Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
to have “heavy words,” and whatever they said was likely to come true.
Such heavy words could also
churu pajeode
, or “wash away negative emo-
tions,” in the present and the future. Others were known as
uto ca'achu
.
Someone who was
uto ca'achu
was capable of causing something to hap-
pen to another person through his or her spoken predictions. Such an
occurrence was called
pugaite
. The
u'e
were another class of people who
spoke about good things and caused them to happen. According to these
ideas, if someone's prediction came true it was because the utterance
itself was animated by the speaker's soul matter, exhaled in his or her
breath. The power of a chant depended on a general Ayoreo theory that
spoken words can, under certain conditions, travel through time to cause
the effects they purportedly describe. As the figure of the
Abujá
attests,
ethnographic representations of tradition are premised on the same kind
of power. And they may well have the same effects, whether we admit
it or not.
The Secret of the Devil
During our first long session, Simijáné seemed most interested in teach-
ing me the basic operations of the
ujñarone
and their relationships to
the myth narratives, and in establishing his own authority on the mat-
ters in question. He started with around two hundred chants considered
generically beneficial but weak, such as those to make children strong
and smart, to cause peace and happiness, etc. Soon, he appeared to grow
bored with this and began asking me to use the chants after he had dem-
onstrated them. At the time my Ayoreo was abysmal and I invariably
butchered the words and rhythms beyond recognition. Simijáné always
found this quite hilarious. Each time, he would laugh and repeat, “He
doesn't know!”
He never laughed or joked, however, once he began teaching me the
more powerful chants and he never asked me to repeat them. These in-
cluded a set of chants made around Christian figures, such as Adam, Eve,
Noah, Mary, and Joseph. Simijáné learned these chants from a vision-
ary woman shaman named Amo'nate, when they were both living on
the mission of Tobité in the late 1950s.
44
Simijáné told me he knew the
ujñarone
of God and the Devil:
We cannot imagine the christian God. We cannot see him, either, because his spirit
is so powerful. We cannot imagine, but we know what he is called and we know that
he exists. God made all the things that we see in this world.
Ujñarone
, medicine,
