Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
“The
Cojñone
are coming. They will be against us if they see any trash.”
And soon three dozen government officials and hangers-on arrived in
an air-conditioned caravan of new 4x4s, many of the men dressed in
safari suits, one with a pistol tucked behind his belt, swilling cold bottled
water.
The Totobiegosode leaders got up and each sang a song to honor the
occasion. The officials smiled and promised nothing but their sincere
friendship. After an hour or so they were all sweating and ready to leave,
but first they wanted to make a stop at a traditional-style Totobiegosode
house that was near the road. They asked me to guide them there, and the
Totobiegosode leaders agreed. At the sight of the house tucked into the
forest, far from the village, the group's anthropologist—who had been
notably silent during the encounter with actual Ayoreo—lit up. Panting
from the heat and exertion, his canvas vest showing sweat, he proclaimed
with a smile, “It's beautiful! Just like a photograph in a topic!”
This distance between degraded Ayoreo bodies and any single one of
the contradictory images of moral life they were supposed to embody
was filled by violence. Many
Cojñone
seemed to desire close encounters
withTotobiegosode only if they were sterilized and abstracted from the
flapping plastic, the biting insects, the delirious heat, the nonchalant
bodily processes. Local experts often complained that working with Ay-
oreo was impossible because they were so difficult.5
5
William Miller has
described the “intensely political significance” of Anglophone notions of
disgust, which is “an assertion of a claim to superiority that at the same
time recognizes the vulnerability of that superiority to the defiling pow-
ers of the low.”
6
He also makes the remarkable observation that “disgust is
organized by the laws of sympathetic magic,” insofar as it presumes that
similarities in form are similarities in substance and that the socially low
are not only polluted but contagious.
7
That is, it arises precisely at those
moments in which hierarchies of being are vulnerable to being undone
and need to be reasserted. Ayoreo people did not have a word that pre-
cisely encompasses disgust. But they did have a particularly developed
vocabulary for noting shades of hierarchy, strength, and power. The Ay-
oreo expression most often translated as “disgust” was
etetigai
. This was
a derivative of
etei
, which meant one who is hated, despised, and pitted
against in opposition or disapproval.
8
In other words, most Ayoreo inter-
preted such discriminatory attitudes as a reflection of low social status.
At some places in Bolivia in the early 2000s, Ayoreo was considered to be
an insult if used between two white people, as in “Don't be an Ayoreo,”
or “What an Ayoreo you are!” Denigrating words for animals were used
