The Strange Visitor: Towards a Theory on Amazonian Rituals

Abstract

The habit of understanding «ritual» as a representation of symbolic and social structures usually leaves its symbolic and social effectiveness to the background, that is, its value as a «laboratory» in which new relations between subjects or new notions can be experimented. The studies on rituals tend to focus in those considered as more «representatives» and to avoid the ones that appear to be too informal or inauthentic, especially the ones that would fall into the spurious category of «ritual for the public» or «for tourists». A review of Panoan rituals –and the Amazonian rituals in general– reveals, nevertheless, that the ritual actions «for others» have always occupied a central place. And even in the more commercial contemporary versions they manifest the same socializing and innovative impulse (with its broad improvising margin) that have always characterize those constituently open societies.