Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
taboos,” he said. “Here, we only listen to the Bible and
Dupade'uruode
,
the Word of God.”
When I returned a year later, Siquei was thin and sick and had devel-
oped a severe stutter. He was among the most marginal people in Chaidi.
I could not understand why he did not simply leave. When I tried to ask
him one afternoon, alone at his house, he just laughed nervously and
looked away. The others said something was wrong with him, that he was
ashamed. “Ashamed of what?” I asked. No one answered.
During my fieldwork, I learned that Siquei and the others used shame
to explain a variety of reactions that I found difficult to understand, not
least because of my own ideas about loss. For instance, the Totobiegosode
communities were perched on the southern edge of a territory claimed
in one of the most ambitious land claims cases in the Southern Cone.
Yet outsiders routinely failed to recognize their Aboriginal title to this
territory. The Totobiegosode communities were unique in that they were
not founded by missionaries. Yet Totobiegosode self-consciously repli-
cated the forms of the mission settlements where they had been held
captive, complete with church, store, and their own set of New People to
subject. They sold wild honey to buy white sugar. Men preferred make-
shift firearms to bows and spears. Some refused to eat all but the most
common traditional foods. All ignored the delicate and detailed
puyaque
taboo restrictions that had formerly regulated life with such remarkable
precision. When I asked people to explain each of these behaviors, the
answer was the same: they were ashamed.
This answer seemed straightforward, yet I struggled to understand all it
conveyed. On one hand, it appeared so predictable as to be vague. Indeed,
much anthropological research foretells such a response.
1
Scholars have
documented how moral sentiments like shame reflect ethical concerns,
manifest culturally specific moral orders, mediate universal tensions,
and serve as the crucial affective gradient through which hegemonic and
counterhegemonic projects alike are instantiated.
2
On the other hand,
this Ayoreo explanation raised more questions than it answered. What
did it mean to become ashamed of the very practices that once defined
moral humanity? And what did it mean if a group of “ex-primitives” felt
ashamed but in ways that were almost precisely the opposite of how we
think they should feel? What kind of social orders and what kind of colo-
nizing violence might this dialectical tension between self-objectification
and frustrated attribution allow? If ontological sentiments created New
Worlds and if shame was the defining ontological sentiment of becoming
