Becoming Other, Becoming a Relative: The Masato Feasts among Yaminahua (Peruvian Amazon)

Abstract

During the masateada festivities the Yaminahua get together to consume mass quantities of masato, the fermented manioc-based drink that gives the festival its name. The music, dancing, and participation of loggers who work up the river mark these encounters in which families, who would normally be busy with their day-to-day chores in the housing complexes distributed along the flow of the river, get together to have a good time, dance, and flirt. The masateadas seem to function as a kind of reduced sociological model: in these festivities, the centrifugal and centripetal principals of Yaminahua social dynamics may be seen in action in a condensed form. If, on the one hand, the values uniting this group are fully operational –joyfulness, generosity, the desire to get together with family members and friends– on the other, points of fracture and conflict only partially obvious in daily life, such as sadness and separation, become manifest with special intensity. This text examines how the masateadas construct and express such kinds of relationships, thus constituting one of the paradigmatic spaces (and moments) of their confluence.