Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
relationships that already bound the lives of the concealed groups so
tightly to our own. At the same time, the isolation imaginary offered yet
another justification for classifying Christian Ayoreo and settled Totobi-
egosode as degraded remnants of culture death and threats to the forest
bands. Because the uncontacted were simultaneously everywhere and
nowhere, their figurative isolation allowed the destruction of ancestral
Ayoreo lands to continue unchecked. As I became more deeply involved
in advocacy work throughout 2006-2007, I began to wonder if actual Ay-
oreo people were stripped of rights to the same degree that human rights
were granted to the imaginary subject of isolation. Was valuing isolated
life predicated on dehumanizing other Ayoreo?
The problem seemed to lie in the particular way that the politics of
isolation redefined culture. By definition, the edges of isolated life were
rigidly mapped onto the limits set around pure culture. That is, political
investments in isolation assigned social force and human substance to
the “serious fiction” of culture as a bounded, stable whole: a container
for true difference. Many scholars have noted how such narrow defini-
tions of authentic culture are a primary way in which the hard-fought
gains of Indigenous rights movements may “boomerang” back into the
very structures of oppression they aimed to disrupt.
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What was distinct
about the political and legal category of isolation is that, within it, social
relation itself was a stark line of exclusion cutting through the category of
culture. That is, it parsed Indigenous kinds of life into opposed regimes of
legitimacy based on the degrees of relation between them and us. These
two kinds of Indigenous life were mutually exclusive and demanded to
be vertically ranked by politics. In such ways, the protection of isolated
Ayoreo life created a new regime of Indigenous biolegitimacy. It rebor-
dered culture and life and redefined the kind of life that the contempo-
rary politics of indigeneity are interested in. In doing so, it extended a
fundamental contradiction of contemporary indigeneity: contradictory
limits of culture allowed for a kind of politics that may be set against the
human lives these forms supposedly sheltered and protected. At stake
was not merely a new technique of the self, but the uneven ascription
of meaning and value to a kind of life imagined legitimate only to the
degree it remained the precise opposite of the ideal subject of modern,
network society.
This also made isolation a particularly fraught kind of knowledge. Al-
though the category was politically effective to the degree it was perceived
as a fixed or self-evident description of people like the forest Totobiegos-
ode, the fact that it did not correspond to their realities meant it was also
an incoherent form of intelligiblity whose contradictions mirrored the
