Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
I could describe the ruined expanses of industrial agriculture in the
Chaco, how the sun and the salt are creating areas of drifting sand in
which little can grow—a white dream spreading across a landscape that
is becoming a fossil of itself, fantasies of the Chaco as a hellish wilderness
finally anchoring in hard fact. I could try to describe a new darkness, the
confusion and rumors around an impending epidemic of HIV among the
“little birds.”
Or I could write of the protest in 2013, when the Totobiegosode tribal
organization took direct action in defense of their land rights for the first
time. They blocked the Trans-Chaco highway for several days in order
to draw attention to the legal impunity that privileged
Cojñone
ranchers
claiming land already titled in the name of Totobiegosode. The ongoing
struggle to gain title to their ancestral territory merits a topic of its own.
I could mention the North/South collaboration we arranged between
Totobiegosode communities and an Indigenous-run NGO based in the
United States, aimed at economic self-determination. I could write about
the ways that my early audio and video recordings are now being taken
up by Bolivian Ayoreo, or about the two young Ayoreo women who have
begun recording interviews with elders on their own.
I could also conclude with portraits of the New People: Tié, who has
sunken deeper into depression and silence; Sidabia, who has tubercu-
losis and is overrun with unkempt children; Cutai, who spends long
stretches working on ranches and remains as cheerful and enigmatic as
ever; or Siquei, who broke away from Chaidi and settled in Arocojnadi
and then moved back. His eleven-year-old son found work on neigh-
boring ranches, spraying pastures with herbicide.
Each of these dynamics might complement the interpretations I have
offered in the preceding chapters and reveal the artifices that they too
contain, unravel the hard edges of any conclusions. They might reiterate
that I do not have the last word on any of this, that many would surely
disagree with me, that writing is inseparable from becoming, that this is
an overexposed snapshot of a time already past, a story we are all writing
together, however we appear before one another—ready, set, go.
Yet this account emphasizes that synthesis is impossible. I have attempted
to write close to contents in order to unsettle form, to show the unruly
kinds of vitalism engendered by the social afterlife of ethnographic cat-
egories no less than world-ending violence, to suggest how the fevered
pursuit of the primitive devolves into a contagious cascade of imperfect
copies, to interrogate how the negation of the self may mutate into a
