Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
existence and as a material and means of sociality and governance” whose
study “recasts totalizing assumptions of the workings of collectivities and
institutions.”
16
Such conceptualizations envision drug consumption as
“a combined chemical / intimate / social / economic matter” that always
bridges the psychic and the political-economic.
17
Likewise, the “disordered subjectivities” of Ayoreo-speaking
Puyedie
or those possessed by the spirit of the past should not be understood
as psychopathologies produced by the disintegration of culture, but
rather, as radical forms of immanence that simultaneously instantiated
and subverted the contradictory meanings and values attributed to In-
digenous “life as such” within the contemporary. That is, they were the
“dense transfer points” by which global political economies were fused
with the most intimate forms of everyday experience.
18
Contemporary
politics were instantiated through Ayoreo ontological formations and
vice versa.
The stories told by Rosy about chemical lines of flight or by the
uruso
about the flight of his
ayipie
articulated precisely the fractured subjectivi-
ties of the ex-primitive, caught as they are between agency and erasure,
human and nonhuman, vitality and public death. Yet it was also par-
ticularly telling that each kind of negative articulation was only legible
to outsiders as the loss of culture and a return to an essential savagery.
Considered the biological residues of culture death, ex-primitives were
not eligible for the protections newly extended to cultural life. They were
again treated as subhuman
Bárbaros
to be exterminated or consumed, as
a social problem and a threat to civilized order.
On both sides of the border, Ayoreo faced systematic discrimination
and were stigmatized as prostitutes and beggars, reduced to shadows of
themselves by evangelical ethnocide.
19
In the Bolivian popular press, ur-
ban Ayoreo were described as evidence of what happens when “urban
sprawl devours a culture.” They were a group that had lost “the founda-
tions for the reproduction of their culture” and whose “cultural fabric has
been torn apart in the clash with mainstream society.”
20
Or, as Sebastián
Hurtado Rodríguez, the deputy governor of one province in the depart-
ment of Santa Cruz, put it to journalists in 2011, Ayoreo in general were
“a defect [
lacra
] of society,” a group that “must become useful human
material for society and not a visible defect, not a lamentable burden.”
21
Few could articulate what kind of force emanated from these percep-
tions of Ayoreo as a subhuman blemish or burden, but there were times
when everyone could feel it, when it built from thin air and unfurled in
the atmosphere like a storm or a stench that settled on the tongue. If one
walked with any young Ayoreo girl at night down the sandy roads and
