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but to argue that contemporary Ayoreo culture is a function of a deter-
ministic core of traditional cosmology that endures beneath a veneer of
apparent change: “The traditional culture manifests itself in many as-
pects of the thought and behavior, and its bases govern [
rigen
] to this day
in the Ayoreo culture. The obvious appearances of change only represent
tendencies of adaptation to a new environment, but in every case can be
identified with the respective traditional structures.”
27
Like von Bremen, Fischermann argued that “new and unknown . . .
phenomena of the modern world” are “totally submitted” to the cos-
mological orders established by myth narratives and time. Fischermann
wrote that this “complete subordination” is possible because Ayoreo peo-
ple assigned all “introduced elements”—including medicines, material
goods, and Christianity—“to the time frame and category of mythical
ancestors.”
28
He thus concluded his sweeping work with the supposedly
romantic and empowering claim that contemporary Ayoreo people have
an “intact cultural identity,” because “modern cultural elements” have
proven unable to contaminate Ayoreo tradition.
29
In doing so, Fischer-
mann merely inverted the value attributed to Ayoreo tradition. Like
other
Abujádie
, he ultimately reified the reductive equation of tradition
and life, and reasserted the exclusive authority of ethnographers to deter-
mine the limits of both. Such projects deflected attention from the more
interesting question of how tradition became such an eagerly sought ob-
ject and diabolical fetish in the first place.
The stories that I heard in the field—and those that I did not—suggested
two fundamental critiques of these models: first, that the very terms of
the questions being pursued were dangerously suspect and pathological;
and second, that they were based on a serious misinterpretation of the
myth narratives they claimed as their empirical evidence.
On the most superficial level, Simijáné confirmed the general out-
lines of “Ayoreo cosmology” as described by ethnographers. He told
me that the first world was populated by Ancestor Beings known as the
Jnani'bajade
(Original or First Men) or
Cheque'bajedie
(Original or First
Women). These beings, according to Simijáné and my other teachers,
shared a humanoid form, language, and idiosyncratic personalities and
capacities. The fundamental division of society from nature and thus,
the human from nonhuman was the result of various processes by which
the majority of these Original Beings were transformed into the nonhu-
man forms apparent in the world today (plants, animals, virtues, etc).
The narratives of these transformations were referred to as
adode
in
the Ayoreo language. This word (singular
adi
) referred to manners or
