating. . . [A] valuable ethnography whose comparative possibilities with other areas could well help us to understand the Amerindian variations, not only concerning property, kinship or authority, but also of the role of intimacy, dependency and control in relations between men and non-human entities such as land or cattle."

Anthropos (Translated from Spanish)