Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
For those afflicted, it may well have been precisely the opposite. Mad-
ness and vice were radical forms of negative becoming. They turned the
ontological murk of the colonial situation and its constitutive ties to
death into the terms for self-transformation. For outsiders, these unrav-
elings were merely the predictable evidence of the essential savagery of
Ayoreo or what happens when a culture is destroyed—the stripped down,
devalued core of biological life that remained, a dangerous and annoying
and disgusting residue, begging for coins on the sidewalk and picking
through trash and watching from the brush.
In these nonlinear entanglements of madness and culture, vice and be-
coming, life and death, the general Ayoreo project of becoming crashed
against the instrumental incoherence by which colonial order was fused
with the disorder of violence and then reduced not to economic ratio-
nality but to a space of death for Indigenous subjects, a process itself
rationalized by the ways that difference snapped back into focus through
this process only as a radical cosmological alterity that was external to
modernity or the colonial situation itself and thus eligible for consump-
tion. Contemporary politics, as well as colonial ones, were instantiated
through the production and cannibalism of this difference. Yet through
these extreme Ayoreo formations, such ontological murkiness was put
