Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The Failure of Mimetic Magic
In the face of such violence and fear, established theories of causality
and agency began to fail. Totobiegosode groups roaming the dwindling
Chaco forests in the 1980s and 1990s turned to long-standing theories of
sympathetic magic and the mimetic faculty to seek alternatives to group
death. But the object of mimetic magic shifted from spiritually animated
natural elements to the superior power of the strangers.
After the former shaman Guedeuejnai had a vision in the early 1980s,
he put his entire group to work digging a shallow ditch about a mile in
length along one side of a familiar path. If anyone stepped into the ditch,
he said, he or she would die. He told his people that if they dug the ditch,
then they would never die, that death would stay in the ditch. “We dug
that ditch,” I was told twenty years later. “But he was a liar.” Others at-
tempted to reproduce the specific material forms they believed gave the
Cojñone
spiritual power. Yoteuoi tried to make metal. He put the men of
the group to work digging a deep pit, in which they mixed soil of five dif-
ferent colors and water. “It did not work,” he told me. “But almost.”
Former members of the Aregued'urasade also recounted how they tried
to access the power of the
Cojñone
through mimicry. They broke into iso-
lated ranch houses and took clothing and items of metal. They also spent
hours hidden under thick brush, observing the
Cojñone
inhabitants. They
hypothesized that these outsiders must have access to an unseen magi-
cal substance, which was explained to me as taking the form of a tubular
object about twelve inches in length that generated light. This sticklike
thing, Totobiegosode reasoned, was impregnated with a form of
pujopie,
or supernatural power, distinct from the one possessed by their own sha-
mans. It provided the foreigners with sustenance, for they never seemed
to eat, and gave their machines the force to move with great speed. “We
thought they could rub it on their bodies,” I was told. “And they would
fly around the world.” Totobiegosode entered several houses looking for
this source of superhuman strength. When they did not find it, Jutaine
attempted to fabricate such a magical stick out of hardwood and incanta-
tions. “He rubbed it on us, but it did nothing.”
These stories are told with a gentle bitterness, when they are told
at all. Mimetic magic ultimately failed to summon a source of power
great enough to provide an alternative to group death. The former
Areguede'urasade interpreted this failure of transformation as indicating
a pervasive weakness relative to
Cojñone
, a loss of control over the means
