The very high level of value descriptions and judgements on what it has agreed to call drinking festivals is not a misunderstandable thing, as the phenomenon is considered in a broad comparative perspective. From the moment of conquest to the writings of professional anthropologists at the hinge of the 20th century , it remains a depreciative way of apprehending and describing the excessive and dismissal character of these holidays. From the 16th century, these were fought by the Church, with variable successes in South America or Mesoameric, and especially by the Jesuits who saw it – with insight, it must be admitted – a bastion by which pagan beliefs survived, obstacles to conversion. When they were not fought, they were tolerated with disregard by the authorities, assimilated to pitiful profane debauchery and, according to sensitivities, interpreted as a sign of sad disgrace linked to the avilisation of civilization or as the noisy confirmation of the alleged savagery of the Indians. The syntheses that bring a clean ethnographic look, which take seriously the preeminence of the phenomenon in South America, are finally quite recent . This article will seek to show, drawing attention to the motive of vomiting, the problems that arise from an understanding of drinking parties too closely focused on the only process of alcoholic fermentation and ethyl drunkenness. Far from claiming to replace the ethyl criterion with the emetic criterion – since it would be useless to claim to distinguish, under the ratio of the body opening, the emical, diuretic or laxative properties –, the main aim of this opening work will be to highlight the interest of an extended comparative approach to other ritual contexts in which substances are used to metamorphose the body at the same time as altering, through drunkenness or other techniques, the awareness of participants.