Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
chant were catalyzed by the presence and money of a rotating cast of
Cojñone
with a resolute interest in documenting the time now referred to
as
Nanique
, or before.
Abujádie
may have been physically present, but they only saw traces
of the past. One of the many stories Totobiegosode people told about
Abujádie
concerned a taxi that unexpectedly arrived in Arocojnadi at
dusk, bearing a tall thin foreigner and a woman. The smiling couple got
out, and they were white-skinned, blue-eyed, and beautiful. These people
acted very friendly and sat down around the fire. They began to talk and
they talked a long time. They smiled at the children. Then they pulled
from the taxi a suitcase full of money. Maybe it was dollars or maybe it
was euros. It was enough money to buy fifty hectares of ancestral Toto-
biegosode territory. These
Cojñone
Strangers said they would give the
people this money if they would let them make a film.
They wanted the Totobiegosode to go back to the forest, to take off
their clothes and live like they did before. The white couple would go
with them and film them. They wanted to take pictures of how people
ate, how people slept. They even wanted to take pictures of sex between
a man and a woman. When they said this, the people knew that they
were
Abujádie
. The people were not tricked by them and became angry.
They began to speak harshly. They wanted these
Abujádie
to leave them
alone and go away. Chacuide, a very old man who had killed enemies in
his youth, was listening. Although he was usually kind and gentle, even
he became furious at the words of the
Abujá.
He went to his house and
came back waving his spear. Chacuide walked to the man and began
screaming at him, “Go away! Go away or I will kill you!” The women be-
gan shouting and gathering things to throw at the
Cojñone
; the children
started to cry. Faced with this response, the
Abujádie
got in their taxi with
all their money and left the village. These two, the people say, were true
Abujádie.
The Devil Does Fieldwork
Anthropologists have long noted that, for many Indigenous peoples,
Devil imagery offers a meaningful and potent way to interpret the partic-
ular conditions under which they live. Michael Taussig's classic accounts
of the Colombian Putumayo and Gaston Gordillo's compelling writings
on the western Toba of the Argentine Chaco are among the finest exam-
ples.
2
Both accounts are based on and expand Marx's notion of commod-
ity fetishism, which holds that the intrinsic conditions of capitalism cause
