Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
borders of relational impossibility. It is thus no surprise that the same
NGO director can only imagine one option for their future, and not a
practical one at that. Echoing the laboratory workers safeguarding Ay-
oreo blood samples, he has argued in print that “freezing the moment of
contact” with isolated Ayoreo bands is the sole hope for preserving “the
essence of their being.”
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Yet neither life as such nor particular life projects can be entirely
contained by such categories and the relational worlds they evoke.
This is at the root of Ayoreo critiques of modernity and their refusal of
such extant political definitions of culture as meaningful forms of self-
objectification. It is, I believe, what Ayoreo-speaking people seem to im-
ply by the concept of
pucuecaringuei
, a phrase that literally means some-
thing like “searching for what is emanated from oneself,” but is translated
as
vida
, or life. This is a concept that foregrounds becoming over being,
and frames each as processes that are contingent on more than the forces
contained within bodily limits. As my adopted father Yoteuoi once said
to me as we walked north of Arocojnadi, “Pucuecaringuei is something
that is outside but inside. Inside but outside. It is something you try to
catch.” He smiled. “But it is fast.”
Isolation as Biolegitimacy
The politico-legal category of isolation, then, reiterates an extreme ver-
sion of what Eric Wolf referred to as the “pool hall model of the world,”
in which certain domains of pure culture/nature/life are newly endowed
with the qualities of billiard balls: disaggregated, bounded, and brightly
colored objects colliding and spinning off one another.
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What is most
striking about this development is the degree to which outsiders inter-
pret this figure of the isolated primitive as evidence of Indigenous self-
determination and thus give it force to act through and against the life
it ostensibly describes. The politics of isolation redefine culture and
threaten to overwhelm the potential agency offered by other, more nu-
anced definitions of cultural difference. Indeed, isolation is politically
effective precisely to the degree it erases or disavows the mediations (of
history, empire, culture) by which indigeneity became a meaningful cat-
egory in the first place.
Of the many contradictions articulated through the speculative pol-
itics of isolation, the redefinition of cultural difference is perhaps the
most crucial. The category of isolation establishes a vertical hierarchy
