Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
I said to Yocaoi, “Are you still bothered by the strong Winds?” He was tired of too
much wind. Afterward, it rained and there was not too much strong wind. I used this
ujñarone
to do it. I destroyed all the winds.
Simijáné's power to heal came from the sense that his humanity was
flexible, capable of being subordinated to the outside forces that he
could channel. Visiting ethnographers likewise expected him to channel
Ayoreo alterity writ large. He made particular note of his experiences with
the man he called Don Luciano—Lucien Sebag, the noted student of
Claude Lévi-Strauss who visited two Ayoreo missions in the early 1960s.
Simijáné still blamed himself for Sebag's 1965 death by suicide. He said
that Sebag had begged him to recite
puyaque
chants. Simijáné initially
refused, but after Sebag promised him a substantial payment, he relented
and agreed to let Sebag record a single chant, the chant of
Poji
, or Iguana.
This chant was so powerful that it broke Sebag's reel-to-reel tape recorder.
In that instant, the words also infected Sebag.
“Before, I did not know how to put my words to one side and Luciano
died because the
ujñarone
broke his recorder and went directly to him.”
Sebag's madness was preceded by Simijáné's own. After recounting the
prohibited chant, Simijáné was possessed by the
Pojiode
spirits. They took
their vengeance by removing his
ayipie
soul matter. “I do not remember
what happened,” he said. Others told him that he began to resemble an
Iguana. In the midst of his madness, his skin turned yellow. He was over-
powered by an irrational fear of his people. After weeks of searching they
found him alone in the forest, living in a hole, eating dirt, mumbling
nonsensical phrases, covered in excrement. It took a week of curing ses-
sions to restore his health.
It was a telling irony that Simijáné's teachings to me contradicted
nearly everything that had been written about Ayoreo traditional spiri-
tuality by the same men he had previously instructed.
Tradition as Ethnographic Fetish
Ethnographers have made Ayoreo tradition, and spirituality especially,
their primary object of study since shortly after missionaries contacted
northern Ayoreo-speaking groups in the late 1940s. Although Ayoreo-
speaking people are nearly absent from English-language scholarship,
they are the subject of dozens of anthropological theses, articles, and
monographs in Spanish, French, German, and Italian. By the mid-1970s,
more than fifteen anthropologists had visited and written about various
