Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Ayoreo-speaking groups in Bolivia and Paraguay, notably, Heinz Kelm and
his student Bernd Fischermann from Germany, Sebag from France, and
Marcelo Bórmida from Argentina. Most of their work focused on Ayoreo
spirituality or myth narratives, described in the ethnographic present.
7
Partly because of these accounts, Ayoreo-speaking people are imagined to
be a homogenous pueblo or tribe and the most authentically primitive or
savage of all Chacoan peoples. As such, contemporary interest in Ayoreo
groups is so pronounced that local scholars wryly refer to an industry of
“Ayoreología.”
8
By 2001, these ethnographers had developed three general frameworks
for interpreting Ayoreo tradition. The crudest example is offered by the
work of the “ergon and myth” school based at the Centro Argentino de
Etnología Americana at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. First elabo-
rated by Marcelo Bórmida and his students in the 1970s and 1980s, this
model continues to inform several recent anthropological accounts of
Ayoreo-speaking people.
9
As Gaston Gordillo notes in his trenchant cri-
tique, such work is based on the idea that Ayoreo myth narratives are
evidence of “permanent structures, independent of space and time” that
are not “contaminated” by the “profanity” of European contact or daily
cultural life.
10
Together, they form a “timeless,” “mythic consciousness,”
which is antithetical to modern rationality and which assumes a “meta-
temporal and transtemporal character by which it is inserted into the
present and will be in the future.”
11
That is, legitimate Ayoreo life was
equated with an Ayoreo culture itself reduced to the permanent struc-
tures and causalities of mythic order.
Proponents of this model can thus argue that the themes of death and
transformation so widespread in Ayoreo myth stories meant that Ayoreo
culture (and, thus, Ayoreo life) was defined as one ruled by “terror and
death.”
12
For example, Carmen Nuñez argued that there is “a very defined
direction in the culture toward a violent, vengeful and bloody world.”
13
Anatilde Idoyaga Molina asserted that within a general Ayoreo “ethos of
terror and precaution,” the “nucleus of the worldview . . . is characterized
by violence, multiple homicides, envy and aggression.”
14
Celia Mashn-
shnek likewise concluded that a “mythical horizon of death and murder
invades the cultural life of the Ayoreo.”
15
In this schema, tradition was
reconstructed and substituted for the value of Ayoreo life.
16
A similar equation informed the ethnographic construction of Ayoreo
people as typical hunter-gatherers of the Chaco.
17
This is most clearly
elaborated by Volker von Bremen's work, which argued that Chaco Indi-
ans embody a “completely different system of reproduction, values and
social order that . . . exercises its influence to this day.”
18
Like Bórmida,
