Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
he came from a long line of distinguished
dacasute
warriors and was said
to resemble his father, the principal leader of the Totobiegosode whose
band was hunted down and captured in December 1978.
By March 1979, Pejei's father had starved himself to death. The young
Pejei was hired out to a local rancher and he returned several months
later to learn that his entire family had died in his absence. He then mar-
ried a young woman who five years later gave birth to twins, traditionally
considered
puyaque
, or taboo
.
Pejei's first bout of
urusori
came when missionaries pressured the
couple to keep both infants, despite the fact that Pejei heard one of the
children “speak” to him, thus predicting the death of his wife if they
violated the prohibition. Back on the mission, they had little choice.
True to Pejei's prophecy his wife soon died. Since then, attacks of
uru-
sori
could strike him at any time and he was told to take antipyschotic
medications.
Urusori
could be caused by any profound fear. I was told that it was
often triggered by frightening encounters with white men or things as-
sociated with them, such as the sudden appearance of a
Cojñoi
carrying a
gun in the forest. The episode I witnessed with Pejei was attributed to an
airplane that unexpectedly passed overhead at dusk. The sound of this
airplane and the air it pushed down, “its breath,” touched Pejei and the
fright caused his
ayipie
to leave his body. Regardless of its cause,
urusori
is
what happens when the
ayipie
newly reconstituted by contact and con-
version leaves the body. When the
ayipie
leaves the body, the corporeal
seat of moral sentiment and reason departs as well. In its absence, the
immoral, irrational body is compelled to strip off all clothing, to flee from
other Ayoreo, to return to the forest.
Ayoreo used the same word—
urusori
—to describe the state of being drunk
or high.
The Ayoreo encampment of Barrio Bolivar was located some seven
hundred miles away from the Totobiegosode settlements. It lay down
a sandy road in a notorious
villa miseria
on the outskirts of Santa Cruz,
Bolivia, a booming metropolis. There, you could buy ten cents worth
of shoe glue, or “
ore ojare
,” spooned into a little plastic bag. It was an
amount useless for actually gluing shoes, but it was precisely the mini-
mum amount required to get high. For an increasingly large number of
young Ayoreo-speaking people, this was the chosen means to escape an
everyday life of crushing poverty, disfiguring disease, and routine vio-
lence. Young bodies joints askance unconscious on pavement in midday
sun. They said that
ore ojare
makes you feel “like you can do anything,”
