Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
precarious and fractured by the harsh conditions of post-contact life, and
in the process coming to mirror precisely the terms of the colonial situa-
tion itself: order is disorder, incoherence is reason, sense is nonsense.
Each manifestation of
urusori
—spirit possession, inversions of contact,
drug delirium—is mutually exclusive and demands a further negation
as soon as it moves within semantic availability. These nonlinear, self-
consuming processes constitute a particular Ayoreo form of moral reason-
ing about the nervous system of internal colonialism and state fetishism
in the Gran Chaco, one attuned to the lack of culture not as a personal
failing but as yet another pressure ridge (or is it a fissure?) in the space
of death. Apocalyptic eschatology negates world-ending violence and
the rampant ecological devastation of industrial agriculture. Conversion
to Christianity negates the prior human signified as savage by outsid-
ers and so ruthlessly exterminated in the past—an operation standard-
ized through fractured moral sentiments and electronic media practices.
The madness of memory or drugs negates the Christian moral self and
the social marginalization of the supposedly deculturated ex-primitive
at the same time.
These negations do not devolve into absolute loss, voiceless abjec-
tion, or bare life, but rather coalesce into a formation of negative im-
manence, adapted to terror and death, rendered sensible through the
impossibility of sense, a formation that is contrary to contradiction, that
embraces the perpetual insufficiency of Ayoreo life and defiantly claims
this self-negation as the condition of subjective possibility. To become
an
uruso
or a
Puye
is the most extreme expression of this negative kind
of “possibilism.”
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It means embracing a self-conscious inhumanity, an
intentional self-defacement, a moral desubjectification. To turn filth into
food, to strip off clothing and run back to the forest, to make intoxication
into morality is to inhabit the space of death as the basis for life and to
make madness indistinguishable from reason in a world already out of
control.
This situation poses a particular dilemma for an anthropology aspiring
to pin down violent incoherence (the Black Caiman) into the terms of
sense that substitute a totalizing narrative for its animating contradic-
tions, that has been duped into believing that a depoliticized ethnogra-
phy is the only kind of anthropology that is politically relevant. It means
embracing the sense of culture as the nonsense of violence and abandon-
ing the perception that our capacity for critique depends entirely on the
logics of cultural alterity. “Culture is our central concept, and everything
else depends on it,”
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but not in the way that many public intellectuals
of indigeneity presume. It is high time to recognize that restricting the
