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Representations about youth vary historically and culturally. In the Upper Rio Negro, there are indigenous groups with over three centuries of contact with the non-indigenous world. In recent years, male initiation rites were suppressed and formal schooling was introduced. These events led to a redefinition of significance in forms of representation at different stages of life. This work sought to understand the construction of the Indian representation of youth; how they correlate with the other life cycle phases and how they contribute to configuring structured social practices in this social group. Several mythical stories dealing with intergenerational relationships have been reviewed; these were correlated with significant stages of life, with other local narratives, and with data gathered from direct observation. The study concludes that the representations about youth have been configured by the social roles of the initiating/initiated, in a currently contradictory fashion, under a generic and lengthy student phase, deprived of its own sociological markers, prolonging the threshold condition of this phase of life.

The interactions among the ways of life and drink of youths indigenous of a populous place of Upper Rio Negro were analyzed through an ethnographic research. It was used a theoretical model that allowed to decompose and to articulate the social reality in different levels. It was observed that there was a multiplication of the situations in which is possible to drink, that are associated to mechanisms as much of belonging demarcation as of exposition of differences inter-group. Nowadays, youths insert themselves in multiple interaction networks. Through these networks they can create juvenile atmospheres of alcohol consumption, drink far away from the parents and buy industrialized drinks. With the introduction of the school and the abandonment of the initiation rituals, the youth status became uncertain, and it occurs in an ambiguous way the social norms of alcohol consumption, in a context in which there is no consensus in daily practice respect of the possible strategies to regulate juvenile drinking. Through this research, theoretical-methodological alternatives could be suggested to investigate the relationships that are established between the ways of life and the production of the health and disease, incorporating in this analysis the culture (and its transformation), the daily life (and its contradictions), the people (and its subjectivities).