Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
consequences of the dismantling of cultures is the resigned submission of the indige-
nous person and his integration, always degraded, to the Western civilizational model.
3
According to this narrative, evangelical ethnocide against Totobiegos-
ode destroyed them as surely as their physical extermination:
The most tragic effect of missionary ethnocide is that it breaks the spine of a people,
it converts their members into caricatures of Westerners and later, as it does not have
any reasonable project to offer them, it pushes them irresponsibly to sell hides, to hand
over their forests and symbols, and to direct exploitation or it sends them to a marginal
underworld of begging, prostitution, alcoholism and petty delinquency where they
end as beings that have no place in their culture nor the culture of others. . . . Once
the community is dissolved, the pact that united it with nature according its common
designs is also dissolved; soon, the Indian finds himself in opposition to a universe with
which he once identified himself and he sees his relations with his ecological environ-
ment adulterated; at the end, he himself is turned into a predatory destroyer. collective
tradition is also dissolved: the anathema launched against his ancient beliefs creates
an artificial wall of forgetting that interferes with the transmitting metabolism of his
culture: a phobic negation of the past and a schizophrenic fracture of time invents a
pure present without ghosts or memories.
4
In this evocative critique, Ayoreo humanity was irrevocably lost
through contact and a pathological internalization of oppression. The
Totobiegosode became global icons of such ethnocidal violence. This
narrative of the human hunt was repeated so often—“The Facts: Hunters,
Hunted,” “Chronicles of Human Hunts,” “The Hunted Ayoreo”—that it
has become inseparable from their political visibility.
5
For many outsid-
ers, it is the foundation myth of Totobiegosode humanity.
This narrative is also an origin myth for the political anthropology of
indigeneity. “Genocide assassinates people in their bodies,” wrote Pierre
Clastres in his famous 1974 essay on the topic, “ethnocide kills them in
their minds.” For Clastres, ethnocide was at once “the dissolution of the
multiple into the One” and the “normal mode of existence of the state.”
The reduction of difference, he argued, was the shared aim of capitalist
productivity and the modern state. The task of the political anthropologist
was thus clear: to prove the historical contingency of this ethnocidal state
form, by showing that primitive society offered a radical alternative.
6
This
possibility, or so the story goes, was destroyed at the moment of contact.
Predictably, the New Tribes missionaries offered a starkly different in-
terpretation of what was at stake in these events. In early 1987, they
