Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
customary ways of acting (as well as the joined parts of a body and ejacu-
lated semen). Together, these stories formed a body of sacred knowledge
called the
quicujaidie
, the traces of all things. Post-contact narrations of
adode
suggested various reasons for these foundational transformations.
30
Regardless of the reason, at the time of his or her bodily transforma-
tion each Original Being “gave” two things to those who maintained a
proto-human form. The first was a moral restriction on behavior, a taboo
known as
puyaque
or That-Which-Is-Prohibited.
The second was a prescriptive chant that could be used to mediate the
illness or malaise caused by transgressing the restricted behavior. These
chants were called
ujñarone
, or breathed ones, and along with a certain
number of magical songs were known more generally as
sarode
.
31
For
Simijáné and my other teachers,
adode
,
puyaque
, and
ujñarone
were in-
separable, and they had previously existed for every plant, animal, and
abstraction that comprised the time/space of the precontact past,
Erami.
Simijáné's stories, however, offered a distinct interpretation of the
relationship between these practices and the constitution of moral hu-
man life. Ethnographers such as Sebag, Bórmida, von Bremen, Dasso,
Fischermann, and others described the
adode
as evidence of the integra-
tion of culture and nature within Ayoreo tradition.
32
Such descriptions
resonate with the late structuralism of perspectivist anthropology, cri-
tiqued by Terence Turner and currently an influential way to understand
Amazonian cosmologies.
33
The central premise of this scholarship is that
all Amerindian peoples share the same timeless cosmology, based on
the homogeneous belief that animals subjectively identify themselves
as humans, or cultural beings, with whom they share a generic soul.
34
This notion of a spiritual unity and a corporeal diversity represents “a
perspectivist theory of transpecific personhood, which is by contrast uni-
cultural and multinatural.”
35
As Viveiros de Castro puts it, “One culture,
multiple natures—one epistemology, multiple ontologies. Perspectivism
implies multinaturalism, for a perspective is not a representation. A per-
spective is not a representation because representations are a property of
the mind or spirit, whereas the point of view is located in the body.”
36
In
such a schema, not only humans and animals but Indigenous peoples
and “moderns” inhabit fundamentally different worlds. Like Bórmida's
“mythic consciousness” or Fischermann's “immutable orderings” of the
world through myth narratives, this “Amerindian cosmology” is taken as
a self-evident and valuable object.
Yet Simijáné's narrations of
adode/puyaque/ujñarone
emphasized the
opposite. In his stories, the crucial difference between humans and non-
humans lies in the capacity to harness and control bodily transforma-
