Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
“Because the
Cojñone
,” he told me, “only want to hear about the time
when we killed each other.” This answer seemed to suggest a profound
point also emphasized by Walter Benjamin and other theorists of history.
Echoi was an image of the past which threatened to disappear, in part
because it was not recognized as a meaningful concern of the present.
9
That is, the figure of the past deemed important reorganized the causal
links and meaning of Ayoreo existence within history. History made and
unmade places. Yet the past itself was highly contested terrain.
The stories that Ayoreo-speaking elders told about Echoi between 2001
and 2008 seemed destined to disappear, not least because Ayoreo infor-
mants self-consciously edited them out of their interactions with outsid-
ers and younger Ayoreo alike. Yet Echoi initially appeared to me in these
stories as a place around which a powerful counter-history could be orga-
nized—a counter-history that resonated with my aspirational sense that
ethnography could identify and expand the limits of possibility in zones
where death was otherwise a foregone conclusion. Such a revisionist ge-
nealogy seemed to be articulated in Echoi's presence as an abandoned
axis mundi
, or in Ayoreo terms,
yequerodie Echoi nanique ome ayoreode
uyoque
: “Echoi was the trunk of all Ayoreo before.” This phrase implied
that Echoi as a place and a set of practices was the origin or fundamental
source for the humanity of Ayoreo-speaking people. In the figure of Echoi
I began to cocreate and evoke together with my elder teachers, I thought
I had found a serious challenge and alternate line of descent to much of
the history outsiders had written for these people.
Ayoreo stories about Echoi seemed to suggest the existence of histori-
cal joint-use areas, a finding that challenged the widespread notions that
Ayoreo-speaking people inhabited rigidly defined and exclusive territo-
ries and that territorial affiliation was the primary source of band com-
position or individual identity in the decades preceding contact.
10
The
existence of peaceful zones also upended the limited idea that historical
violence between Ayoreo-speaking groups necessarily arose from territo-
rial disputes or can be explained solely as an internal function of a static
and intrinsically violent “traditional culture.” In fact, my elder Ayoreo
teachers said that precisely the opposite was the case. They emphasized
that the profound violence between Ayoreo groups in the first half of the
twentieth century was an aberration. That is, they suggested that some
other interpretation of violence and abandonment was needed.
Yet try as I might, I could never entirely peer through the mists of his-
tory. The stories about Echoi as a place of unity, repeated over and over
again, were offered to my tape recorder in exchange for food or a sym-
