Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
as such.” These unevenly felt bioinequalities instantiate how governance
pivots upon a new politics of life, whereby the pursuit of its ideal defini-
tion also means deciding “who should live and in the name of what.”
9
Who, exactly, is allowed to live in the name of culture? Who is allowed
to die? What is at stake when guarantees of cultural citizenship become
indistinguishable from the biological components of citizenship for cer-
tain historically oppressed peoples?
10
It is obvious that some peoples and their descendants, especially those
like Ayoreo long imagined to border the human/nonhuman, cannot
or refuse to enact their physical and psychic alterity in ways that con-
form to the new criteria of difference valued within post-multicultural
politics. They are those whom Clifford Geertz so memorably called “ex-
primitives”: ambiguous, unruly beings whose ties to legitimating origins
are rendered impossible, unreliable, or newly suspect through active
global investments in preserving primitive lifeways as a public good and
radical imaginary.
11
Such investments paradoxically authorize an amplified regime of vio-
lence against the supposedly deculturated ex-primitive. Those not eli-
gible for the protections afforded to the cultural subject were also denied
the rights of liberal citizenship.
12
From this vantage, it was no longer a
mystery what sort of place in the world ex-primitives have: the zone of
targeted marginality reserved for those populations who refuse or are
denied the degree and liberally sanctioned kind of culture deemed neces-
sary for becoming intelligible as fully human, Indigenous or otherwise.
For officials, scientists, and citizens alike, the “whatness” of such groups
increasingly dissolved not into performances of marginality aimed at se-
curing rights but into the terms of affliction and death.
Genealogy of Madness and Vice
During my fieldwork, many Totobiegosode suffered from attacks of
uru-
sori
. One man kept ripping off his clothes, trying to grab his spear, moan-
ing that he had to kill the
Cojñone
. Another woman in Arocojnadi told me
that it was the heat of a fever that made her want to cast off her clothes
and run back to the forest. “My head was just too hot.” In Bolivia, I heard
similar stories from the early 1980s, such as the middle-aged man in
Zapocó who woke up one day, stripped off all his clothing, grabbed his
spear, and left. On his way out he told his wife that he was possessed and
had to return to the forest. He wandered alone for several months before
being shot and killed somewhere in Paraguay, or so the story goes.
