Holy Intoxication to Drunken Dissipation: Alcohol among Quichua Speakers in Otavalo, Ecuador (review)

In this new work, Barbara Butler examines a reversal in the public morality of a group of Ecuadorian Quichua speakers. Until 1987, the residents of the community Hauycopungo invested much of their disposable income in ritualized drinking. Placing a high value on the solidarity created in fiestas, residents tolerated the costs of drunkenness: fights, domestic violence, indebtedness and alcoholism. Then, in March 1987, an earthquake struck, damaging half the homes in the community. In coming to grips with the disaster, residents spoke of God's punishment, just as they had done in past catastrophes. However, unlike previous occasions, the earthquake "gave people the confidence to give up behaviors of the past without fear that they were betraying their heritage" (p. 231). Drinking to excess went from being spiritually sanctioned to socially condemned. What happened? In answering this question, Butler uses ethnographic materials gathered over the course of three decades to explain the changing costs and benefits of drinking.

Drinking's goals and the costs become clear in the first chapter, where Butler details one family's new house fiesta and how their private anxieties spill over into public arguments. In the following chapters, the author lays bare the cultural logic at work. Her account is broadly holistic. She explains the structural principles of kinship and community organization and the ritualized exchanges of drinks that confirm social status. Butler also clarifies the ecology and economics of the two main alcoholic beverages, asua (a less intoxicating drink made at home from maize) and trago (a purchased and potent liquor distilled from sugarcane). In Chapters 4 and 5, she expands her scope to Andean spirituality, the ceremonial calendar, and the drinking cultures found in private homes and cantinas, or rudimentary rural taverns.

Butler's pronouncements will sound familiar enough to anyone with a basic knowledge of Andean ethnography—"mutual exchanges of alcohol are supposed to symbolize reciprocity in the exchange of labor and goods" (p. 103), "drinking removed communal projects from the realm of the merely instrumental and made them another support of the sacred interdependency of the community" (p. 107). However, she develops these themes creatively, especially in her emphasis on the moral commingling of the good with bad. Butler points out that Quichua speakers recognize that "all things of great power can as easily help as harm human beings" (p. 16). She plays out this insight to show how cooperation and conflict become mutually reinforcing in community life. In her description of the Pendoneros celebration, for example, she describes when the flag bearers from different communities walk slowly toward the chapel, and "at a given moment they turn quickly and begin to kiss and bite each other on the ears, men with men and women with women" (p. 146). Affection and aggression are bound in the ritual. Butler draws a deeper lesson about not polarizing moral choices, in general, and the need to avoid celebrating or condemning Indian drinking, in particular.

When the earthquake hits, drinking loses its purchase in the reproduction of community life. Although the final chapters are offered as an "after" representing this new moral world, in fact they cover stories that are decades in the making. In Chapter 7, readers learn about the Otavalo tourism and craft economy that gave rise to a new class of indigenous entrepreneurs. In Chapter 8, Butler covers the local history of evangelical Protestants, their successful struggle to establish a church and the emergence of Catholic Catequistas who compete for followers. Whatever their differences, the churches combine forces in affirming community life that is both indigenous and sober. Chapter 9 reviews how the transition away from peasant livelihoods led to more use of purchased cane liquor, trago, and worsening problems of alcohol dependence. Finally in Chapter 10, Butler describes how the newer, more abstemious ritual culture plays out during return of the Corazas fiesta in 2000 after a sixteen...