Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
In the upheavals of contact, cases of urusori proliferated. In 1963, the
visiting scientist (and pedophile) D. C. Gajdusek noted—following an
epidemic of deadly fever that killed one-third of the Ayoreo group—the
cases of “two youths and one man who were in delirium and later with
strange disoriented behavior ran off into the forest where they have pre-
sumably died. They had delusions and a strange manic fright behavior
pattern.” 13 Ayoreo-speaking people tell of many others.
Yet those afflicted with urusori in Cojñone-Gari experienced different
symptoms than for the same affliction prior to contact. Post-contact uruso
did not act so much like Iguanas or Nighthawks but like themselves and
their ancestors prior to contact. Their humanity was not compromised
by violating the taboos of a single spirit being but by residues of the
peculiar humanity/nonhumanity instantiated within their incompletely
transcended pasts and embodied in the flinches and memories of their
flesh. The other Totobiegosode explained that Pejei's sickness was not
caused by his ayipie vanishing or hovering in an indistinct state but by
its returning to the past. If he ran out of medicine, his ayipie left his body
and returned to the cucha bajade . It refused to stay focused on the present
and the future, “ Chi ayipie echaiji cucha bajade, chajesa daquigade. Payipie
que chicaji piquei.
Like Pejei, those afflicted by urusori turned against the trappings of
moral life in Cojñone-Gari . Like Pejei, they attempted to destroy all traces
of Cojñone around them, particularly the symbols of contact. They tore
their clothes, they broke their dishes, they refused to eat the foods of the
whites, they always tried to run to the forest. They were usually restrained
by being tied to a tree or a post. Ayoreo people said that an uruso acted
“like an animal,” precisely because the symptoms bore a striking resem-
blance to past forms of human life that were later considered deeply
profane.
Broken Lines of Flight
One thirty-three-year-old Puye woman, Rosy, began huffing gasoline in
her early teens while living on an evangelical mission near Santa Cruz,
a bustling metropolitan area of more than two million inhabitants. Like
many Ayoreo people, she moved to an Ayoreo squatter camp on the out-
skirts of the city in her early teens, looking for a temporary wage-labor
job. There, she switched from gasoline to shoe glue but quit after it caused
her to abort a seven-month-old fetus. While in Santa Cruz, she often
stayed at the place called the Casa Campesina, built by an advocacy NGO
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