Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The relation this media event claimed—between the gathering of sci-
entific facts and genocide—rested on the assumption that the concealed
Totobiegosode were pure if fragile Others who “live in another world.”
4
Their exceptional alterity, according to this widely circulated argument,
was derived from two sources. First, their bodies and souls were believed
to be inseparable from certain threatened domains of nature. As the NGO
director put it in his BBC interview, the Ayoreo “live in complete inter-
dependence with nature . . . in a great extension of completely virgin for-
est.” Second, they were imagined to be the bearers of an uncontaminated
culture that has not yet been “eroded” by contact.
5
The director described
this conflation of pure culture and pure nature as “a principle of life.”
Anthropologists and other theorists, of course, have long critiqued the
primitivist trope of Indigenous populations that exist beyond “contact,”
history, or social relations as central to the logics of colonial domination.
6
Scholarship has shown that this trope of “uncontacted primitives” is an
enabling principle for naturalized inequalities, structural violence, or im-
perialist nostalgia; a justification for the ongoing dispossession of Indig-
enous populations and the pathologization of local forms of knowledge
or social memory; and a political field in which the positivist pretensions
of anthropological expertise may be uncritically played out.
7
Difference,
we now presume, is the result of longer
dureés
and wider relations.
Despite exhaustive ethnographic evidence to the contrary, the well-
traveled fantasy about a form of cultural life conserved beyond the limits
of modern society persists in rising again and again. From blockbuster
films like
Avatar
and “first contact” tours in West Papua to recent UN
human rights initiatives and best-selling topics and the YouTube sensa-
tion created by aerial photos of remote Brazilian tribespeople, the figure
of the isolated primitive is an increasingly powerful global imaginary.
While the discipline of anthropology has moved on to concerns that it
considers less problematic and more pressing, its trenchant critiques may
register in different ways or not at all in the realm of popular politics.
Despite scholarly arguments, the notion of such “uncontacted,”
“unconquered,” or “unreached” humankinds has been given new force
within the political formations that ostensibly define the contemporary
limits of legitimate life.
8
Today, political norms, moral arguments, and
infrastructures of protection are being organized around the pressing im-
perative to police the boundaries of “voluntarily isolated” life. Those ral-
lied to its defense are evoking subjective horizons, managerial logics, and
human contents based on the urgency of preserving its imperiled form.
Yet the moral defense of isolation as a principle of life articulates pre-
cisely the contradictions that occur when cultural preservation becomes
