Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
their mothers, while behind everyone a ring of a dozen skeletal dogs
sat with desperate patience, ready to pounce snarling on any scrap of
food tossed into the darkness. This was the hour of jokes and stories and
debate and decisions and sometimes, if one of the four older men felt
inspired, old-style singing accompanied by a paka'a gourd rattle. The art
of such singing lay in maintaining a constant swirling of the seeds and
stones around the inside of the rattle and punctuating this with delicate
shadings of the voice. The lyrics of such songs were always short stories
of lost love or old battles or shamanic visions.
On this particular evening, Yoteuoi, my adopted Totobiegosode fa-
ther, concluded the performance of one song with a casual mention that
it had been composed by Ichague'daquide. I was not paying close atten-
tion and thought I misheard the name. The only Ichague'daquide I knew
about had been a prominent leader of the Direquednejnaigosode Ayoreo,
who had died sometime in the 1920s or 1930s and who had spent his
entire life approximately five hundred miles north of where we sat. I
asked Yoteuoi if this was the same Ichague'daquide, and he affirmed that
it was. I then asked if he had learned the song recently, from a cassette
sent by someone or on the two-way radio. To cut off my direct question-
ing, which was slightly rude and threatened to break the peaceful mood,
Jochade interrupted with a stern tone. “No. Lucas, listen to me. We know
this song because the Direquednejnaigosode gave it to us long ago. They
gave it to us directly and said we can sing it. That is why we have it.”
I pondered this in silence, as the smooth flow of laughter and chitchat
resumed. But in the days and weeks that followed, I began asking other
Totobiegosode what they knew about northern Ayoreo groups. Much
to my surprise, even the New People knew many of the same stories
and events I had heard about in Bolivia from elders like Simijáné, Jnupi,
Ore Jno, and others who were supposedly their mortal enemies and who
had made contact a half century earlier. Siquei in particular could recite
names and details that were astonishingly consistent with the stories I
had recorded in Bolivia four years earlier. Yet if different Ayoreo groups
had always been involved in violent wars against one another, how could
this be the case? How could they know the same stories? I wondered if
there might have been another kind of place, a place of peaceful contact
that was absent within official accounts but which implied that a differ-
ent kind of history could be written. The very thought was electrifying to
me at the time, not least because it seemed to confirm my own desires to
discover a site of resistance. I wondered what kind of future possibilities
for Ayoreo and anthropologists such an alternate history might contain.
Where could such possibilities be located or at least imagined?
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