Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
limits of the human. This implied nothing less than reclaiming the terms
of their own subjective immanence. At the same time, they also became
negative outsides to the zone of “traditional culture” and, thus, political
subjects of a certain kind.
It was a predictable irony that this creative heterodoxy reappeared to
culturalist outsiders only as evidence of an essential Ayoreo difference.
Many insisted, without any evidence whatsoever, on the existence of
clandestine rituals or shamanic practices carried out in secret by Toto-
biegosode. (It is likely, of course, that such practices will eventually be
created in response.) This created a situation inverse to that documented
by Tom Abercrombie in the Andes, in which sixteenth-century Counter-
Reformation techniques aimed at extirpating Indigenous heterodoxy pro-
duced a bifurcated cosmos comprised of clandestine “Indian” elements
and public “Christian” ones.
18
Among contemporary Totobiegosode, it was
an earnestly felt evangelical apocalypticism that was produced as the clan-
destine private in creative tension with public declarations of culturalist
agendas and the preservationist rituals of Indigenous rights.
Such was the colonial crucible which contemporary Ayoreo ontolo-
gies and moral sensibilities were coproduced. No stability was possible.
Rather, they could only be understood in relation to the global political,
economic forces destroying the Chaco ecology at breathtaking speed, the
violence of internal colonialism and techniques of missionary control,
the long-standing moral value given to self-transformation and mimetic
magic, and the recent rise of culture as a regime of legitimate Indigenous
life. Ayoreo ontologies were always politico-moral ontologies written
into the past by the ever-changing concerns of the present.
Rain
The bulldozers must stop when it rains or risk becoming entombed in
the mud for weeks. In a village at the edge of the forest, other sounds
emerge when the motors are silenced. Brazilian disco music thumps from
a speaker held together with fiber twine. Wind rolls like a wave along the
treetops, raindrops patter against leaves and tin. A child giggles.
“I am the beautiful buds, returning in the forest,” the old man sings. “I
am the first fat rain. I am the scent of the flowers carried on the wind.”
“I sound like
mei mei mei mei
!
Ti ti ti ti ti.
Joooo! Joooo! Joooo!
Se se se
. . .”
