Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
to summon moral and physical power from the set of forces that hovered
near Human Beings.
This implied that the boundaries of humanity were
becoming increasingly porous, leaving people at risk of affliction, a sense
that only intensified in the aftermath of contact:
We suffered a lot in the forest and that is why we decided to live with the whites. We
thought that the food of the
Cojñone
was given for free. But now we know that it costs
a lot. We were hungry before. But it turns out that they sell their food. Everything is
very expensive. Even beans are expensive. We thought that things were free before. We
thought that the
Cojñone
always gave away everything. We thought they would bring
us melons, beans. We thought that life among the
Cojñone
was very easy. We thought
it was easy to learn their language. We didn't know about money.
Within four months of contact, the men of the New People were work-
ing as wage laborers alongside bulldozers, fencing off pastures for four
dollars a day. With their meager earnings, they bought noodles, cookies,
and Coca-Cola. On such a diet, their bodies were often weak and sick.
Ayoreo-speaking people do not usually distinguish between physical
health, moral well-being, and social agency.
Daily experiences of disease
and social marginality, then, are seen to indicate a moral weakness intrin-
sic to Ayoreo and neighboring Indigenous peoples. Many people claim
that they cannot remember much of their former lives.
In the “experience of world-annihilating violence,” Veena Das writes
in the context of postpartition India, the “grammar of the ordinary”
fails, and the criteria relating causality, justification, and action may be
abruptly ended or rendered opaque.
9
For contemporary Totobiegosode-
Ayoreo, the aphasia of suffering and terror has become a routine part of
everyday life. Yet this silence was distinct from the cases described by Das
and other theorists of trauma, in which violence caused the failure of lan-
guage and the social.
10
Among Totobiegosode, apocalypticism reclaimed
the capacity for human transformation within such extreme experiences.
Colonial violence generated the social conditions under which apocalyp-
ticism became appealing and intelligible, even as apocalyptic sensibili-
ties offered a way to reclaim life from death or violent events from the
domain of the unspeakable. Totobiegosode believers thus solidified the
sense that the present occured within a radically different moral ecology
than the past did, one that was structured by the future return of Jesus
and the bodily transformation of true believers.
