Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
transformation that was just as quickly undone; in the temporary opti-
mism of apocalyptic futurism and the scant comfort of rotational time;
in the deep fragmentation of subjectivity and the retying of sentimental
chains; in the broken lines of flight to madness and intoxication as the
deathly life best suited for New People in a New World. All the while
the Black Caiman stalked closer to those few Totobiegosode hiding in
the dwindling forest, and I powerless to give it pause.
In my decade-long pursuit of the Black Caiman, all of my initial ex-
planatory ruses failed. Like my Totobiegosode teachers, I too was sub-
merged under what Michael Taussig memorably described as “epistemic
murk,” the breakdown of knowledge through which colonial modes of
production are inexorably fused with terror and the space of death. The
key dialectical trick is that this epistemic murk not only unravels dif-
ference but continually reproduces alterity through fetishized images of
wildness now imbued with magical force. Moreover, as Taussig wrote,
this operation critically depends upon what seems to be its opposite,
“the hermeneutic violence that creates feeble fictions in the guise of real-
ism, objectivity and the like, flattening contradiction and systematizing
chaos.”
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Appealing to the linear and the rational means being duped
into lending essential momentum to the dialectics of domination. And
appealing to form without recognizing how this engenders an opposite
image does the same. This murkiness was acutely felt by all in the Chaco,
where several distinct neocolonial projects were organized around ap-
parently opposed images of moral Indian life and constantly interrupted
one another. It was a system where the rational was the irrational, where
similarity was difference, where expenditure was the point. Dysfunction
was how it functioned.
Yet epistemic murk was only one medium through which the Black
Caiman moved. This murkiness was simultaneously the stuff out of
which Ayoreo actively redefined time and being, self and other. It was a
sort of primordial soup for Ayoreo ontological allopoiesis. Pressurized by
terror and dehumanizing violence, Ayoreo ontological theories and co-
lonial images of alterity were dissolved into elements, constantly aligned
into nonlinear constellations and then broken apart again. Embodied
Ayoreo dispositions, durable and otherwise, emerged from this peculiar
metaphysics in a way that both mirrored and exceeded the breakdown
of representation. These dispositions looped colonial categories of Indig-
enous life back into somatic perceptions of the moral value of rupture
and transformation in such a way that all were changed. The results, as
Tom Abercrombie described in the Bolivian Andes, were creative Ayoreo
