Seriously Laughing: On Paradoxes of Absurdity among Matsigenka People

Abstract

Laughing and humour are of great importance to most people in their everyday life and these phenomena have attracted attention from many social thinkers. It has been noted that laughter often is provoked by something that is considered to be absurd and paradoxical. This essay focuses specifically on the meaning of laughter among Matsigenka people of the Peruvian Amazon. The paper discusses how absurdity is employed within narrative genres as a structuring principle within the specific ethos that is predominant among this people and how it serves to generate and manifest conviviality.

Keywords:

• Matsigenka
• humour
• narrative
• conviviality
• aesthetics

Notes

The Matsigenka is a group of swidden horticulturalists, numbering between 10,000 and 12,000 persons, the majority of whom live along the Urubamba and Manu Rivers in the southeastern foothills of the Peruvian Andes. I initiated fieldwork in Matsigenka settlements in the Upper Urubamba area in 1979 and I have since then intermittently continued to visit the area.

Substantial overviews regarding how laughter and comedy have been understood through Western intellectual history can be found in, e.g. Berger (1997) and Moreall (1983).

In an interesting paper on Cashinahua laughter, Elsje Lagrou (2006:47) concludes that the Cashinahua laugh at the powerful not to neutralise them but to appropriate part of their agency and mode of knowledge.

From at least the time of Plato (1975) and Aristotle (1996) through to Baudelaire (1956), there have been thinkers who, in trying to understand laughter, have mainly stressed the ungenerous, mocking and outright evil attitudes that it may express.

The friendly teasing and bantering that seems to be common among many Amazonian peoples is only rarely heard among Matsigenka people.

For Matsigenka people, the principal strategy to reduce conflict is to move away from the contending party and to evade the problem altogether rather than to stay and face the awkward situations that may emerge (Rosengren 2000).

As a rule, Matsigenka people do not engage in an obliteration of the memory of dead peoples as individuals which occurs elsewhere (Taylor 1993:653). Parents and grandparents (and occasionally even great grandparents) are usually remembered, but these reminiscences are, in the main, of individual interest only. With the exception of those outstanding characters who are made subjects of biographical narratives, the memory of individuals is not collectively elaborated.

Koribeni is a tributary to the Upper Urubamba River in the vicinity of which Matsigenka people have been living for a long time, and it is, thus, a well-known place.

Darío was a prominent story teller in the community of Koribeni and I owe much to him as a major source of my myth material.

The merging of his individuality with the anonymous mass of ancestors is in accordance with the depersonalisation effected by mortuary practices among other Amazonian peoples (Taylor 1993; Conklin 2001).

Even though the general image of feasting is one of joy and goodwill, drunken brawls occur sufficiently often for everyone to be aware that the ideal of amity is not always possible to uphold.

Jules Henry (1964:56ff) describes an instance among the Kaingáng (Xokleng) that is similar in this respect to the case reported here and that resulted in the death of those who were invited to partake in the festivities. George Mentore (2005:48) also notes how the Waiwai seek to control physical violence with a convivial attitude towards potential aggressors.

The more common magical stone is the ‘tobacco stone’ (iserepito) upon which shamans also blow. The blowing upon these stones will however not transform them but make the auxiliary spirit who dwells within them go to saangarite spirits to serve as mediators in the contacts between the shamans and these spirits (Baer 1984:201f; Rosengren 2002, 2006).

The association between the playing of flutes and flatulence can also be found elsewhere in the ethnography of the Amazon. For example, Stephen Hugh-Jones (1979:200) notes that the sound of the Yurupary flutes ‘is made by the player blowing with pursed lips … down an open tube and is thus like an amplified fart’.

The importance given to bodily control is articulated differently in various parts of the Amazon. In his comparative mythology, Lévi-Strauss (1969:135) comments upon this variation noting that ‘… whether it is a question of not giving in to comic illusion, not laughing (through physical or mental causes), or not making a noise while eating (…) all the myths mentioned belong to the same dialectic of opening and shutting, which operates on two levels: that of the upper orifices (mouth, ear), and that of the lower (anus, urinary canal, vagina)’. While Matsigenka people as a rule seem to stress modesty, other peoples are more flamboyant. Stephen Hugh-Jones (1979:202) says in relation to the Barasana and farting that ‘One of the things that instantly strikes visitors to the Pirá-paraná area is that adult men delight in farting loudly, often modulating the noise with their fingers or cupped hands’ (see also note 13). This would be unthinkable among most Matsigenka. On the connection between bodily orifices and folly, see also Overing (2000, 2006).

In contrast to the stinking demons, the spirits that Matsigenka people turn to for help and protection, the saangarite, are characteristically sweet-smelling (Rosengren 2004:42).