Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
of being known as
ditai
. A
ditai
man was
puyacho
, or taboo. He could
not travel with anyone who was not a
dacasute
, and he could not enter
the camp upon the party's return. The blood of the enemy that covered
him was contagious and this blood transformed the killer's metaphys-
ical being. The
ditai
state lasted until he was cleansed in an all-night
ceremony.
Fellow
dacasutedie
made a circle around the man who was
ditai
, and
a
daijnai
shaman traced a rectangular shape in the dust with single lines
representing arms and legs and dots for eyes. The warriors did
chugu'iji
there and sang songs of rage and death. The killer jumped over the figure
and the shaman wiped it out. At that precise spot a hole was dug and the
death weapons broken and then buried. The earth that comprised the
figure was turned over and used to cover the broken weapons, and thus
the soul of the dominated enemy vanished into the underworld of death,
Jnaropie
. The men then shared food that only they could safely eat, as the
food itself represented the flesh and blood of the victims and would kill
any noninitiated person who dared to consume it.
For the
ditai
man, blood was more than the second-order residue of a
primary violent event. Rather, spilling and consuming human blood was
transformative because blood was considered to be an agentive sign of life
itself. A
dacasute
proved his capacity to dominate existence and to realize
his full human potential through surviving, vanquishing, and incorpo-
rating the very life substance of his enemy. If this was his first kill, the
dacasute
was given a special warrior name known only to his peers, usu-
ally the name of a carnivorous animal or carrion-eating bird, part of a
complex vocabulary exclusively used during journeys of war. He was
then eligible to don elaborate feather
potaye
and
cobia
and the
ayoi
, the
jaguar-skin headdress that symbolized the spiritually potent blood of the
jaguar and marked his status as a man of consequence and potency.
Yet this state of being a
dacasute
warrior itself was fraught, the power
of blood a dialectic. “It is as if a
dacasute
always has a sickness,” Simijáné
said, “because he has spilled blood. The blood of enemies is in all of his
things, they are filled with blood and no one else can touch them or they
will get sick and die.” The dangerous power of blood was in its mimetic
excess, its capacity to act against the very life force it signified.
Disiejoi, a Direquednejnaigose elder bent with arthritis and the leading
pastor of the village of Zapocó, recalled visiting Echoi as a child and
then killing his Guidaigosode enemies with a shotgun there later. He
responded to my questions about Echoi in the following way. “It is true
what you say. Echoi used to be a good place for all Ayoreo. It was our
