Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
desired effects. This means that, in the early years of the twenty-first
century, “traditional Ayoreo ontology” could only be discovered as an
ontology of transformation—if, of course, it could be discovered at all.
Where the ethnographer collects and orders, the Ayoreo healer unravels
and ruptures. The tension between them is not merely one of disagree-
ment. This friction also creates new figures and forces and sets them loose
on the world where they demand responses from us all.
Despite superficial disagreements, most ethnographers of Ayoreo
groups were involved in a unified project. This project consisted of trans-
forming the unequal relationships between outsiders and Ayoreo into
the object of traditional culture. This object was then transposed with the
psyches, history, and value of Ayoreo life. Such ethnographers actively
celebrated the phantom objectivity of a traditional being they alone de-
ined
over and above the universal capacities of human becoming
, a process
that concealed the fundamental nature of this thing: the vertical relations
between people and their unruly capacities to transform. This substitu-
tion required an active omission of the conditions and relationships by
which anthropological knowledge was possible in the first place. Such a
mystifying ethnographic project depended on and actively encouraged
the alienation of Ayoreo-speaking people from what they considered to
be the defining essence of themselves. Whereas the mine owner trafficked
in silver or the plantation overlord in wage labor, the
Abujá
trafficked in
tradition. Setting this process over and above Ayoreo projects of vital-
izing transformation created and sustained the strange fetish power of
tradition, even while the resolute anthropological focus on its extraction
conjured and loosed diabolical spirit-anthropologist doubles with whom
everyone, including future ethnographers, now must contend.
Such operations were not unfamiliar to the New People and my other
teachers. In fact, they were precisely what most Ayoreo identified as the
source of shamanic power in
Erami
. Ayoreo people consistently described
this power as a kind of magic whereby representing something or some-
one gave the representer power over it—what anthropologists have long
referred to as sympathetic magic. This magic is what gave power to the
markings painted on the seven different kinds of shaved wooden posts
capable of fending off enemies and sickness, and it is what allowed spe-
cial verses to lure game or prayers to reach the spirit world. This is what
caused the wordless
perane
songs to invoke the potent essence of clan an-
cestors; it is how wiping out crude rectangular figures carved in the earth
in the
ditai
ceremony could purify a warrior contaminated by spilled
blood; it is what made group performances like
ore agapi cukoi
drumming
