Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
“the relationship between people to take on the character of a thing and
thus acquire a phantom objectivity, an autonomy that seems so strictly
rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental
nature: the relation between people.”
3
Both argue, in somewhat differ-
ent ways, that Indigenous peoples use Devil imagery to protest against
this phantom objectivity of the commodity-form produced through their
alienated labor and how it justifies and sustains their subordinate status
relative to wider political and economic processes.
4
At first glance, the Ayoreo use of Devil imagery appeared strikingly
distinct. Ayoreo-speaking people did not join devilry with capitalism
per se but with the practice of anthropology. And they did not appear
to protest the conditions of wage labor so much as the conditions of
fieldwork and the kinds of temporalities that underwrite ethnographic
representations of tradition. This distinctiveness raises a number of ques-
tions: What, if anything, might an ethnographer of the Ayoreo and a
mine owner or plantation overseer have in common? Are we similarly
engaged in a labor of allowing the relationships between people to take
on the phantom characteristics of an object or thing? What is at stake
for Ayoreo and anthropology if this object or thing is traditional culture?
And doesn't this Ayoreo critique then require us to accept that it is now
necessary to account ethnographically for the palpable social presence of
anthropological knowledge and the unequal forces that it conjures and
exerts against human life?
As was so often the case, Ayoreo suspicions about outsiders like me con-
tained a kernel of keen insight. By the time I met the New People in
2004, I too was already well on my way to becoming an
Abujá
. It was not
my first experience with Ayoreo-speaking people. In 2001-2002, I spent
fourteen months among northern Ayoreo in Bolivia, descendants of
the Direquednejnaigosode and Jnupedogosode confederacies that had
emerged from the forests in the 1940s and 1950s and who had a much
longer history of dealing with anthropologists, missionaries, NGOs, and
the like. I met these people as a twenty-two-year-old while on a Fulbright
scholarship to examine a sustainable forest management project that
my host organization, the NGO Apoyo para el Campesino del Oriente
Boliviano, was implementing in the Direquednejnaigosode community
of Zapocó. I was soon swept into the constant movement of Ayoreo-
speaking people from relatively remote settlements like Zapocó to an
informal camp of tarp and embers in a notorious shantytown on the
outskirts of the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra and back again.
