Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Christianity” can only be intelligible in relation to continuity or rupture
with the past and it is imagined to be the result of collisions between
two bounded and incompatible “regimes of value.”
1
Like anthropolo-
gists working elsewhere, I gradually came to realize that this model did
not adequately describe local faith practices. Moreover, as Tom Aber-
crombie painstakingly shows, the common perception that indigenous
Christianity represented only a “thin veneer” of change concealing a
deeper essence of alterity is itself a colonial logic long deployed to mor-
ally justify the violent dispossession of heterodox Indians.
2
Yet it was precisely through such creative heterodoxy that Ayoreo
believers also attempted to render their new subject position as “indig-
enous peoples” inhabitable. That apocalyptic futurism was the primary
drive and reflection of this creative agency added a further complication.
3
Ayoreo apocalypticism created a limit situation in which continuity im-
plied rupture and vice versa.
4
It was never a “fully articulated horizon”
that “freezes our view of the reality that immediately confronts us” or a
simple evacuation of the near future by the far.
5
The opposite appeared
to be the case: the capacity to alter the experience of time and to reclaim
the possibility for self-transformation is what made apocalypticism an
appealing and commonsense way for Ayoreo people to understand the
end of past worlds. Perhaps more disturbing, the widespread adoption of
apocalyptic futurism as a source of optimism showed how the fusion of
Western eschatological models and global political economies created
a world where hope for marginalized peoples was restricted to the same
terms as their imminent destruction by forces they did not control.
Space of Terror
For Totobiegosode, bulldozers became both vehicle and sign for the end
of time. They called them
eapajocacade
, a word that likens them to “at-
tackers of the world.” Siquei told me that bulldozers were his people's
greatest fear. The sound of one—impossible to pinpoint in the complex
acoustics of the forest—caused Totobiegosode to run far and fast.
The machines of industrial agriculture haunted the forest of the con-
cealed Totobiegosode throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The forest bands
were constantly harassed by their noisy incursions. On several occasions
in 1994, 1998, and 2001, Totobiegosode warriors attacked bulldozers
with spears and arrows. They remembered these acts with pride. Usually
they fled:
