Consaguinize and deconsanguinize, Tepehuas ways to "replace": to make consanguineous ties between new parents and new children, new grandparents and new grandchildren. But also consanguineous in-law?

Abstract

This article describes the shamanic ritual practices that allow the Ma'alh'amanin (Eastern Tepehuas) to break the old bonds of consanguinity with parents who have died, or are absent in life, and build new consanguineous ties with the "replacements" (oqxtapáaxanín) that substitute them as ‘new’ parents, whereby the main purpose of the article is to propose that, according to ethnographic data, consanguineous relations are not a universal biological fact, but rather a social-ontological construction. The article also places emphasis on the funeral rituals that permit the substitution of old children for those who will act as their substitutes, albeit that this is only from the perspective of the deceased parents who will continue their life in the other world. As far as living humans are concerned, the focus of the ethnographic description is with regard to the construction of the relationship between ‘new’ children and ‘new’ parents, as well as to those cases in which the spouses and the old children of the ‘new’ children submit equally to the shamanic mechanism of ritualistic blood transfusion (consanguinization), so that the " replacements"  become
the grandparents of their ‘new’ grandchildren.