Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
fies and demands further images to represent it and create another kind
of excess that demands further images of difference.
These tensions found their clearest articulation in the drive to hunt
Indians. Repeated time and again, this operation aimed to track down and
capture and enslave and convert small groups of forest Totobiegosode in
order to save and care for them by touching and then eradicating their
difference, yet in doing so the Indian hunt created and amplified the sav-
age figures of forest Indians to be hunted anew. Orgiastic representation
flashed into another Indian hunt, which flashed back into another limit
of humanity to be transcended, which flashed back into another Indian
hunt, and so on. Yet neither wild man hunts nor my own reverse pursuit
of them offered any positive synthesis for anyone involved. Instead, this
lack of synthesis is the point.
In the midst of this turbulence, the figure of ethnocide reappears not
as an effective critique but as a crucial pole for sustaining this nonsystem.
It is a figure created by the instrumental dysfunction of colonial violence
and inseparable from the allure of hunting Indians. It does not question
Indian alterity but reifies it anew. That is, the notion of ethnocide is a
key colonial metanarrative that inverts and naturalizes the operations of
colonial subjugation. Through it, Indian difference is imagined as a pre-
existing multiplicity forcibly reduced to the singular, and this singularity
is imagined to make Indians identical to the model we impose.
Yet in practice Ayoreo missions instantiated the very opposite dy-
namic. Indian hunts did not eradicate Indian difference but tamed it and
through taming it they unwittingly reproduced the difference in need
of being hunted. Only by having a barbarian to hunt and tame and dis-
place back into the forest could one truly become Christian, civilized, and
saved. The drive to domesticate multiplicity, in other words, did not im-
ply its rational reduction to a singularity but rather a much more chaotic
tension between the amplification and homogenization of multiplicity
itself. In this case, then, the narrative of ethnocide substitutes cause for
effect and gives new momentum to the apparatus of eradication, salva-
tion, and alterity that was indistinguishable from colonial violence. It
emerges from the same nonsensical logic as the Indian hunt.
Taking this dynamic seriously obviously charters a different kind of
political anthropology than did the ethnocide envisioned by Clastres.
Such a project can only start by recognizing that the notion of primitive
society as “the conceptual embodiment of the thesis that another world
is possible” is fused to the appeal of the Indian hunt. It risks diverting
our attention from the more pressing question of how such images work
through and against the substances of life to create vertical hierarchies
