Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
voices of actual Totobiegosode people who were indifferent or opposed to
the redemptive potential of the concealed groups. During my fieldwork,
this was achieved by a variety of strategies that ranged from sincere at-
tempts at dialogue and collaboration to blatant forms of domination,
such as manipulating the information given to the leaders or threaten-
ing to withhold vital services from client communities if they disagreed
with a particular NGO position. The common practice of paying leaders
to participate in meetings blurred these lines between institutions even
further. This process of bureaucratizing and domesticating valid Indig-
enous life was always reductive. As a means it never justified the ends of
simply sustaining the NGO. 44 This inversion of roles was enabled by the
emergence of the isolated subject as the fullest expression of what Alcida
Ramos has called the hyperreal Indian “clones . . . [which] exist as if in a
fourth dimension, a being with whom one enjoys having close encoun-
ters of whatever kind.” 45
Whereas Indigenous groups elsewhere have “turned to cultural forms
of political struggle in direct defense of the reproduction . . . of their
lives,” both Paraguayan NGOs acted as if preserving pure culture re-
quired denying Indigenous peoples the capacity for self-objectification.
While their funders assumed that defending cultural autonomy contrib-
uted to the “struggle to reassert the powers and values of human self-
production,” these NGOs produced the opposite effects in practice. 46 In
this system, efforts to protect isolated life from capitalist pathologies ac-
tively reinforced the suppression of Ayoreo human rights and the denial
of their capacities for self-objectification.
The Totobiegosode tribal organization was created by GAT in large
part as a strategic response to the creation of another Ayoreo tribal coali-
tion, Unión de Nativos Ayoreode del Paraguay (UNAP), by the rival NGO,
Iniciativa Amotocodie. GAT perceived the new tribal organization as a
potential threat to its institutional agenda, and was convinced that the
solution was for the Totobiegosode to refuse to join UNAP and form their
own organization. Despite these cynical calculations, I was hopeful that
the new Totobiegosode organization by its very definition would open
new spaces for Totobiegosode political agency.
At the time, the Totobiegosode leaders were kept in constant motion
between meetings. They received wages from the NGO for attendance
and in general they regarded leadership in the tribal organization as a
form of wage labor. Such meetings were marked by a litany of empty
promises and hollow gestures. They were key elements in a wider ritual
of expenditure around the Totobiegosode land claim, which provided all
participants with salaries under the pretense of the land claim. It was no
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