Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
people, as well as songs, ordered by rank and prestige of the speakers. He
told me these closely resembled the forms of face-to-face greetings con-
sidered appropriate in the past, particularly during the great pan-Ayoreo
gatherings at Echoi. Jochade listened to these greetings over and over.
One of his favorites was a 1989 message from a distant relative of his that
he had not seen since leaving the forest and whom he had long presumed
was dead:
Jochade, this message is for you. i am one who lived with you all before when you
were in the forest. i don't know if you remember what i look like, ñequenochade . i am
igue, who lived with you before in the forest, together with my father. My father lived
a long time with your people, because my father was one of your people before [con-
tact]. it was long ago. i am meeting you now with my words. . . . i do not know if you
remember that when we were children during the war, our parents took us to live with
the garaigosode. we do not know if you remember us. here my words end. Send me
a cassette and some songs, if this cassette of chogueside arrives to you. . . . we do not
know where you all are. we knew before but we do not know now.
According to Jochade, the most important difference between cassettes
and radio was how their effects could be contained. “You cannot erase
the words of radio like you could erase a cassette. They speak there and
it arrives to you. Everyone can hear it. Radio can make problems worse.
With cassettes it was better because we could erase any bad words so no
one could hear them.” I learned that Jochade himself was a notorious
tape editor. He would collect and privately listen to any cassette made
by the people in Arocojnadi. If he objected to any message, he would
secretly edit it out or record something over it. No such control was pos-
sible, of course, with the radio voices resounding across Ayoreoland all
hours of the day and night.
If the ambiguous power of radio sound derived from its multivocal
ephemerality, cassette sound was ambiguous precisely because of its
more durable materiality. Indeed, a history of recorded sound was no
less fraught than a written one. Profound tensions between remember-
ing and forgetting marked Totobiegosode relationships with aural media,
particularly those cassettes deteriorating in the harsh climate. Listening
to the sounds of the past and the voices of the dead could be deeply am-
bivalent and upsetting. It could cause one's ayipie to “go back to the past”
or become embittered and thus vulnerable to infection and death.
Jochade possessed live sound recordings of the first contacts with vari-
ous Totobiegosode groups, including his own band in 1979 and the di-
sastrous contact he guided in 1986. These tapes were made by Christian
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