Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
When I arrived at Simijáné's camp the following week, I too asked
Simijáné if he would be willing to teach me ujñarone . I knew there were
two kinds of chants: those that could be recited relatively freely and
those that were puyaque , or taboo. Reciting a puyaque chant could report-
edly cause great calamity, madness, and death, unless it was indicated by
a specific illness. I told him I was not interested in the puyaque chants but
only in those that were safe. After a short exchange with his daughter,
he agreed as long as I would pay him four dollars a day and take him
someplace where there were no other Ayoreo-speaking people because
even the safe ujñarone might cause unintended damage despite the fact
that “no one believes in them anymore.” I eagerly accepted his terms.
Our acquaintance began with a formal instruction in curing chants over
two months in 2001-2002 and gradually turned into lengthy storytelling
sessions, first in a cheap hotel in the nearby town of Samaipata, then on
the street corner, and two years later over a tiny fire in his drafty shack
once he was allowed to return to the urban camp.
Whereas most elder Ayoreo refused to speak about the past, Simijáné
was the opposite. Like Primo Levi, Simijáné's response to the end of one
world was an irrepressible impulse to narrate. 5 For an Abujá , what could
be more compelling than the prospect of documenting an entire genre
of previously sacred practices that were on the cusp of disappearing? Yet,
time and again, Simijáné seemed to interrupt himself and any pretensions
I had of encountering a vanishing alterity. His stories came out in what
seemed to be disorderly tangles, jumping seamlessly from mythic ances-
tors to his experiences of healing patients to his vivid erotic desires and
dream journeys to Hell or Heaven and back again. Precontact cosmology
proved remarkably elusive. Every time I thought I could grasp it, it dis-
solved once again into a stridently surreal narrative.
Simijáné mixed stories of the first clan ancestors with those of Adam
and Eve and the Devil. “Eve is our grandmother, Adam is our grandfather.
From them come the good people of today. There are also bad people
who come from Satan, from the Devil who tempts them. It turns out that
men are all bad but when someone has courage he can become a leader
and kill enemies but only if he is also lucky.”
He told of the first time he received spirit power by drinking green
tobacco juice and passing out instead of vomiting and of how he killed
an enemy and became a man desired by young women. He interjected
pointed advice about the moral imperative to be generous into stories of
spirit flights in which he could hear giant Ancestor Beings whispering
behind him no matter which way he turned, and he classified Coca-Cola
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