Feasting as occupation: The emergence of ritual from everyday activities

Abstract

Timothy Asch's justly famous ethnographic film, The Feast, made with Napoleon Chagnon, represents the forging of an alliance between two formerly mutually hostile villages of Yanomami tribesmen in the Venezuelan rain forest. The event is readily analyzed according to a rite of passage model. By referring to print ethnographies one can also analyze the action depicted in terms of the transmutation that ritual events effect upon everyday activities. Namely this paper demonstrates that cooking becomes a ceremonial statement; that eating becomes dining; that getting dressed becomes dressing up; that goods become gifts; that walking becomes dancing; that talking becomes chanting, chatting, demanding‐haggling, and speech‐making; and that playing become duelling. The analysis discloses ritual as the master system for orchestrating the political and economic events, each a culmination of its own activity stream.

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