Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Ayoreo believers and doubters used such imagery to turn the colonial
situation inside out. Apocalypticism was appealing precisely because
it asserted the capacity of Ayoreo people to control the terms of their
self-transformation within the profoundly disturbed conditions of post-
contact life. Present contingencies and unspeakable traumas constantly
realigned the past and the future and, in doing so, produced an infinite
number of causal possibilities and events.
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Moreover, apocalyptic sensibilities cited and extended notions of the
originary differentiations of human/nonhuman. They interpreted con-
tact and conversion as implying an equally fundamental transformation
of human life. This was articulated, both implicitly and explicitly, in the
transition from the forest/past of
Erami
to life in the modern/present of
Cojñone-Gari
. In such ways, apocalyptic futurism creatively reconciled
long-standing Ayoreo notions about human/nonhuman divides with
evangelical eschatology and colonial discourses of subhuman savagery.
Like missionaries and local ethnographers, Ayoreo believers imagined
contact as a profound rupture between two mutually exclusive forms of
human life. Apocalypticism was a form of moral reasoning that mediated
this divide and transformed the fundamental contradictions of the colo-
nial situation into the principles by which moral life may be inhabited
and reproduced.
Accordingly, missionary attitudes and disciplinary practices alone
were not sufficient to explain the adoption of apocalyptic futurism
among Ayoreo-speaking peoples. Yet neither could apocalyptic reason-
ing be explained as the simple continuation of past ontologies or mythic
cosmologies into the present. The distinction, rather, rested on the par-
ticular meanings and values attributed to contact in its guise as a radi-
cal transformation of moral human life. Indeed, contact was envisioned
as the latest movement through several contradictory regimes of biole-
gitimacy in ways that closely mirrored colonial logics while inverting
culturalist ones. We may predict that a future transformation to cultural-
ism lies ahead. Many Ayoreo-speaking people concluded that modernity
and indigeneity were both regimes of life only inhabitable for a radi-
cally transformed human—thus, the common wordplay among Ayoreo
people, that “we are no longer Ayoreo (Human Beings), we have become
Ayore-Cojñoque
(a phrase that implies both white Ayoreo and human-
nonhuman).”
Through these apocalyptic inversions of the colonial labor of the nega-
tive, Ayoreo-speaking people recast such negation of their past humanity
as the space of modern life. In doing so, they reclaimed a fundamental ca-
pacity for metaobjectification, the agency to speak and act beyond these
