Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Without breaking eye contact, Mariano stood up. Then he abruptly
turned and stalked away from the garage, his posture rigid, his steps
firm.
At the time, I was unsettled by the confrontation (one among many)
and puzzled by what seemed like barely controlled anger directed at the
Abujádie
. I now realize that I could not have received a more appropriate
introduction to fieldwork in the Chaco.
Over the following months, I asked the people I came to know to tell me
more about the
Abujádie
. I eventually learned that this was an Ayoreo cat-
egory for “anthropologist.”
1
The word literally meant “the Whisperers”
or “the Bearded One” and implied a veiled appearance, such as a
Cojñone
Stranger's face or a rain cloud. It was often used as an insult.
According to the stories I heard,
Abujádie
were trickster figures. They
were said to possess hidden stacks of money “as long as their beards” and
nefarious powers of persuasion. They beguiled people with their charm
and smiles. They were known for their ability to “say all the things the
people want to hear” but secretly plotted against all that is moral and
good. As Jochade, the leader of Arocojnadi, told me in September 2007,
“If you see an
Abujá
heading to an Ayoreo community, he is going to
have problems. If he tries to go among the Ayoreo, the Ayoreo hate it.
They hate him very much.
Ore chijimiji ore idai
, they will cut him out of
their settlement.”
Everyone agreed that
Abujádie
were difficult to spot. But they all even-
tually gave themselves away by two defining traits. They shared a propen-
sity to carry cameras. They also shared a profane focus on collecting the
set of practices now called
cucha bajade
, the “original” or “first things.”
It was no coincidence that the
cucha bajade
included all of the very same
practices that ethnographers claimed to constitute traditional Ayoreo
culture.
I soon discovered that Totobiegosode people (and all other Ayoreo-
speaking people in Bolivia and Paraguay) had made a self-conscious deci-
sion to abandon these practices in their entirety. During my fieldwork,
Totobiegosode elders did not tell
adode
creation myths around nightly
fires, nor did they heal one another by sucking out (
ore chigase
) or blow-
ing away (
ore chubuchu
) sickness with
sarode
and
ujñarone
curing chants,
nor did they smoke
sidi
tobacco and
canirojnai
roots to enter into sha-
manic trances, nor did they ritually define kinship through
chugu'iji
and
chatai
performances, nor did they summon the spirits with
perane
, the
wordless clan rhythms given to the
Jnupemejnanie
, Those-Whose-Bones-
Are-Dust. The rare occasions that someone narrated a myth or a curing
