Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
a term that likened the transference of God's willpower into the body of
the new believer to pouring a liquid from one container into another.
When God
chinoningase
, or converted, someone, he was thought to
create a new kind of person fit for life in
Cojñone-Gari.
Conversion was
associated with a radical transformation in human substance. Ayoreo-
speaking people said that faith in God
chieta bacajeode,
literally fills up
your insides, will, thoughts. This process of filling up meant that God
erased the convert's
ayipie
, the soul matter that encompassed the cor-
poreal seat of memory (located in the head), emotion, and willpower
(located in various abdominal organs). Through
chinoningase
and ac-
cepting the Word of God, the insides and
ayipie
of the convert were
reconstituted anew along the sentimental and temporal axes that were
pleasurable to
Jesui
. It was this erasure,
-iro
, of the convert's memory
and its replacement by God's spirit that supposedly restrained what was
possible to express about life before conversion. This was why, Totobi-
egosode said, so many of them could not remember too much of what
happened before contact. “Your
ayipie
must be erased before you can be
saved by God.”
However harsh this process of becoming New People may have been,
it was considered essential for human survival in
Cojñone-Gari
. This posi-
tion presumed that the contemporary terms of life itself were so radically
altered that the only hope for survival resided in the death of older hu-
man forms and the internal transformation of bodies (in terms resonant
with the ancient transformations of mythic beings). Yet Ayoreo believers
did not simply “internalize” a colonial image of themselves as “quasi-
men ignorant of the truly true.”
14
Rather, they imagined their present
humanity to be a form of immanence that was a precondition for their
transformation into fully human beings of another kind. Such Ayoreo
beliefs, then, were a testament to the generative force of violence. They
exceeded both missionary frameworks (with their particular notions of
Native souls and bodily interiority) and creatively reorganized Ayoreo
ontologies, catalyzed by a potent touch.
Segregated Memory
you all can use the spears that God gives us in the Bible to defend against satan if he arrives to
your village. We are in a war again, but not against other Ayoreo. now we are fighting against
satan. satan wants to attack those of us who believe in Jesus. don't forget that we are bothering
satan, but remember that God is stronger than him. The person who remembers this will be taken
with God when he returns to end this world.
