Geography Reference
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Native culture disavows, instantiates, and reproduces. Through such ten-
sions, contradictory forms of Ayoreo difference are produced, governed,
and brought to bear within and against the always excessive substances
of Ayoreo life.
In many ways, this account is just as guilty of cannibalism as those it has
critiqued. It freezes an Ayoreo project of negative immanence that has
surely already been negated. And I have implied throughout that this
artificially fixed project contains a radical potential for rethinking the
political and moral anthropology of indigeneity in South America. That
is, the end ultimately washes me back to the beginning: anthropology's
conceit to rescue the Native's point of view and effect a reflexive trans-
formation through its faithful rendering.
Like Pierre Clastres and my other distinguished predecessors, I am not
willing to surrender the hope that another world, another kind of being
in it, is possible to conjure. And like Clastres and many others, I have
turned to Indigenous worldviews in order to co-envision this possibil-
ity. Yet I never found a society against the state and I was compelled
to renounce the search for the primitive. The kind of New World I en-
countered in the Chaco was a dystopic one. It was a terrifying reality we
all share but one I am not certain that we—the New People, myself, or
anyone else—can ultimately survive.
Ayoreo voices as recounted in this topic deny the easy escapes of a
stable outside, to be inhabited at our leisure. They let none of us off the
hook. They mock and confound any attempt to find a new origin, to tell
a linear story, to reanimate our logics of redemption. They inexorably
pull us down into the vortical flows of rupture. And it is precisely in this
downdraft of categorical implosion and inversion wherein something
like their radical potential might lie.
Ayoreo sensibilities offer a sharp reminder that there are no cosmo-
logical outsides—no “unmodern ontologies”—to redeem our humanity
and save us from the modern world we have made. If we have created
this New World together, its seas of inequality, riptides of subjectivity,
and islands of liberal ideals, then perhaps it is time to envision the next:
a world not predicated on the essential difference of Indigenous peoples
but on our shared capacity to transform ourselves and to objectify the
common ways in which we do it.
It is ironic that this echoes recent calls by some progressive intellectu-
als, in which the task of the engaged scholar is to identify and create an
“altermodern rationality.” Disordered Ayoreo worldviews likewise hew
closely to how these proponents define this redemptive rationality as a