Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
heterodoxies and a newly bifurcated cosmos wherein colonial binaries
were reproduced, reconciled, and unraveled.
2
For Ayoreo-speaking people, this manifested in a tentative framework
based on inscribing contact as a line of radical rupture. Precisely those
elements that constituted the moral human within
Erami
, the forest/past,
were evacuated and inverted in
Cojñone-Gari
, the space of the modern
present. This inversion was imagined by many to be as profound as the
difference between animals and humans, or between the world of the
dead and the world of the living. It bracketed a form of moral reason-
ing about the contemporary that collapsed immanence and negation
in a series of contradictory and nonlinear ways. While such disordered
sensibilities modeled and reproduced the terms of the colonial situa-
tion, they could not simply be reduced to it. Rather, their Ayoreo pro-
ponents stridently reclaimed a capacity to transform self and world, in
terms that were not autonomous but were also distinctly Ayoreo. The
crucial divergence is that these fluid Ayoreo projects invariably protested
a fundamental link in the colonialist and culturalist chain of cause and
effect. They presumed that continuity is rupture and that being is always
becoming.
The Black Caiman, of course, is also a trickster. And one of his tricki-
est tricks is to make such projects come back into focus only as a kind
of ontological alterity that exists external to a colonizing violence. The
newly politicized category of culture is a primary medium for this to oc-
cur in the present. Culture appears as the consummate logics of alterity,
the soothing antidote to the turbulence caused when subjugated peoples
assert their capacity to define their own subjectivities and the terms of
their own ontological ruptures. All too often, culture now brackets an
ineffective critique. It is precisely this quick step to locating a rationally
ordered but antimodern Indigenous cosmology or ontology that makes
perspectivist anthropology such an appealing and powerful rite of neo-
colonialism. Yet reiterating the myth of a stable ontological outside to
modern rationality allows the fetish power of the primitive to join with
redemptive desires and fully colonize its object. It poses as a protest of
the reduction of the multiple into the one, in order to colonize multi-
plicity itself. This is the very logic that binds the tradition-seeking
Abujá
to the blood-taking scientist and to the soul-collecting missionary. This
is the logic of the search for the primitive, the logic of the Indian hunt,
the logic of isolation, the logic of death. Frantz Fanon was writing for
indigeneity as well when he wrote that: “Ontology . . . does not permit
us to understand the being of the black man. For not only must the black
