Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
knowledge of what Georges Bataille called “nonknowledge.” 7 It begins
by moving away from culture-as-radical-content and toward culture-as-
biolegitimacy. It begins by applying the heuristics of rupture and trans-
formation to the arenas of public debate as much as to the social afterlives
of prior analytic categories. It begins with the shift from an anthropology
of Indigenous being to the anthropology of unauthorized becomings.
And it begins with sustained reflection upon those murky zones where
Indigenous projects of becoming and anthropological projects of knowl-
edge come together, fall apart and, perhaps, meet up again.
Here, at the end of this lurching slog, I am brought up short. A ripple
in the water, a sigh of fetid breath: the Black Caiman is finally near. My
courage falters. Suddenly I am uncertain: Have I been stalking the Black
Caiman or has the Black Caiman been stalking me? I take a deep breath,
grip my flimsy spear tighter. I refuse to abandon the hunt after all these
years, to seal myself into the form I have tried unsuccessfully to resist.
Instead, I remember white light slanting through dust and the warmth
of a hand in the Place-Where-the-Black-Caiman-Walks. I have not in-
vented the journey or the place, but have I loosed the terrifying form I
set out to pursue and slay? Have I, too, become what I beheld? No matter.
The story is written. The figure is carved.
And the Black Caiman moves ever closer. I feel him in the smoke, I
smell him in the dust, I hear him in the forest, I see him in these words.
There: a shadowy form, a menacing sway, merciless back, flat of eye, a
quick rush, a silent sinking, dark water: the Black Caiman slips away.
I stand empty-handed in the mist. All I'm left with is a longing to
find my way back, a yearning for those I'd like to consider my friends,
a memory of an enviable piety and an unflinching strength, a haunting
sense of what we once were and what we might yet become.
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