Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
said that he himself had never learned how to use that particular
ujñarone
properly. The woman who once knew died long ago. Now, no one could
gain power over the Devil except God. He said that no one believed in
any of the chants. He thought he was the last one and the chants would
lose their power when he died. “The power of the
ujñarone
depends on
faith. If I have faith in them, I can cure. If I don't have faith, what use are
they? There is nothing there.”
With the exception of Simijáné, nearly all Ayoreo people during my field-
work said that the
ujñarone
were satanic, as were all of the many prac-
tices related to shamanic healing. Even the Totobiegosode people who
had been contacted in 1986 agreed. “It was Satan,” they told me, “who
compelled us to heal by blowing away before.” Today only a handful of
elders know the
adode
myths, and even fewer know more than one or
two
ujñarone
. Many middle-aged Ayoreo in Bolivia do not know what the
word
ujñarone
refers to. Those few elders who can still recite
adode
myths
for the meager pay offered by visiting
Abujádie
often insist on prefacing
every sentence with the word
chiese
, which roughly translates as “it was
once said but is now known to be untrue that . . .” The knowledgeable
elders refuse to teach the myths and the chants to the few young people
who are interested. And it is said that even thinking too much about such
things can cause illness and retribution from God, to whom shamanic
healing is morally offensive.
If we agree with previous ethnographers that tradition and life or be-
ing in the world are indistinguishable for Indigenous peoples and that
such spiritual practices constitute tradition, then this decision to aban-
don the chants leaves us with only one choice: to mourn the death of
Ayoreo. The image of Ayoreo is sealed—their lives indistinguishable from
a tradition we alone have the authority to classify, delimit, and fetishize.
In the process, we deny them the full range of human being, the capacity
for human becoming.
But Simijáné's unruly and disordered teachings suggest another possi-
bility. If moral human life emerges from the capacity to define and control
the terms of transformation—from the ability to renarrate causality and
properly use sympathetic magic—then this collective decision is simply
the most recent of many historical transformations of humanity. That is,
abandoning the chants is not the end of humanity but a reaffirmation of
Ayoreo capacities to transform themselves. It is thus an affirmation not of
being but of becoming, one that reclaims a kind of radical agency for on-
tological self-determination in the face of dispossession and subjection,
