The grotesque humor of pantomime and myth, the festive humor of play, and the humor used to criticize excesses in myth and comic sketches, can all be read as modes of native knowledge of the world and of the relationships holding this world together. Native exegesis of humoristic imagery reveals crucial values related to Cashinahua concepts about sociality and ritual agency. These are iconic discourses about the quality of relations between people and between people and the animated world. The humor of the grotesque body composed of parts of the body acting as autonomous forces, and the festive humor contaminating the owners of substances, have ritual efficacy, making cosmic powers act in favor of humanity. What kind of knowledge is expressed in humor? Festive and grotesque humor expresses a knowledge of how to act on the world, a knowledge the protagonists of mythic time lacked. In myth, the powerful owners of knowledge crucial to life were conquered and killed. In ritual, these same beings are "made happy" and seduced. Ritual agency thus subverts mythical agency to produce historical time, a time in which bodies are produced out of the constructive qualities of powerful beings known for their predatory capacities.
ethnology; Kaxinawa; festive humor; grotesque humor; ritual; myth