Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
South America, including neighboring Chacoan peoples. According to
these studies, this exceptional biological difference is evident in blood
proteins and gene expressions, as well as “an extremely reduced” num-
ber (2), kind (C/D), and distribution of mitochondrial DNA haplo-
groups.
52
These genetic traits, in turn, are interpreted as evidence of
“founder effect” or isolation.
53
Today, Ayoreo DNA not only stands in for
the political subject, but reduces its political subjectivity to the biologi-
cal facts of isolation.
54
Through such techniques, the renewed scientific
value of the isolated subject is segregated not only from politics, but
also from actual bodies. Thus, the significant infrastructures dedicated to
preserving Ayoreo blood in the form of plasma and glycerolized red cells
are kept frozen for decades in labs across Brazil, Chile, and Argentina.
Here, the desire to extract and preserve isolation produces it as an object
for genomic management. And at this point, the particular disembodied
objectifications of isolation—myth, tradition, culture, soul, blood, gene,
law, victim, sacrifice, donation—become interchangeable.
55
There is little place for humanity here. Materials that are purely bio-
logical or cultural are self-contained and self-evident signs, much like
those painted figures from Brazil, shooting arrows at the circling planes
over and over on YouTube. As the value of the isolated Ayoreo subject
escalates, the value of the recently ex-primitive plummets. Humanizing
the hyperreal isolated man presumes dehumanizing Ayoreo personhood
in the present. Ayoreo people are once again prefigured as dying or al-
ready dead. The only hope for such degraded figures is a project of revi-
talization or being brought back to life. Thus, anthropologists like Miguel
Bartolomé can argue:
In the moments that I am concluding these pages, March 2000, the great hope of ay-
oreo cultural revitalization resides in the next exit from the forest of the “uncontacted”
Totobiegosode, who have not undergone the deculturating impact of the evangelical
ethnocide. as such, they are bearers of the ancient knowledge and cultural wisdom
which their sedentarized countrymen have been obliged to renounce.
56
In this schema, legitimate Ayoreo life is increasingly tethered to iso-
lated life. And isolated life only comes into focus as petrified culture,
and vice versa. Thus, the most legitimate form of Ayoreo humanity is
that which is “still fully alive among the uncontacted groups.”
57
Yet
even these small groups that remain hidden in the forest are prefigured
as fossils of themselves, ideally conserved by outsiders as a resource for
a foreclosed future but already rejected into death by the immutable
