Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
reappears as a crucial medium for the stratifying craft of the neoliberal
state.
26
The hypermarginality of Ayoreo-speaking peoples in the Gran Chaco
was maximally expressed among the
urusori
and the
Puyedie
. It was hard
to imagine more thoroughly animalized beings, inserted as they were
into contradictory moral, political, and economic orders through an un-
stable personhood of death. Like those stricken mad by a frightening
encounter with
Cojñone
or dark spirits, the dehumanization of the
Puyedie
was a legible experience of negation for other Ayoreo. Both forms of
uru-
sori
were lines of flight that organized vital contents in a recognizably
nonhuman way along the axes of the ontological murk of the colonial
situation, through rupturing rupture itself. Yet even these spiraling lines
of flight were made brittle by the oppositional kind of negation reserved
for the deculturated indigene within post-multiculturalist society.
Through their bouts of madness and their public death, profound
contradictions between the “negative citizenship” of deculturated life,
the resurgent moral economies of primitivism, and the figure of a sav-
agery that must be sacrificed were uneasily reconciled.
27
The result for
the hypermarginal subject was an amplified political erasure without—at
that time—the possibility of magical powers or cultural revitalization or
biomedical salvation or a healing reincorporation into market productiv-
ity. Rather, their routine animalization was a negative image by which
neoliberal politics were instantiated through the fusion of culture and
legitimate life.
The Neoliberal Fusion of Culture and Life
Colonial authorities, of course, have long deployed culture as an ideal
through and against which valid Indigenous life is delimited.
28
As Mi-
chael Taussig describes, in Latin America this took the form of an “epi-
stemic murk” through which colonial drives to create, extirpate, and
ultimately enact savagery bent the magic of primitive alterity to the space
of death itself erased by metanarratives of political-economic rationali-
ties.
29
Early twentieth-century efforts by Latin American governments
to solve the “Indian Problem” with forced acculturation programs arose
simultaneously with the most grotesque forms of public extermination.
If genocidal sacrifice failed, then stripping Indians of their less evolved
cultures was believed to be a necessary first step for exposing them to
the superior culture of rational modernity and integrating them into
productive relationships with the nation and the market.
30
So was the
