Abstract
On the Highland of Jasimaná, in North Western Argentina, the euro-American idea of kinship, which on the traditional anthropological concept is based, cannot completely explain the local kinship perceptions and relations. Using both culturalism and ecological functionalism as theoretical perspectives, the article analyses, on the one hand, the dynamics of the households in the Andean environment and, on the other, the indigenous practices and categories of “family” and “kinship”. We aim highlight the usefulness of ethnographic method, case study and reconstruction of family networks in order to understand from the local level the variation of macro-regional family patterns in Latin America.