Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
tion itself. This is why such forms were considered the “source of life” in
Erami
, or
yucucuecaringueri garanone u sarode iji monte nanique
.
As in the
Kayapó models described by Turner, Simijáné said that the First World
inhabited by the Ancestor Beings preceded the rise of human society or
culture. These Ancestor Beings were not fully human. Rather, they were
proto-humans that were fundamentally amoral and unsocialized. In ev-
ery case, Simijáné stressed that these proto-humans did not possess the
basic means for reproducing moral society.
In fact, proto-humans only learned how to become properly moral
humans—how to make fire, weave clothing, construct shelter, plant gar-
dens, kill game, wage war, cure illness, navigate the Chaco landscape,
and enlist metaphysical alliances—through the lessons and warnings
imparted by Ancestor Beings as they transformed. The key elements nec-
essary to reproduce moral human life, in other words, did not already
exist from time immemorial but emerged from these foundational trans-
formations of content and form. Thus, Sebag's oft-repeated observation
that animals represent “ancient Ayoreo who, for one or the other rea-
son, renounced their humanity,” contains a crucial error: even within
the terms of post-contact
adode
as recited by Simijáné, humanity itself
emerged as a result and condensation of transformative processes.
37
The
same error is repeated in other contexts by perspectival anthropologists,
who claim that “the original common condition of both humans and
animals is not animality but rather humanity. . . . Humans are those who
continue as they have always been: animals are ex-humans, not humans
ex-animals.”
38
Simijáné, in contrast, emphasized that humanity had always been de-
fined by constant flux. It was never a stable state. As in the Kayapó systems
described by Turner, “the whole point of these myths is not how animals
became and continue to be identified with humans, thus subverting the
contrast between nature and culture, but how animals and humans be-
came fully differentiated from each other, thus giving rise to the contem-
porary differentiation of nature and culture.”
39
Moreover, it is precisely
through the capacity to continually manage, contest, and redefine such
distinctions that moral humanity was constituted. And it is this plasticity
of the human that made healing chants an effective technology.
To cure using
sarode
or
ujñarone
chants, a healer first activated his or her
pujopie
soul matter through the smoke of
sidi
tobacco or
canirojnai
roots.
In the following trancelike state, the healer would visit with the particu-
lar spirits with whom he or she shared an affinity. These spirits would
indicate the source of the illness, sometimes prescribe certain sequences
