Ritual plays a huge part in Juan José Saer’s The Witness. The narrator – the cabin boy – talks about his first couple of days at the natives’ settlement, and remarks about their shocking but seemingly normal rituals that follow. As they begin to prepare the human meat to eat, the settlement seems to follow some strange sort of rules – the cooks are methodical and practical, and the tribe (if that is the correct rule) stands transfixed by the process. After the meat has been cooked, the natives eat it quickly and then sit around as if transfixed by the entire process. Afterwards, another group of natives (perhaps a subset of the same tribe) brings by large jugs of some kind of alcoholic beverage on canoes. As soon as the natives drink it they devolve into a base animals, participating in an orgy of incestual and grand proportions. Many people have violent and erratic behaviors, and many die or are injured during the course of the day. Afterward, the dead are dealt with, the injured heal, and the tribe takes a large amount of time to recover from the ordeal. This was clearly a ritual, as the natives participated in all of these events naturally and with ease, and thus it calls into question the literary purpose of including such a ritual. In this context, I think that the inclusion of such a ritual that is so opposed to European standards is in order to show that European “rituals” are probably just as absurd to these natives. Rituals in different cultures are even more interesting when juxtaposed, and this long scene does a good job at exposing the reader to this fact.