Cover of Behold the Black Caiman
Behold the Black Caiman A Chronicle of Ayoreo Life
by Lucas Bessire
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Cloth: 978-0-226-14089-6 | Paper: 978-0-226-17557-7 | Electronic: 978-0-226-17560-7
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226175607.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

In 2004, one of the world’s last bands of voluntarily isolated nomads left behind their ancestral life in the dwindling thorn forests of northern Paraguay, fleeing ranchers’ bulldozers.  Behold the Black Caiman is Lucas Bessire’s intimate chronicle of the journey of this small group of Ayoreo people, the terrifying new world they now face, and the precarious lives they are piecing together against the backdrop of soul-collecting missionaries, humanitarian NGOs, late liberal economic policies, and the highest deforestation rate in the world. 

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. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Lucas Bessire is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma. He is the producer and director of the documentary film From Honey to Ashes. 

REVIEWS

“This is an exceptional book whose compelling narrative fully immerses the reader in the social and spatial geography of the northern Gran Chaco. The book’s greatest strength is Bessire’s careful conceptual and ethnographic decomposition of the terms that have long been used to dehumanize the Ayoreo people in popular and scholarly imaginings. Original and unsettling, this ethnography shows that the anthropological deconstructions of conventional notions of ‘culture’ and ‘indigeneity’ haven’t gone too far—in fact, they haven’t gone far enough.”
— Gastón Gordillo, author of Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction

“Wonderfully sensitive to its own presuppositions about anthropology no less than the giddy claims made for ‘Amerindian cosmology’ and the so-called ontological turn, Bessire’s chronicle of the Ayoreo of Paraguay and Bolivia is breathtaking in its power and delicacy. His chronicle takes us into the depths of suffering, not to resurrect the primitive or the travail of genocide, but so as to more honestly address what he sees as deep-seated ‘zones of intense translation’ that override the hoopla of Western attachment to the indigene as bound to tradition. A profoundly iconoclastic book that will become one of the great classics of social thought, it leaves the reader in a remarkably new place for rethinking modern history, no less than thinking itself.”
— Michael Taussig, Columbia University

“In a time when anthropologists proclaim an ‘ontological turn’ based on the study of cosmologies and mythologies, proposing a representation of Amerindians as radical others living in ahistorical temporality, Bessire resists what he calls the ‘fetishization of tradition’ by offering a beautifully written ethnography of the pauperized and marginalized Ayoreo people, who are caught between the forest and the bulldozers that destroy it, between the proselytism of millenarian religions and the benevolence of humanitarian organizations. Behold the Black Caiman is an important and courageous book, which will be a source of inspiration for all social scientists interested in the contradictions of the contemporary world.”
— Didier Fassin, Institute for Advanced Study

“Bessire presents the reader with a plethora of unruly images and evocative vignettes of Ayoreo life which never surrender to a single, univocal narrative. His account is purposefully complex. In a world where sensationalized images of the “last contacted Indians” are regularly consumed to satiate our hunger for otherness, and in an academy where indigenous ways of life are increasingly emphasized as the only true political alternative to our world, Bessire’s book is a much-needed different voice.”
— Times Literary Supplement

"Behold the Black Caiman wrestles with the complexity of life and the ways in which it can be both dehumanized and endured. The book’s innovative, elegiac style is not merely an aesthetic device, but rather a provocation. Bessire is asking us, as readers, to think with him."
— Cultural Anthropology

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Prefatory Note


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226175607.003.0000
[First Contact, Primitivism, Perspectival Anthropology, Culture as Life, Totobiegosode, Paraguay]
This chapter presents an overview of the major dilemmas and tensions unpacked throughout the book. It does so by telling the story of the "New People," a group of seventeen Totobiegosode Ayoreo who made contact in 2004, when they were forced from their forest homeland in northern Paraguay, fleeing ranchers' bulldozers and fearing for their lives. Working through their story serves to establish the major conceptual concerns of the book: Who is allowed to live and who is allowed to die in the name of culture? How does the recent ontological turn in anthropological scholarship paradoxically reproduce the colonial logics of dispossession and domination? How might the search for an "ex-primitive" subjectivity expand understandings of Ayoreo humanity and gesture towards a new model for the political anthropology of indigeneity in South America? (pages 1 - 21)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226175607.003.0001
[Cosmology, Human/Nonhuman Divides, Tradition, Myth, Shamanism, Magic, Fetishism, The Devil]
This chapter explores the common Ayoreo perception that anthropologists, or Abujadie, are bearded rich liars driven by a diabolical intent to extract tradition from suffering bodies and the social contexts of its production. Based on the author's apprenticeship to the last Ayoreo shamanic healer, it examines a parallel in the kind of sympathetic magic at work in both shamanic healing and ethnographic practice; a finding which revises the existing ethnography of Ayoreo cosmology, tradition and shamanism. Along the way, it chronicles the author's abandonment of the search for tradition and his transformation from an aspiring Abuja to something else. (pages 22 - 48)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226175607.003.0002
[History, Pre-contact gatherings, Jesuits, Nostalgia, Place and Space, Blood, Salt, Colonial Violence]
This chapter documents the author's doomed quest to peer through the mists of history and find a site of redemption by chronicling the abandonment and disintegration of the place called Echoi, large salt lakes that were once the site of annual intra-tribal gatherings of widely separated Ayoreo bands. Based on extensive oral histories, the chapter charts how colonial violence fractured the contemporary force, collective memory and fantastic texture of this place formerly known as the center of the world in order to make a larger point about the relationship between rotational time, the operations of history and the objectification of legitimate Ayoreo life. (pages 49 - 83)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226175607.003.0003
[Ethnocide, Manhunts, Slavery, Brown Gold, New Tribes Mission]
This chapter backtracks the peculiar drive to hunt forest Indians in the Chaco, through the testimony of Totobiegosode survivors, Christian Ayoreo proponents of more hunts and the enigmatic missionaries at the heart of this frontier institution. It uses missionary writings to explore the fundamental disorder of the missionary efforts to collect Indian souls or so-called "Brown Gold." It asks: what does it mean if being Civilized is the same as hunting Indians or if being an Indian is the same as being Hunted? (pages 84 - 109)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226175607.003.0004
[Indigenous media, Radio, Sound, Moral transformation, Reconstitution of the Soul]
This chapter traces the tenuous construction of a moral Ayoreo mainstream through intensive use of an all-Ayoreo two-way radio network and the particular qualities of electronic sound. It traces Ayoreo understandings of sound, spirit and body in order to explore the fraught relationships between Christian morality, radio metaphysics and a pan-ethnic sense of belonging. Is it any surprise that the new moral human constituted through the ambiguous and ephemeral sound of radio proved an impossible to realize ideal? (pages 110 - 123)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226175607.003.0005
[Christianity, Apocalyptic futurism, Bulldozers, Terror, Time, Being]
This chapter describes the social topography of apocalyptic futurism and alluring images of impending a world-ending transformation to examine how novel ontologies emerge as a moral response to harsh post-contact conditions. I chart how such apocalyptic sensibilities extend the moral Ayoreo mainstream to its breaking point, even as they became the only way to make sense of ecological destruction and the forcible conversion of the New People to evangelical Christianity by their captors. (pages 124 - 146)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226175607.003.0006
[Indigeneity, Shame, Subjectivity, Morality, Ethnography]
This chapter stays close to the ways that the uneven distribution of shame redefines life and ethnographic analyses of it in the Place-Where-the-Black-Caiman-Walks. It ranges from the shame of the ethnographer to the shame of the New People to the shame of the Ayoreo mainstream to the paradoxical refusal of shame by teen-aged Ayoreo sex-workers and back again. What does it mean to become Indian and become Ayoreo today? (pages 147 - 171)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226175607.003.0007
[Madness, Vice, Lines of Flight, Neoliberalism, Political Fusion of Culture and Life, Ex-Primitives]
This chapter examines two linked modes for refusing the mainstream Ayoreo project of moral self-transformation: madness and vice. It relates each - spirit possession by the past and addiction to smoking coca-paste - to an intentional and legible negation of the self; a formation of negative becoming. It does so in order to pose larger questions about how legitimate indigenous life and the figure of cultural continuity are increasingly fused within neoliberal politics, thus making many elements of Ayoreo society newly eligible for violent extermination and death. (pages 172 - 193)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226175607.003.0008
[Voluntary Isolation, Multiculturalism, Law, Indigenous Rights, Humanitarianism, NGOs, Genetic Science, Biolegitimacy, Concealed Totobiegosode]
This chapter charts conflicts over the meaning and value of the lives of those few bands of Totobiegosode which remain in nomadic concealment in the dwindling forests of northern Paraguay. It tracks the ways they are objectified in international law, multiculturalist state policies, NGO practice and genetic science, and asks what kind of humanity is at stake in the disavowal of our connectedness to their fate. (pages 194 - 220)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226175607.003.0009
[Black Caiman, Negative Immanence, Ontological Self-Determination, Altermodernity, Political Anthropology, Becoming]
This chapter returns to the allegory of the Black Caiman, draws links between the chapters, and makes explicit how the instances described in the book are relevant to wider theoretical and humanistic concerns. In doing so, it gestures towards a new way to approach the political anthropology of indigeneity in South America. (pages 221 - 230)

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Book published by University of Chicago Press, 2014. Page maintained by BiblioVault.