Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
sight could trigger deep emotions. In one such place that has since been
bulldozed, Siquei and I walked through overgrown gardens. “This was my
father's garden. We were happy here.”
The Rotation of Apocalyptic Horizons
Everyone alive now will surely see the end of this world. This will happen when this generation is
still alive, it won't happen to another generation. It will happen in this generation. no one will be
able to distinguish heaven and Earth when God comes, only the Word of God. The things that we
see here, like food and motorcycles and jobs and money, seem to be important things. But they
will all disappear when God comes. We will be in the village of God that will never die. no one
knows what time he will arrive, this afternoon, tomorrow, or the next day. At midnight or noon
or six in the morning. I don't think it will be earlier than six. . . . We must be prepared because
he can arrive any day.
Impending bodily transformation and the destruction of the world were
not much of a logical stretch for people who believed they had already
experienced such events. Many Ayoreo said they were waiting for Jesus.
As in Kenelm Burridge's description of collective myth dreams among
cargo believers in New Guinea, Ayoreo believers animated this “structure
of waiting” with half-articulated expectations, conflicts, and rumors.
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Stories of speaking dogs, satanic animals, and cannibalistic white men
were common. Yet these visions and hopes were also frequently frus-
trated by the precarious conditions of post-contact life.
Once every three or four months during my fieldwork, a rumor swept
through the communities that a foreign, white-skinned man with mys-
terious powers had arrived in the Mennonite colonies. Usually, the man
had departed, walking away down the road with a band of Indian dis-
ciples, just before the Ayoreo source of the rumor found out about him.
Poverty-stricken, monolingual Ayoreo families saved money for months
to travel to distant churches in search of miracles.
These miracle searches usually bore no fruit, as in the case of my ac-
quaintance Juan, a Ñamocodegose man, who took his wife to find a place
in Asunción where they had heard a man could expel Satan and make
people vomit out their diseases with his touch. The sickness, Juan told
me, would come out in a hard, multicolored ball that the man could de-
stroy. “He talks to God, saying, 'Come here God, cure this person.' And
then the person is cured. Surely there are miracles happening there.”
I found Juan and his wife in Asunción camped in an empty lot behind
a Catholic church. Juan produced an indecipherable map, consisting of
a single line and two words drawn onto a tattered napkin, and asked me
