Behold the Black Caiman: A Chronicle of Ayoreo Life
Lucas Bessire
Language: English
Pages: 296
ISBN: 022617557X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Drawing on ten years of fieldwork, Bessire highlights the stark disconnect between the desperate conditions of Ayoreo life for those out of the forest and the well-funded global efforts to preserve those Ayoreo still living in it. By showing how this disconnect reverberates within Ayoreo bodies and minds, his reflexive account takes aim at the devastating consequences of our society’s continued obsession with the primitive and raises important questions about anthropology’s potent capacity to further or impede indigenous struggles for sovereignty. The result is a timely update to the classic literary ethnographies of South America, a sustained critique of the so-called ontological turn—one of anthropology’s hottest trends—and, above all, an urgent call for scholars and activists alike to rethink their notions of difference.
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the end of the Areguede’urasade’s existence as an independent group. Tié and the others were quickly divided among their captors and reduced to a servile status. They were forced to haul water, chop wood, and provide forest foods to the others. They were ridiculed for being dirty and backward and ignorant, for their reactions to the clothing, soap, and foods of the Cojñone Strangers. Dejai himself cut their long hair with a pair of crude sheers. He told them that their painstakingly crafted
the end of the Areguede’urasade’s existence as an independent group. Tié and the others were quickly divided among their captors and reduced to a servile status. They were forced to haul water, chop wood, and provide forest foods to the others. They were ridiculed for being dirty and backward and ignorant, for their reactions to the clothing, soap, and foods of the Cojñone Strangers. Dejai himself cut their long hair with a pair of crude sheers. He told them that their painstakingly crafted
calf. I 91 c ha p ter three passed a handful of shady recessed houses, garages, and a generator station, before stopping in front of a large brick house with a picket fence and flowers shaded by palm trees. A Great Dane greeted me at the gate, and a half-grown pet anteater raised its sticklike nose to examine me. Soon, a smiling woman with pale skin and auburn hair invited me to sit on a padded wicker chair on the cool porch. She spoke English, her words clipped and polite. She served me a
Totobiegosode to Ngahu Pioi, the “lake of fire.” For more than a year prior to my arrival at his house, Bobby and I had carried on a debate by proxy. I put out word that I didn’t hate God. It was disconcerting to find myself imitating preachers I had known as a child in western Kansas, where my grandfather often took me to services at the evangelical Church of Christ he so loved. To argue with Totobiegosode that they were not intrinsically sinful, I ended up quoting scripture and discussing Bible
occupied this forest until the day of contact. The land being bulldozed 124 A p o c a l y p s e a n d t h e Limit s o f T r a n s f o r mati o n was intimately known. It was dotted with old camps and houses and gardens and trails and carefully stewarded reserves of honey and game. The bulldozers uncovered a traditional Ayoreo iguijnai house in the path of the first planned road. The Nivaclé Indian drivers walked off the job when they were ordered to bulldoze the dome of mud and limbs. It stood
