Collective Violence and Birthday Parties: A Girardian Analysis of the Piñata

The piñata is a tradition most commonly associated with Latin America, but this party game has a mysterious origin. Some suppose that the origin of the practice was brought to the Americas by the Spanish, who received the custom from the Italians.¹ Some say that the Italians, through Marco Polo, appropriated the ritual from the Chinese.² Others see the Mexican piñata as originating locally in an Aztec religious ritual.³ But looking at this festival activity through a Girardian lens we can see that wherever a custom came into being, it seems that its origins lie in the lethal practice of collective violence. The following description may serve as an exemplar of the tradition:

In Mexico, a plain, round clay cooking pot called an olla is decorated and finally almost entirely concealed by ruffles and streamer coverings shaped into animals, stars, etc. It is filled with nuts, sugar cane, fruits and small toys and is hung overhead from a rope. One participant in the game is blindfolded and given a long stick with which he or she tries to hit the pot. Several people (usually children) take turns at being blindfolded and swinging the stick, and finally when someone hits the pot hard enough to break it, the other players scramble on the ground for the scattered prizes. It is a kind of noisy and happy version of a grab-bag, and the game goes on for quite a few minutes, since a controlling cord is used to swing the pot out of reach of the batters. There are several sing-song chants which the children say as the game goes on with each new target.⁴

While the clay pot is the most traditional, piñatas are also made from other materials, including papier-mâché and cane plants.⁵ Furthermore, the piñata has a place in many different festivals; it is especially associated with Christmas, Easter, and birthday parties all over the Americas where there is a Latin influence.

While the ritual of the piñata contains no explicit violence, the ritual itself contains many of the elements of the scapegoat mechanism René Girard describes in Violence and the Sacred. What Girard describes here is the banding together of society as they focus their internal animosity onto an arbitrary third-party victim. The peace that arrives after this violence is so profound that it is instinctually associated with the divine. This peace inspires a reenactment of this violence as a religious ritual. Therefore, religion functions as the force that keeps internal violence from turning all members of a society against one another. This controlled violence is the safety valve that releases the violence that would otherwise rend the social fabric of a community.⁶ Religion also veils the violence, which grants peace. It is important that the violence be expressed, but also hidden. Girard says, "Men cannot confront the naked truth of their own violence without the risk of abandoning themselves to it entirely. They have never had a very clear idea of this violence, and it is possible that the survival of all human societies of the past was dependent on this fundamental lack of understanding."⁷ This is the significance of the ritualism of cultic sacrifice.

This relates to our current question of the piñata in the sense that the practice is reminiscent of a sacrificial ritual, especially when the piñata takes the shape of a being like an animal or human person. First, destruction is the initial aim of the activity. The piñata, like the oblation, must be destroyed in some way. This is what grants the ritual its efficacy. Second, there is a need for rubrics, a carefully followed procedure for the desired effect to come about. In cultic sacrifice, this can take place in a variety of ways, from ritualistic washing of the priest and the victim to the exact procedure and order for dissecting the victim. Similarly, as we saw in the description of the piñata above, there is a procedure. The piñata is...