Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
A History of Fragments
Like a dutiful ethnographer, I made a diagram in my notebook of all the
places I knew, writing late into the night in the blue glare of a flashlight.
Of them all, Echoi seemed the most likely place to begin my pursuit of
an alternate history. At the time, I had little to go on except several vague
and half-remembered mentions of this place and my eagerness to tell a
different narrative about the past. Yet stories about Echoi
were not forth-
coming from my elder teachers. I had to seek them out.
My efforts to do so were fraught and complicated by what I gradu-
ally learned was a striking and profound reluctance to discuss many past
events in detail, especially among Totobiegosode-Ayoreo. Usually, my
attempts failed. I could never predict what responses a question about
the past would elicit, no matter how innocent or general it seemed. Some
people would respond casually and at great length, others not at all. One
day, a middle-aged woman agreed to tell me her mother's teachings; the
next day, she began to shake and sweat at the thought. When I asked one
man to tell me about life after contact on the mission, he responded with
a lengthy story about hunting peccaries.
Those who agreed to talk to me invariably set limits on what domains
of the past they would discuss. When I asked Yoteuoi to tell me about
visiting Echoi in his youth, he answered in the following way. “I will
tell you the names of those who died. There were seven massacres of
our people: Jochadaquide cachodi, Jnacaode cachodi, Chequedie ca-
chodi, Junchaai'nate cachodi, Ichajuide cachodi, Pajine cachodi, Cuteri
cachodi.” He listed 118 names, then walked inside his house. He did not
invite me to follow.
If such stories had a meaning that can be grasped, it was that some
histories cannot be whole. At the time of my fieldwork, historical con-
sciousness for Ayoreo-speaking people was an intensely political do-
main, composed of fragments and pieces that never quite fit together.
4
But its fragmented presence exerted a strange force on us all.
Codé was an elder Totobiegoto woman. She had been captured in
1986, and because she was the mother of another of my adopted mothers,
Yijnamia'date, she was my classificatory grandmother. But she seemed
to harbor no affection for me. After years of ridicule on the mission of
Campo Loro, where she and the others were taken in the days after their
capture, Codé specialized in hard doctrine and hard humor. She often
sat shirtless around the fire and she reserved especially denigrating com-
ments for visiting
Abujádie
like me. When someone told her that I was
