The Devil and the Fetishization of Tradition - Behold the Black Caiman - page 2

At the time it seemed like an odd remark, but I thought little of it. We
both laughed a little (for different reasons of course). Then we hoisted our
heavy bags again and moved on through the thick brush.
Only two years later did I begin to question the significance of this brief
exchange. It was mid-September 2006, one of the last cold days of the dry
season. The low clouds were pushed by a south wind. I had arrived the
week before to begin two years of fieldwork. Everything seemed opaque,
my relationships tenuous.
I spent my days making preparations to set up camp in the forest and
visiting with the fluid group of a dozen Totobiegosode living in a wooden
garage behind the brick house in the town of Filadelfia, the Mennonite
colony and nerve center of the Paraguayan Chaco where the NGO had
its headquarters. At the time, the contrast between the NGO building
with its well-fed, live-in staff and the general squalor of the garage seemed
to epitomize the ambiguous status of the Totobiegosode.
We were squatting around a handful of burning wood scraps some-
one had scavenged from a lumberyard down the road, when a man who
appeared to be in his late fifties and whom I had never seen before in-
terrupted the quiet flow of conversation, skipping the usual polite for-
malities and fixing me with a hard stare.
“Are you an Abujá ?” He was a small man named Mariano with graying
hair and heavy-lidded eyes under a stained knit cap.
“I don't know,” I replied. “What is an Abujá ?”
“What is your work?” He spoke in a strident tone that clipped the
Ayoreo and Spanish words.
“I am an anthropologist,” I said in a tone that was aiming for polite
but came out obsequious. “I am trying to understand the ways [ jmapiedie ]
of the Totobiegosode. What their lives are like.”
“You are the one who took pictures, who filmed them before, no?”
“Yes. But now I am also working with OPIT [the tribal organization].”
“To bring them money?”
“To support what they want to do.”
There was a tense silence while the fire guttered in the wind and the
others sat quietly, hands outstretched to the flickering warmth. Mariano
stared at me intently and I looked back.
“ Abujádie are worthless.” He turned and spat to one side. “They are
only interested in recording the cucha bajade , like ujñarone curing chants.
They want to hear adode myths. They try to get people to tell those old
bad things. It seems like they must sell them later. They do not respect
anything.”