ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a fieldwork that was carried out in Peru in the Southern Andean village of Ocongate, Cusco. It discusses the central importance of drinking and drunkenness to ritual in Andean villages. The sexual violence which occurs in the towns and villages of the Southern Peruvian Andes is highly visible yet strangely inaccessible. Men and women become very sensitive to their position in the household hierarchy and it is with reference to the need to impose respect and draw attention to the order of the kinship hierarchy that much domestic violence occurs. The chapter looks at how the idioms of kinship and affinity are applied to the conflictual social relations enacted in ritual battles and in interactions with the supernatural. The birth of children brings a husband and wife into a pseudo-kinship relationship. Marriage ideally marks the formation of a kin-based unit through the birth and rearing of children.
