Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
There were so many stories of such violence that Ayoreo people often
imagined that national citizens shared a latent desire to kill them. In
such an atmosphere, it was no surprise that any unexplained deaths were
believed to be murders by
Cojñone
.
10
During my fieldwork, rumors often
swept through the communities about such murders. One involved a
bizarre case of a man who died after hunting a giant anteater. There was
no evidence of foul play, but it didn't make sense to anyone. Ayoreo
people were convinced that the man, named Abujei, had been killed by
a white rancher and that the police and the lawyers had conspired to
suppress the evidence. Many inconsistencies were mentioned and hotly
debated for weeks, but his death remained officially attributed to a giant
anteater attack (which would make him the first human casualty of the
giant anteater in the history of the Chaco).
Alongside such physical violence, there was also a lucrative traffic in
the hair of Ayoreo women. Several competing teams traveled in SUVs
to Native villages in the Chaco buying the thick black strands. When
women were desperately poor, they sold their hair, and many did it more
than once while I was there. They came back quiet and subdued, running
their fingers through bobbed ponytails. The
Cojñone
paid by length, usu-
ally five or six dollars for a head of hair. The hair was dyed and ended up
as beauty enhancing extensions in high-end salons in Argentina, Spain,
or the US. Ayoreo people consider hair to be a particularly important
aspect of feminine beauty, and its coercive commodification reinforced
a general sense of low social status in
Cojñone-Gari
.
The category of
ajengome
was expanded to fit these new conditions of
Ayoreo life. One way its expansion did so was through changing notions
of the public. In the past, I was told that shame was attributed by an au-
dience comprised of those who witnessed the transgressive event. Elders
said this had changed. During my fieldwork, Ayoreo people commonly
discussed
ajengome
in relation to
Cojñone
witnesses who were not physi-
cally present. I was told that young people didn't learn how to hunt, sing,
or play the old games because they were ashamed of acting like an Indian
in front of
Cojñone
, even in a remote village where no
Cojñone
could see.
As usual, it was Jochade who articulated this in the most pointed manner
one night around the fire in Arocojnadi. “The young people today do
not
ajengome
God and they do not
ajengome
the old things from before,”
he said as everyone listened. “But now they
ajengome
the
Cojñone
. They
want the life of the
Cojñone
, that's why.” For Jochade, the nascent sense
of being Indigenous arose from the same factors that made shame an ap-
propriate response to the new publics of
Cojñone-Gari.
