Before entering the Promised land, Moses declared to Israel: “the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land… a land of wheat and barley… and the land in which you will eat bread without scarcity”   (Deut. 8:7-8). In the new land of Canaan bread became the staff of life because environmental conditions were favorable and conducive to planting and harvesting wheat.

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But at an altitude of 10,000 to 12,000 feet, the staff of life is the lowly potato for approximately two million Aymara and Quechua who live in Bolivia, Peru, and  Chile. In this arid and cold environment with very little water, potatoes are the staple of life, not wheat and bread. Potatoes require very little water, mature in as little as 50 days, and can yield between two and four times more food per acre than wheat or other grains.  

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Now fly North over the Andes from La Paz, Bolivia and drop down to 600 feet above sea level and you will find the Chácobo living in a vastly different ecosystem. Here the hot climate, sandy soil, and an annual rainfall of approximately eighty inches a year, is conducive to growing manioc. This large thick-skinned tuber similar to the potato, is either roasted and eaten, or boiled and converted into beer or jënë as they called it. 

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Unlike their Bolivian neighbors, the Chácobo, until recently, never planted rice. For the Chácobo, jënë or beer manufactured from manioc became the staff of life, though at times they made bread out of it. Everyone drank jënë, men, women, children and even babies.  

 

However, when the jënë ran out, as we witnessed on a number of occasions, it became obvious their way of life was threatened. First, it meant no more fiestas where the  rhythmic playing of panpipes and the dancing around a huge pot of jënë was the central focus of such festive occasions.

 

Secondly, it meant finding a substitute for manioc, like palm nuts, from which their jënë could be manufactured.  Lack or shortage of manioc beer, their staple of life, meant a life of impoverishment and hardship. 

 

A Crucial Choice in History

At some point in Chácobo history their ancestors grappled with the question: Who is going to make the beer or jënë? Their existence depended on it. First we must note that preparing jënë is female intensive labor. Manufacturing it involved all women in the household, both mothers and daughters. If their husbands were hosting a fiesta, then all the women in the village would be involved.

 

The task consisted of walking out to their gardens to collect firewood which they needed for the brewing of the beer. Then they would return for the manioc which they had to dig up. Filling up their baskets, they would bring the roots back to the village where they peeled off the thick skins and cut them up into pieces.

 

After cooking the manioc, they poured the pieces into a large clay dish. Seated around the dish, they then each plucked out the cooked pieces which they thoroughly chewed and masticated, in the processing adding their saliva as the chemical agent needed for fermentation. 

 

After each piece has been chewed and spit back into the dish, they pushed the mash through a bark sieve into 25-35 gallon clay pots that they then filled with water. The brew was left to ferment and in a day or two the jënë was ready to drink.  

 

The daughter’s role in this labor-intensive task eventually turned into a permanent job as "mother's helpmate."  Her role, or more accurately, her ascribed function as "mother's helper" did not end at marriage.

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Submitting to the shaping power of the elements of the Amazonian Rainforest rather than the voice of conscience, the Chácobo not only reconfigured the internal structure of the nuclear family, replacing the "one flesh" principle of husband-wife with the biological "one flesh" principle of mother-daughter, they began to ascribed functions to each member of society.

 

Marriage did not change the nature of these relationships. After all, the marriage contract was between the sons-in-law and the wife's parents, not between husband and wife. Instead of leaving father and mother at marriage, she remained at home to help her mother make the beer

 

The function ascribed to every daughter was to be "mother's helper." Daughters were needed to produce the basic staple of life which was beer.  If they were to survive as a beer manufacturing society,  then releasing their daughters to join their husbands at marriage would threaten their way of living. It therefore was imperative that the mother-daughter  dyad remain the dominant dyad of the nuclear family.  It was a cultural life-way in which women covertly ruled. . 

 

By reconfiguring the internal structure of the nuclear family and by ascribing specific functions to each member of society, the Chácobo were able to satisfy their basic needs for survival. But in the process, they became a leaderless society existing without a rudder. They were like a ship without a pilot and a port of destination.

 

Convictions 

1. This shift from FREEDOM to FUNCTION  occurs whenever a society rejects and replaces inherent meanings attached to cultural forms or concepts held in common by all peoples with meanings which "belong to the people."

2. When the Chácobo crossed that Andes of Peru and entered the Amazonian Rainforest, they entered a new ecological environment.  Instead of potatoes there was manioc. In time manioc beer became the staple of life. This in turn lead to asking the question: Who is going to make the beer?  

3. When the collective response was: "mothers and daughters," this meant daughters remained at home when they married.  Instead of becoming husband's "helpmate" (Genesis 2:15) when they married, they remained mother's helpmates.   In order  to make sure their defensive system against anxiety kept going, husbands and wives were prohibited from sleeping and living together.

4. In time the mother-daughter dyad replaced the husband-wife dyad as the dominant dyad of the family. The replacement produced a dying egalitarian society devoid of leaders.