Drunken speech: A glimpse into the backstage of sociality in Western Amazonia

This paper engages notions on sociality by Spanish speaking descendants of Panoan Capanahua from Peru, as revealed in one aspect of social practice. Speaking while inebriated, members of this small Western Amazonian population draw from locally specifi c set of ideas about the nature of social life. Therefore, an overview of various standardized themes and attitudes or modalities of such speeches presented in this paper refl ects different, often confl icting layers of ideas and practice of social life. Because of both their content and notions about the very inebriation, drunken speeches are shown to offer a privileged vantage point for understanding the Capanahua descendants’ notions and realizations of sociality. Indeed, they reveal one of the important problems fuelling the dynamics of their sociality, which is the tension between, on the one hand, perceptible dimension of village sociality governed by ideals of equality and neighbourly conviviality, and on the other, the inherent difference and hierarchy encoded in contested personal histories of origins. The latter are conceived as normally concealed layer of social life, but at the same time they condition local ideas about what might be understood as kinship and descent.