Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
logics in which “becoming is prior to being and where the relation to al-
terity is not just a means of establishing identity but a constant process.”
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What makes the Ayoreo opening to altermodernity contain a radical
potential, however, is that the generative murk of an Ayoreo project of
“rupturing-becoming” is based on rupturing the very kinds of philo-
sophical collapse between nature/culture, tradition/modernity, human/
nonhuman that such theorists of altermodernity take for granted as con-
stituting the Indigenous-European divide. That is, Ayoreo “worldviews”
invert the very insights that scholars such as Hardt and Negri identify
as the primary contribution that “an unmodern Indigenous ontology”
makes to this wider project of envisioning altermodernity. Instead, Ay-
oreo call attention to the objectification of Indigenous cosmology as part
and parcel of a wider regime of revisionary futurism, in which some verti-
cally ranked world- and life-making projects count more than others.
The destabilizing Ayoreo project of negation protests modernity but
to do so its protest is directed against all orders. It is especially directed
against the figure of an Indigenous antimodernity through which mod-
ern and altermodern orders alike are oppositionally sustained. It emphati-
cally asserts that what is insidious here is not the reduction of multiplicity
to the singular but the ways that this metanarrative masks and requires
the standardization of multiplicity itself—thereby undoing its radical po-
tential, domesticating alterity, and making ontology available for gover-
nance. It suggests that this dynamic, intrinsic to late liberalism, requires
more sustained ethnographic attention. And it reminds us that what is at
stake here is not only the meaning and value of ex-primitive life but the
meaning and value of our own.
This poses an unsettling question: How can we take seriously a kind of
Indigenous worldview that is outside of the authorized outside precisely
because it unmasks the forceful fictions of cosmological exteriority and
in such ways reclaims the capacity for self-transformation according to
terms that are not autonomous but are distinctly Ayoreo?
To do so requires a very different kind of political anthropology than
that offered by Clastres and others. It begins by undoing the habits and
categories by which indigeneity is an intelligible object, as suggested by
the work of Terry Turner, Fred Myers, and many others. It begins by
tracking the contradictory moral economies by which Indigenous life
is unequally ranked, as Didier Fassin argues. It begins by inverting the
presumed relationships between the form and content of indigeneity, as
Tom Abercrombie shows. It begins by embracing the generative effects
of negativity, as the work of Gaston Gordillo in the Argentine Chaco
urges. It begins by pursuing not patterns and logics but the politics of the