Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
recognizable form of immanence, and to argue that the violent fixture
of contradictory limits of legitimate life does not result in the end of hu-
man actuality but may be tripped up in such contradictions even as these
limits harden into political fact and just as quickly begin to erode. These
energies reverberate unequally within and against bodies, they linger
hauntingly but not evenly in places and people. Together, they animate
the shadowy figure that I have called the Black Caiman, the pursuit of
which is the aim and method of this topic.
I have chronicled the doomed efforts to pin down my quarry, to make
ultimate sense of such nonsense. Every time I came close, the Caiman
slipped away. If the forceful fictions of history and conversion continu-
ously unraveled in the nonlinear weft and warp of daily life, so too did
most hermeneutic aspirations. Ayoreo realities stretched my capacity for
interpretation to its breaking point. If the New People offered no clear
way out, Simijáné's schizoid chants or the misty fantasies of Echoi were
just as perplexing. None were as profoundly disturbing as becoming an
observing participant in the routine failure of meaning; in the tenta-
tive patchwork emergence through electronic media of a new project of
