The Anthropology of Marriage in Lowland South America is a substantial and ethnographically rich volume presenting ten ethnographic cases of alliance-based Dravidian-type (bilateral cross-cousin) marriage systems from western and north-western Amazonia, central Brazil and the western Guianas. Some of the material is as recent as it could be, given that the volume is based on a panel held at the 2006 International Congress of Americanists, and many of the authors draw on career-long observations to offer more reflexive discussion of changes over time.

The organisational framework of the book is based on three variations of the ‘structure vs. agency issue’ in marriage practices in Amerindian societies (p. 12). The first section (Part 1) aims to address motivations for ‘breaking the marriage rules’ (ibid.), by which the authors mean not adhering to a strict ‘normative’ (here equated with prescriptive) behaviour in the choice of marriage partner. Dan Rosengren on the Matsigenka is one of the few authors to use myth to suggest the cosmological context of his ethnographic account. Alexander Mansutti Rodríguez discusses various examples of irregular marriage choices among the Piaroa but engages little with Joanna Overing's seminal work on the Piaroa alliance system (The Piaroa, a People of the Orinoco Basin, Oxford Clarendon Press, 1975). Closing the first section, Daniela Peluso's chapter discusses marriage choices among the Ese Eja and the importance of sight and visibility in formally establishing relationships.

Part 2 is divided into four chapters devoted to three case studies addressing the high degree of variability between postulated marriage conventions and actual occurrences. François-René Picon opens the section with a discussion of Wayù (Guajiro) marriage with a decisive focus on exchange and wealth. The following two chapters by Nalúa Rosa Silva Monterrey and Paul Valentine examine the high incidence of irregular marriage choices among the Yek'wana over a number of generations, at last finding that ‘residence and age take precedent over descent and marital connections’, though without acknowledging that this has been the standard expectation in Amazonian ethnology since Peter Rivière's Individual and Society in Guiana was published in 1984 (Cambridge University Press). As Catherine Alès argues in her chapter on matrimonial strategies among the Yanomami of Venezuela, the terminology of reference is distinct from that of address, ‘open[ing] up possibilities for variations of appellations that will be codified and reinforced by the system of attitudes’ (p. 125). In a typical native Amazonian fashion, consanguinity and affinity afford various degrees of flexibility and adjustment across specific cases.

Part 3 consists of four chapters centring on changes in marriage rules resulting from wider historical events and processes such as globalisation. Janet Chernela's chapter on the Eastern Tukanoan Kotiria provides a balanced, ethnographically grounded perspective which resonates with Peter Rivière's classic observations in Marriage among the Trio (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1969, p. 141) that ‘the impulses of rule and practice interact dialectally’ (p. 176). Paul Valentine and Lionel Sims give an evocative rendition of the life of a frontier town across the triple border (Venezuela–Colombia–Brazil) of the north-western Amazon, in which they identify an example of transition from an elementary to a complex elementary kinship structure, though regrettably without discussing A. C. Taylor's classic 1983 article ‘The Marriage Alliance and its Structural Variations in Jivaroan Societies’ (Social Science Information, 22: 3, pp. 331–53). William Crocker's chapter on changes in Canela marriage practices over 70 years reflexively elaborates on an earlier version published in Kenneth M. Kensinger's edited volume on native Amazonian kinship (Marriage Practices in Lowland South America, Illinois University Press, 1984). The final chapter, authored by Pamela Erickson, Stephen Beckerman, James Yost and Rosemary Diaz, based on the analysis of ethnographic and historical sources, traces changes in Waorani marriage from the point of view of intergenerational and interethnic relationships.

The central thrust of Paul Valentine and Stephen Beckerman's introduction is to challenge the putative notion that marriage rules (often referred to as ‘norms’) represent rigid, ‘cold’ sociological ‘structures’ which ‘individual’ actors strategically circumvent in their marriage practices. Structure is presented as a sociological antithesis of agency and individuality (p. 1). The editors thus appear to repeat the mistake made by a second generation of critics of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ early work (The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Beacon Press, 1971 [Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté, Presses Universitaires de la France, 1949]), with the publication of Kensinger's Marriage Practices, by failing to engage with the notion of alliance, instead considering marriage ‘as an institutional relationship between concrete groups or social categories’ (Anne-Christine Taylor, ‘Compte-rendu de K. M. Kensinger (ed.), Marriage Practices in Lowland South America’, in L'Homme, 29 (1989), pp. 111–12). Lévi-Strauss’ above-mentioned 1949 work on Dravidian systems, though based on the analysis of south Indian material, included some important intuitions on the principles of Amazonian forms of social organisation, notably the fundamental ontological significance of affinal relationships. Despite their emphasis on the role of incest, Valentine and Beckerman's inattention to alliance leads them to ignore that Lévi-Strauss places brother–sister incest, or ‘alliance-incest’ – rather than the effectively Freudian ‘filiation incest’ between parents and children – at the foundation of Amazonian elementary structures (Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-Structural Anthropology, Univocal, 2009, p. 178). Given the wide consensus among Amazonian scholars and readers of Lévi-Strauss today that South American affinity is ‘not a sociological category but a philosophical idea’ (ibid, p. 173), it is surprising that some authors continue to revisit structuralism as though Lévi-Strauss had been primarily concerned with social rather than with mental structures, and without engaging with its intellectual legacy in French, Brazilian and British anthropology. Indeed few of the key works on kinship and personhood, or from linguistic anthropology (e.g. on agentivity), are discussed here. The attention to the role of affinity in mental structures and linguistic categories allows a richer insight into native Amazonian relationships with the lived and living environment, including non-human persons, mythical beings, or indeed land and dwelling places, which are unfortunately lacking in this volume. Nevertheless, the ethnographic richness of the chapters make them a valuable resource for scholars of the region.