Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Von Bremen described a specific Indian mentality and argued that Indi-
ans are only able to interpret modernity by reference to the “mythical
time” of tradition.
19
For Von Bremen, the interactions of Ayoreo-speaking people and capi-
talist economic systems are predetermined by a hunting-gathering mode
of production and by an Ayoreo cosmology that supposedly “makes it
feasible to continually reorder the forever-metamorphosing external
world without having to alter the essential mythological structure on
which it is predicated.”
20
According to Von Bremen, these two features
form “the principles of a whole way of life,” based on “integrating expe-
riences of relatively recent historical time into the myth system, which
is itself characterized by a lack of chronological order. As a result, there
is no diachronic view of history, and the development of a historical
consciousness of progressive sequences is prevented.”
21
Von Bremen's
argument rests on the premise that all Ayoreo people believe that mytho-
logical structures create an external world that cannot be changed by hu-
man action and to which humans must adapt. This allowed him to erase
both politics and history:
The specific problems of contemporary Ayoreode do not consist primarily in the danger
of not being able to maintain their ethnic identity or their right of self-determination. In
their view, it is rather their still existing ignorance about the origin of the new phenom-
ena and their concomitant inability to contact the related ancestors. It is this contact
that they regard as an essential precondition for successful living in the present world,
since the ancestors always accompany the contemporary phenomena.
22
Bernd Fischermann offered a more sophisticated formulation of these
links between myth, culture, and identity.
23
In his painstaking magnum
opus—a continually revised doctoral thesis originally for the University
of Bonn—he wrote against “incomprehensible . . . desktop” descriptions
of an Ayoreo ethos of terror and death.
24
Instead, he offered an exhaus-
tive catalogue of traditional practices, concepts, and myths. Despite the
many ethnohistorical contributions of this work, Fischermann too
based his descriptions on an implicit theory that the cosmological order
of the world established by myth narratives is eternal and unchanging for
Ayoreo. “The results of the mythic happenings are reflected in the actual
ordering of the world that for the Ayoreode is valid and immutable.”
25
Fischermann argued that myths thus explain “the conformation of the
structure of human society and nature in the form in which it is currently
encountered.”
26
Because this stance presumed that the abandonment of
tradition would imply a degradation of Ayoreo life, he had little choice
