The bait and the parasite: Paumari ritual and humor against power

Abstract

After leaving the seclusion, during the ritual games, the Paumari girl is presented and exposed by the other women to several "predators" staged by the men.  In a game of complex inversions, she is positioned as a "bait" to attract the predators and constitute a trap, an ambush, in which the predator seduced by the possibility of subjecting or devouring its prey, can only fall and be killed. The Jara, the white man, is usually the last predator to arrive. The most elaborate figure of this stage of the ritual, he is the only one who becomes the object of mockery by the women and children, before being beaten by them “to death”. This ethnographic essay seeks to analyze humor and derision in the Paumari ritual context by linking it to the dynamic of positional inversions that they operate between the point of view of the prey and that of the predator, as a vector of the symbolic annihilation of power and in light of another ritual figure, that of the parasite. This figure forms a parasitic ideal, where the bosses would end up trapped in their dominant positions, at the mercy of capture and consumption by their parasites.  But not in a movement of simple inversion or annulment of positions, but rather crossing the asymmetrical relation, thus creating a possible opening to trace some line of escape. Opening the possibility for the bosses to be forced to assume the position of eternal providers, not only of manufactured goods, but of everything that is considered indispensable to be in the world: relatives, names, food, exchanges, and enemies.