Despite its purported universality, hospitality has little ethnographic and theoretical yield in Amazonia, being neither an important indigenous idiom, nor an abstract sociocosmic operator. Why is this the case ? Why is hospitality so important in Eurasia, and not in Amazonia ? In this article we argue that hospitality’s close connection to the twin concepts of sovereignty and domestication precludes its acclimatisation to the South American Lowlands. It further analyses the notion of mastery, present both in Eurasia and Amazonia, in order to show that, in the latter case, mastery and its attending relations must be conceptualized independently of both sovereignty and domestication.