Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
someone had reportedly found bones. But all we found was dust. The
details were always vague, the sources difficult to find. Usually no one
pursued the stories; they lingered with others like heat waves.
The Politics of Isolation
There was little room for such contagious and haunting ambiguity
within the political mobilizing around the protection of isolated peo-
ple's rights. The more time I spent in the Chaco, the more blurred and
murky the figure of the isolated primitive became. On one hand, it seemed
to offer the potent and clear image of Ayoreo victimhood required for
effective political advocacy. On the other hand, this was precisely the
objectification of their humanity that actual Ayoreo so strenuously re-
jected as opposed to their project of moral transformation. Moreover, the
global movement to protect Ayoreo isolation that gained momentum in
the early 2000s did not seem to interrupt the dispossession of Ayoreo-
speaking peoples at all. Rather, this fascination seemed to sustain and
amplify colonial violence.
In November 2006, I participated in the United Nations Regional
Seminar on “The Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Voluntary Isolation
and Initial Contact in Amazonia and the Gran Chaco,” where I witnessed
an international political economy of cultural preservation coalescing
around the image of isolation. Yet this organizing was premised on the
sense that isolation was an empirical reality. It became an indexical
sign for a kind of life imagined to exist independently of representa-
tional processes and relational ways of being.
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This image was compel-
ling, and its power was indelibly fused with the political visibility of
the tribal organization OPIT and the Totobiegosode, whose proximity
to “uncontact” was widely known and celebrated by the NGO. At the
same time, the disconnect between Ayoreo sensibilities and the moral
imperatives of this cultural advocacy made isolation a peculiar kind of
hyperreality. That is, it was a model of reality that promised to create
and impose the actualities it purported to describe, at least in the Gran
Chaco.
Even more disturbing was how this disjuncture between an imposed
hyperreality and Ayoreo self-understandings allowed the well-meaning
interest in preserving “Ayoreo isolation” to slip into the disenfranchise-
ment of actually existing Ayoreo people. Indeed, the global concern with
isolation defined Ayoreo humanity in opposition. It diverted attention
away from the political investments in denying the clear and vertical
