Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
To prepare for my first trip, I had spent a year reading everything I
could find on Ayoreo. What a shock to discover that none of the practices
and forms that I had studied so closely appeared to exist in Ayoreo daily
life, either as something that people did or even as something they dis-
cussed. Could this actually be the case? Like a good
Abujá
, I resolved
that it could not, that such appearances were deceiving. There must be
some hidden substrate that with dedication, intelligence, and solidarity I
could access. I suspected that this difference could be reconstructed from
oral histories. This misleading impression was sealed when I discovered
a ready set of answers to my probing questions. I soon shifted my full
attention to collecting oral histories and spent six months in the spring
of 2002 traveling among several Ayoreo communities in eastern Bolivia.
I recorded more than five hundred hours of elders' stories—first working
with translators and later, as my Ayoreo language skills improved, alone.
My justification at the time was that of the salvage ethnographer, imagin-
ing that I could document a vanishing difference for future generations.
I was especially eager to record the
ujñarone
: a set of esoteric chants
that, according to the topics and articles I had read, previously formed
