ACCULTURATION IN THE GUAJIRA—CRIST 485 
selves to local customs, and whose children, according to Guajiro tra- 
dition, do not belong to them but to their wives. Permanent mar- 
riages are made by outsiders who have come to settle in the Peninsula, 
some of whom buy a wife or wives in the Guajiro manner, while others 
marry one wife according to Catholic rites. Whatever the character 
of these mixed marriages, the children are brought up in two cul- 
tures. During their early, most impressionable years they are im- 
bued with the Guajiro language and with other cultural traits of 
their mother. 
Many of these mestizo children are educated, at least for a time, 
outside the Peninsula, with the result that a layer of “modern” culture 
is superimposed or grafted onto the maternal Guajira culture. But 
the grafting is not universally successful—in the words of the horti- 
culturist, it does not always take. Many who have gone to school or 
lived for several years in Caracas or Maracaibo, in Bogota or Baran- 
quilla, upon their return to the Guajira appear very happy to settle 
down and live in the manner of their Guajiro ancestors. They may 
build a permanent, cement-floored house in the nearby settlement of 
La Gloria, one that is a far cry from the thatch-roofed, dirt-floored 
huts of their unaccultured fellows in the vast desert beyond, but the 
idea, for example, of constructing a privy has evidently never oc- 
curred to them, and if the visitor asks where such facilities are, a 
baffled look comes over the face of his host, who makes a sweeping 
gesture with the hands to indicate that the whole wide desert is avail- 
able for such use. 
The Indians of the Guajira are divided into various clans or blood 
groups, castas, each with its distinguishing totem representing the 
animal with whose traits, according to legend, the clan was originally 
imbued. For centuries every clan was theoretically—and often ac- 
tually—on a war footing with all other clans. Blood feuds for real 
or imagined causes were common and sometimes resulted in the anni- 
hilation or enslavement of the vanquished clan. Marriage was prac- 
ticed within the clan. Only recently have marriages between mem- 
bers of different clans tended to decrease interclan tensions and blood 
feuds. Formerly each member of a clan was considered a blood rela- 
tive of every other member. In the course of time the blood relation- 
ship of any member came to be restricted to his mother and her an- 
cestors, her brothers and sisters and their descendants. 
In La Gloria, where some marriages are being performed in the 
Catholic Church instead of by purchase and with Guajiro ritual, still 
more marked changes in the system of relationship have been intro- 
duced. In the case of marriages within the church—which first of 
all substitutes the concept of monogamy for the traditional polyga- 
mous unions—children are no longer considered to pertain exclusively 
to their mother’s clan, nor do they carry her name. Instead the 
