Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Missionary prayers were answered when the Areguede'urasade ap-
peared, on their own, in 2004. Bobby had been waiting a long time for
this, his own opportunity to capture Indian souls and make New People.
By October of that year, he was making regular trips to Chaidi. His visits
were described to New Tribes believers and prayer partners through posts
on the New Tribes Mission website like that entitled, “Pig People Clan
Hearing God's Word.”
As [Bobby] taught about the Ten commandments he held up a mirror, showing the
Ayores how he could look into it and see himself. Then he took mud and spread it all
over his face. The people thought it was hilarious, but Bobby brought out the serious-
ness of the lesson. He told them how, in the mirror, he could see the dirt all over his
face and that god's Law was like a mirror. It showed people how they are dirty (sinful)
before god.
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We're suddenly back to savagery and gold and an anxious drive for
more Ayoreo souls to collect and consume and discard, a race for the last
Indian hunts to once again recreate and unsettle the boundaries between
Indians, missionaries, and anthropologists. It remains to be seen how
Totobiegosode people are dealing with the legacy of being hunted, the
topic of the following chapters.
For now, we can conclude that the mission was animated by two con-
tradictory energies. One was the drive to create a neat economy of salva-
tion, to reproduce “the romance, the ecstasy, the catharses of the fantasy
of order by which the conquest of the New World has been so constantly
rendered” and effected.
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Like the tradition-seeking
Abujá
, the soul-
collecting missionary rendered Ayoreo life intelligible only to the degree
that it was reduced to a single, valuable, and interchangeable image with
magical powers and to a preordained function in an already-established
whole. The moral humanity of missionaries and
Abujádie
was the func-
tion of their capacities to control the terms of categorization and objec-
tification and, thus, the reproduction of the cosmic order by which their
own self-transformation was ultimately possible to realize.
Yet the drive to impose this hermeneutic order on the violent chaos
elicited by their encounters was a second-order effect of the more potent
breakdown of images and constant unraveling of sense. Indeed, the mis-
sion system was animated primarily by its systematic dysfunction and
epistemic failure on all sides. As Lévi-Strauss reminded us, the founda-
tional myths of savages and missionaries and contact and Indians and
ethnocide exist to mediate the binary contradictions they reify. Yet each
attempt just as surely engenders its opposite, an inverted excess that de-
