Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
not survive in the moral ecology of the present.
Asojná
and other spirits,
as well as the practices associated with them such as
adode
myths and
ujñarone
curing chants, became associated with Satan. “According to
Du-
pade
,” Siquei later told me, “the
puyaque
prohibitions
are worthless and
bad.” The transformation of contact, in other words, realigned the cos-
mic binaries through which human becoming was charted. In the bifur-
cated cosmos of the New World everything associated with past morality
became resignified as satanic and displaced spatially and temporally into
the forest/past. It is no surprise that living in
Cojñone-Gari
also implied an
inversion of the moral sentiment of
ajengome
. “Before, we had shame of
the things that were
puyaque
,” Siquei told me in 2010, reflecting on how
he then perceived the world. “Now, we only have shame of
Dupade
.” He
told me that those who did not have the proper shame relative to
Dupade
,
those who did not follow God's rules, were sure to get sick.
Yet the audience for this conversion—and the intentional expansion
of becoming it entailed—was not only limited to
Dupade
and his mission-
ary helpers. Indeed, it included a diverse cast of
Cojñone
. Ayoreo quickly
learned that there were many types of Strangers, and that they rarely
agreed. Surviving in
Cojñone-Gari
also meant being observed by
Cojñone
such as the
Abujádie
believed to oppose Christian morality. It was a world
in which self-transformation was routinely interrupted and you never
knew quite what to feel about it.
Disgust
A long line of
Cojñone
have worked with Ayoreo people in some capacity,
and they routinely arrived unannounced in Totobiegosode communi-
ties to check on this project or that initiative in a shiny four-wheel-drive
truck, to teach the poor Indians something, to spend part of some huge
international development fund on water tanks and cisterns or tin roofs
for the houses. Many of these projects targeted the hygiene of Ayoreo
people, like the decades-long missionary attempt to separate extended
families and construct single-couple homes with indoor bathrooms in
Bolivia. (One typical example was the construction of expensive commu-
nal laundry stations in several communities in 2005. Based on a “Tuscan
model,” the idea was that these square concrete block buildings were
“culturally appropriate” because they would encourage group activities,
and would bring the added benefit of cleaning up the dirty Indians, who
presumably could go about in their freshly laundered rags. A year later,
they were rarely if ever used, mostly because of conflicts over who could
