LUCAS BESSIRE
University of Oklahoma
Apocalyptic futures:
The violent transformation of moral human life among
Ayoreo-speaking people of the Paraguayan Gran Chaco
A B S T R A C T
In this article, I describe the social topography of
apocalyptic futurism among recently contacted
Ayoreo-speaking people in Paraguay to examine the
novel senses of being in the world that are emerging
in harsh postcontact conditions. I show how
apocalyptic futurism exceeds the temporal confines
of both “traditional culture” and “Christianity.”
Rather, it derives from the afterlife of violence and a
general consensus that biological survival now
requires a reconstitution of the terms of humanity.
Apocalyptic sensibilities are concerned with more
than local values or the transcendence of death;
rather, as I show, they mark a new threshold
between the human and the nonhuman.
[apocalypticism, indigeneity, contact, violence,
biolegitimacy, Gran Chaco, Ayoreo]
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 38, No. 4, pp. 743–757, ISSN 0094-0496, online
ISSN 1548-1425. C 2011 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2011.01334.x
The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in the face of
despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present
themselves from the standpoint of redemption.
—Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia
This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into
homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the straight gate
through which the Messiah might enter.
—Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”
uring the dry season in northern Paraguay, the bulldozers never
D
stop. The massive caged machines with stabilizer bars and halo-
gen lamps ride over and crush the low forest, too dense to under-
cut. The metal is worn smooth by the plants. Many chaqueños
say that driving one makes you embrutecido, brutish and mean,
that it damages your kidneys, spine, brain. As the days lengthen and the
heat of the sun intensifies, ranchers burn what the bulldozers have pushed
into mile-long rows. Smoke covers thousands of square miles for weeks,
enough to make the streetlights in the Mennonite colonies far to the south
turn on at midday. The sky is twilight gray; one wakes with the taste of ashes
and a thin film of white on the tongue.
In this land, apocalpytic thought and imagery resonate strongly for
visitors and residents alike.1 Such schemas gain particular traction
among the Totobiegosode group of Ayoreo-speaking people, who con-
sider their recent “first contacts” to be world-ending encounters. The Toto-
biegosode, the People-from-the-Place-Where-the-Collared-Peccaries-Ate-
Our-Gardens, are descendants of the southernmost village confederacy of
Ayoreo speakers, former hunter-gatherers of the Bolivian and Paraguayan
Gran Chaco.2 Seventy years ago, “the Ayoreode,” or Human Beings, were
not a recognizable ethnic group. Although most Ayoreo-speaking groups
entered into peaceful relations with missionaries between 1947 and 1969,
the Totobiegosode refused to make direct contact.3 Instead, evangelical
New Tribes missionaries and armed Christian Ayoreo from a hostile group
hunted down and captured the majority of Totobiegosode in the notorious
American Ethnologist  Volume 38 Number 4 November 2011
“Wild Man” hunts of 1979 and 1986, and the most re-
cent “first contacts” occurred in 2004 (see Escobar 1988;
Hein 1990; Perasso 1987). At least one small group of To-
tobiegosode still opts to avoid direct contact and remains
concealed in the rapidly dwindling Chaco forest.
Today, a foreign visitor to the stark Totobiegosode vil-
lages, perhaps hoping (in vain) for an encounter with the
“last traditional Indians” of the Gran Chaco, will invariably
be queried, politely but firmly, about his or her religious
faith. “Are you one of Jesus’s people?” I was asked early in
my acquaintance with these people. “Do you know when he
is coming?”
Like other Ayoreo-speaking peoples, Totobiegosode
have made a conscious decision to abandon the social prac-
tices of precontact life. People no longer tell adode myths
around nightly fires. They do not heal one another by suck-
ing out (ore chubuchu nyane) or blowing away sickness
with sarode and ujnarone curing chants, smoke sidi to-
bacco and canirojnai roots to enter into shamanic trances,
or ritually define their gender and clan kinship through
chugu’iji and chatai speech genres or perane, the wordless
clan rhythms given to the Jnupemejnanie, Those-Whose-
Bones-Are-Dust. The rare occasions that an elder may de-
cide to narrate a myth or a curing chant are now usually
catalyzed by the promise of money from a rotating cast
of visiting ethnographers who, according to many Ayoreo-
speaking people in Paraguay, have a dangerously profane
interest in collecting the cucha bajade, or original things
(see Bessire 2010a).
Instead, performances of Christian faith dominate
public sociality. Nearly every day, the entire community
gathers around the hearth of a senior man to listen to Bible
verses. The members of the most recently contacted group,
in particular, are asked detailed questions about scripture.
Twice a week, missionaries broadcast 15-minute Ayoreo-
language sermons on a Mennonite radio station. When
these are aired, the village quiets. Adults huddle near their
battery-powered radios, listening. Ayoreo performances of
Christian faith usually invoke the end and rebirth of so-
cial time. Some Ayoreo-speaking people are convinced be-
lievers will soon be transformed into prosperous, white-
skinned, celestial beings. It is an appealing vision for Ayoreo
people, who have become the most marginal and poorest of
all native peoples in a region where members of a large “In-
dian” underclass are commonly held in conditions resem-
bling slavery (see Kidd 1997). Consider the following radio
sermon by Refresco’daye, a respected Ayoreo pastor:
We know that the stars, the moon, the sun, the night
and the day are very different. We know that up to this
day. We know that because we have these stories in our
hands [in the Bible]. It will be the same for the Ayoreo.
Those that die will come back to life again, even though
they were dead. When they live again, they will have an-
744
other body. Their old bodies will stay underneath the
earth . . . They will have a New Body when it happens . . .
Our old bodies are very ugly and dirty . . . Our new body
will never die. It will never die because we believe in
God. The dead ones will come back to life again. They
will have a new body. They will change to another body.
Their new body will be very beautiful. It will be clean
and white.
Apocalyptic futures
In this article, I explore how recently contacted
Totobiegosode-Ayoreo have made apocalyptic futurism—
rather than discourses of culture—a potent explanatory
framework for understanding or creating past events and
their new place as “indigenous peoples” in Paraguay.4 I
argue that apocalyptic futurism is a form of intelligibility
that translates extreme experiences of violence into the
conditions for human existence, by providing a key “orga-
nizational schema,” or cognitive template for patterning
the relationships between events and persons.5 Apocalypti-
cism, as an implicit constructive form, organizes subjective
experience in ways that exceed both precontact ontologies
and any single external representation of the ideal Indian
or Christian subject.
Such meaning-making practices have particularly high
stakes for recent “ex-primitives” in contemporary Latin
America, where a linear continuity with the artificially lim-
ited set of practices that count as “traditional culture” is of-
ten presumed to be the sole legitimate source of native po-
litical visibility and claims to resources from the state (see
Abercrombie 1998; Sieder 2002).6 Here, I describe the social
topography of apocalypticism (and not apocalyptic narra-
tives) to push against the narrow confines of a petrified “tra-
dition” as well as the terms such notions imply for imag-
ining “indigenous Christianity” solely as evidence of either
“continuity or rupture,” that is, of preservation or loss as
an effect of collisions between competing systems of value
(see Mbembe 2001; Robbins 2004, 2007). To be clear, the
adoption of apocalyptic imagery by Ayoreo-speaking peo-
ple does not require the erasure of ontological difference,
yet neither does it reflect a hidden core of resistant alterity
continuing beneath a deceptive veneer of apparent change,
as is commonly assumed within much local ethnography
of “Chaco Indians” (cf. Fischermann 2001; Hein 1990; Kidd
1999). (There is no reason to presume that many Ayoreo-
speaking people do not mean what they so frequently say.)
Apocalyptic futurism is appealing precisely because it
marks a limit situation in which continuity requires rupture,
and vice versa. Here, I attend to the ways apocalyptic futur-
ism, by shifting the terms of the present, is also linked to
the reimagination of the bodily limits of the human under
the conditions of colonial violence. This link to embodied
dispositions makes apocalyptic sensibilities uniquely able
to forge novel senses of being-in-the-world that transcend

any given or coherent set of values while still emphasiz-
ing the value of objectifying transformation itself. Terence
Turner (2009:22–24), in his masterful critique of late struc-
turalist anthropology, argues that control over transfor-
mation, or “a reflexive process of meta-objectification,” is
central to the constitution of human–nonhuman divides
and, thus, social reproduction among many Amazonian
peoples (cf. Vilaça 2009). Ayoreo-speaking people deploy
apocalyptic imagery in precisely this way: as a meaning-
ful form of self-objectification and self-transformation in a
situation in which the human–nonhuman divide has also
been realigned with the axes of contact and conversion.
Apocalyptic futurism, then, can be considered a cen-
tral technique for the contemporary reproduction of Ayoreo
humanity. It asserts Ayoreo mastery over the processes by
which they are objectified and transformed, and it evokes
the unique senses of being-in-the-world that emerge within
the severely attenuated spaces of postcontact life, inchoate
sensibilities that are only later authorized by outsiders as
“cultural” or not. It is not primarily a zone of loss or “psy-
chopathology” but of intense labors of translation. Apoca-
lyptic sensibilities derive from the multiple, shuffling tem-
poralities that persist within and give meaning to any par-
ticular formation of the “modern” (cf. Hall 2009; Keane
2007). For Ayoreo-speaking people, apocalypticism is not a
“fully articulated horizon” that “freezes our view of the re-
ality that immediately confronts us” (Crapanzano 2004:2)
or a simple evacuation of the “near future” by the far (cf.
Guyer 2007). Instead, its capacity to alter temporal sensi-
bilities calls attention to the generative force of violence it-
self, to the ways extreme experiences of violence may re-
late to the unstable and rotational nature of social time.
Present contingencies and unspeakable traumas constantly
realign the past and the future and, in doing so, produce
an infinite number of causal possibilities and events (cf.
Bergson 1965; Das 2007). Moreover, apocalypticism bleeds
into sensory perception and bodily states: It does not ex-
ist as a closed narrative plot but as an embodied “sense of
the world,” a relational ontology and a practice of “world-
ing” (Nancy 1997; Stewart 2007; Stoler 2008).7 This means
it is not only a replication of colonial hegemony but also
a “disordered” subjective state that articulates something
important about the “lived experience of persons caught
up in complex, threatening and uncertain conditions of the
world” (Good et al. 2009:11), especially when these are vio-
lently refracted across the distinct political, moral, and epis-
temic domains of “contact” (cf. Biehl 2005; Gordillo 2004).
Here, I suggest how apocalyptic futurism relates to the
present politics of humanity in the Ayoreo context and,
in doing so, draw attention to one local response against
the broad contradictions between life and culture that “be-
coming indigenous” has come to entail (cf. Rose 2007;
Taussig 1992). The intelligibility of Ayoreo apocalypticism
arises within the residual afterlife of dehumanizing violence
Apocalyptic futures  American Ethnologist
and a general consensus that biological survival within
postcontact conditions requires a negation and reconstitu-
tion of the terms of humanity.8 For most Ayoreo-speaking
people, life (pucuecaringuei) in the present is now opposed
to prior definitions of the human as well as to the prac-
tices that politically count as traditional culture. This means
that apocalyptic sensibilities, which posit a similar recon-
stitution of human life in the future, are concerned with
more than abstract reason or the transcendence of death;
rather, they also mark a new threshold between the human
and the nonhuman (cf. Agamben 2002). Such bodily lim-
its are profoundly political, not least because the figure of
the “Indian” has historically mediated the same boundaries
(Pagden 1982). Apocalyptic sensibilities, then, reconcile
and collapse long-standing Ayoreo notions about human–
nonhuman distinctions with colonial discourses of subhu-
man savagery through their temporal inscription. Ayoreo
believers thus assert their capacities for self-objectification
and self-transformation in a present that they consider to
be fundamentally changed.
Whereas Ayoreo believers assume that an apocalyp-
tic threshold delimits the possibility of postcontact life in
moral terms, that threshold is simultaneously recast as
the border of culture—“culture death” or “ethnocide”—by
some outsiders (see Escobar 1988). In such ways, apoca-
lyptic sensibilities rearticulate and subvert a defining para-
dox of contemporary indigeneity in Latin America, where
competing definitions of the truly moral Indian subject
mean that “becoming Indian” always implies a biological
or metaphysical insufficiency. In what follows, I argue that
apocalypticism is one form of embodied knowledge that
emerges from the insoluble contradictions of colonial vio-
lence, transforming social suffering into a source of human
life by making the present an effect of the “not-yet” future.
This begs the question, along which axes do such beliefs be-
come dense with meaning for Ayoreo-speaking people?
Spaces of terror
For Totobiegosode, bulldozers have become the vehicles for
and signs of the end of time. They call them “eapajocacade,”
“attackers of the world.” E was the leader of the group that
made contact in 2004. He told me that bulldozers were his
people’s greatest fear.
We did not know before that people were inside. We
thought that machines moved by themselves, but it
turns out that there is space inside where people sit.
We did not know what was inside of them. We thought
that they had eyes and could see where to go. We
thought that they obeyed the words of the white men
[cojnone]. That is what we thought before because we
did not know. We thought machines were like dogs . . .
We thought the bulldozers were looking for us because
they knew how to find the places that had always been
745
American Ethnologist  Volume 38 Number 4 November 2011
ours. We thought they were following us. Every time we
made a village a bulldozer would come.
The sound of one—impossible to pinpoint in the com-
plex acoustics of the forest—caused Totobiegosode to run
far and fast. Often, people were left behind in these flights.
They thought bulldozers were monstrous beings controlled
by cojnone. The word cojnone (singular, cojnoi) originally
referred to all non-Ayoreo and implied shades of enmity, ig-
norance, and subhuman status. Today, it refers almost ex-
clusively to “whites,” or nonindigenous people. On several
occasions (in 1994, 1998, and 2001), Totobiegosode warriors
attacked bulldozers with spears and arrows. Usually, how-
ever, they fled. E told of a bulldozer arriving in his village
sometime in the early 1990s:
I was working in my garden when the bulldozer arrived
in the village. I began to run to the village. I forgot my
cobia [feather collar for war] near my garden. I went
back and put on my cobia of stork feathers and went
to fight the bulldozer. It was very loud. It seemed like
it was angry with us, that it wanted us to go to another
place so it could have our beautiful gardens. We loved
that village very much. We ran away but organized to
return [and fight] . . . Then Areguede said, it is okay if
the bulldozer pushes us out of here. So we [did not
fight and] returned for the women . . . Before, we walked
from here to there, around the land. We were very afraid
of the bulldozers, and that is why we walked to every
place. We returned to our camp and stayed there. But
the bulldozers came again, and we had to run away
again. We walked at night, from one place to another . . .
We did not know where to go that would be safe from
the bulldozers.
The machines of industrial agriculture haunted the for-
est of the concealed Totobiegosode throughout the 1980s
and 1990s; these people concluded that dogs, chickens, and
cattle as well as bicycles, trucks, and bulldozers were sent by
cojnone to follow their scent and consume their land. Such
machines mock the conceits of the “uncontacted” and “iso-
lation.” Belying the stereotypical primitive aped in earlier
descriptions, Ayoreo-speaking people’s precontact percep-
tions were not determined by a cyclical time of myth but
by their relationship with global political economies. They
recount a life organized around the practical problems of
daily survival.
E told me his people began to imagine new kinds of
specters, such as the cojnoque chaguide, or hungry foreign-
ers, huge blue-eyed beings hungry for the taste of Ayoreo
flesh and responsible for the neatly cut stumps of quebra-
cho colorado trees encountered in the remnants of forest.9
Often, the 17 people in E’s group were forced to camp in
the 10- or 20-meter-wide margins of brush and shade left
around vast empty pastures (see Figure 1). They told me of
their sadness when they returned to find favored places flat-
tened, burned, and bared to the sun. Such places, they said,
746
Figure 1. A typical ranch in the Paraguayan Gran Chaco. Photo by L.
Bessire.
were dead. More than anything else, they remembered run-
ning from the people and machines they thought were try-
ing to kill them. As E put it,
We were afraid of the Guidaigosode [an enemy Ayoreo
group], we were afraid of the cojnone. They had killed
many of our people before. We were afraid that they
would do the same thing again. We were afraid of the
noise of the vehicles, of the bulldozers that moved us
out of our land . . . We didn’t know that any Ayoreo were
left, we didn’t know if the cojnone had killed them all.
Some people became so terrified that the slightest
noise could provoke paralysis. Stories are laughingly told of
instances in which the sound of someone walking nearby
caused all of the women in the group to enter a kind of hys-
teria, crying and running, leaving behind all of their pos-
sessions, stripping off their skirts and running nude to go
faster, only to later discover that the noise had been made
by one of their own hunters returning to camp at the ex-
pected hour.
The fear of bulldozers recalls past fears of warriors
from Ayoreo-speaking enemy groups. The Totobiegosode,
in particular, had been the frequent targets of raids aimed
at their extermination. Genealogies that I compiled sug-
gest that more than 80 percent of Totobiegosode were killed
by enemy Ayoreo groups between 1940 and 1979. All Toto-
biegosode adults over 40 are survivors of more than one at-
tack by raiding parties from the missions, armed with shot-
guns and machetes. Most of the men bear traces of battle on
their bodies. A fleshy knob conceals a bullet lodged against
the skull, crooked spines and bent limbs, indecipherable
scars and puckered craters speak of spears, machetes, bul-
lets, clubs.
One man named Poaji was overcome by bouts of ter-
ror after he was the lone survivor of such an attack. He hid
under a bush and watched silently as his mother, father,

siblings, and other relatives were killed and dismembered.
After months alone, he found a friendly group. Decades
later, the slightest sound would cause him to vanish again
for months or years at a time. E and his group found him
living alone in a hollow tree, and he stayed with them for
two or three months in 2000 or 2001. They remembered him
as one moment taking delight in the children and the next
trembling with fear. When they heard a chainsaw one morn-
ing at daybreak, Poaji disappeared. (As far as anyone knows,
he is still hiding alone in the forest.)
This terror was so pervasive that the uitaque seers
began to have visions of group death, a prophecy with
historical precedents among Ayoreo-speaking peo-
ple. Ethnographers who visited the Guidaigosode and
Garaigosode-Ayoreo groups shortly after first contact in the
1960s noted “a collective delirium of the end of a world by a
group massacre” (Susnik 1963:133) and “a great fear of the
civilized . . . they expected at any moment to be attacked by
some fantastic machine” (Hein 1990:18; see also Lind 1971).
Such fears only intensified among those Totobiegosode
groups who remained in the forest, as the death of their
world was evoked in images of endless night without fires,
children who could not speak, a warrior’s club that could
not be lifted, and crushed and dead lands. “There were
shamans who knew our land would be destroyed,” I was
told by a leader of the Totobiegosode band captured in
1979. “One shaman saw only darkness in the forest, not a
single fire. He knew that the land would disappear. It is like
today, the lands of Uejai and Manenaquide, they are gone,
finished.” His brother added, “Eotedaquide woke up and
told his wife what he had seen when he was sleeping. He
told his wife, ‘Do not believe that we are still Humans. The
day will come when we will all disappear and the world
will disappear too.’ That is what Eotedaquide said to his
wife long ago, that we will all die.” Totobiegosode living in
concealment in the rapidly dwindling forest of northern
Paraguay concluded that there was little hope for survival.
“Before we said to one another, it appears that we will all
be killed,” my adopted father recounted. “We thought that
other Ayoreo or the cojnone would kill us all. That is what
we thought would happen.”
Genocidal violence and ecological devastation rever-
berated in bodies and psyches. These dynamics inverted
the existential conditions of precontact concealment and
transformed the forest into a space of imminent death.
Moreover, this postcolonial terror impinged on the limits of
the human.
The failure of mimetic magic
In the face of such violence and fear, established theories
of causality and agency began to fail. Totobiegosode had
previously shared a general notion of bodily transforma-
tion rooted in ontological relationships with ecological el-
Apocalyptic futures  American Ethnologist
ements. Mythological narratives explaining the creation of
humanity locate the divisions between the natural and the
social in ancient ruptures of form and time, in which Orig-
inal Beings (Jnanibajade and Chequebajedie) transformed
themselves into plants, animals, and Humans Beings, or
Ayoreode (see also Fischermann 2001). They were said to
preserve their original form in other existential and tempo-
ral planes, which initiated daijnane shamans were able to
access. At the moment of his or her transformation, each
Original Being put a restriction on human behavior and
gave Humans a powerful incantation to channel his or her
power. These Original Beings formed an ecology of meta-
physical forces that profoundly influenced the outcome of
any human action. Mimicry of the characteristic “ways of
being” or “forms” of these forces (isocade; quigode) could
allow humans to channel this potentially transformative
and mysterious power. A successful attempt depended on
and indexed an individual’s physical and moral strength.
The necessary conditions for the existence and reproduc-
tion of moral human life emerged from these originary dif-
ferentiations. Becoming human, in this case, meant gain-
ing mastery over processes of transformation. The human–
nonhuman divide was, thus, located in the transformations
of being and relation that marked the end of mythical time
and the beginning of the present epoch, even though a
framework existed to allow relationships to conditionally
span such distinctions.
This theory of social time and mimetic agency was
central to shamanic healing techniques that presumed the
perlocutionary power of ritual speech and onomatopoeias,
in particular, to move across boundaries of time, space,
and being. A similar notion underlay a variety of practices
aimed at summoning the power of mythical clan ances-
tors, or edopasade, such as the performance of wordless
perane rhythms, the chugu’iji display of masculine rage,
the selection of designs to be painted on magically potent
tunucujnane sticks, and even the naming of newborn chil-
dren (see Bessire 2010a, 2011). This theory may have been
more than a language ideology. Bernd Fischermann, writing
in the ethnographic present, offers a vivid reconstruction of
the ways that group performances to attract rain depended
on such mimicry:
They then stage a spectacle that contains all the ele-
ments and behaviors of people caught in a strong rain
or storm. The inhabitants of the village act as if copious
amounts of rain had been thrown on them, and as if
lightning had frightened them. Out of large containers
made beforehand, water is spilled on the singers and
these immediately begin to greet the rain and reject at
the same time lightning. They also spill water, lancing
it skyward and splashing it over a group of men gath-
ered around a large fire. The water almost extinguishes
the flames. They chant for rain and yell at the others.
“It is turning cooler, come warm yourselves by the fire.”
747
American Ethnologist  Volume 38 Number 4 November 2011
They throw more wood on the fire as if it is in danger
of being extinguished by the rain, and they warm their
hands on the fire. Parents urge their children to call the
rain away because they are tired of so much water. Chil-
dren ask their parents and other adults to come into the
communal house so they do not get wet. Others shout,
“Look at how the rain is running over the earth!” The
whole camp is in agitated movement. [2001:199]
Totobiegosode groups roaming the dwindling Chaco
forests in the 1980s and 1990s turned to such theories to
seek alternatives to group death. But the object of mimetic
magic shifted from spiritually animated natural elements to
the superior power of the cojnone invading erami, the for-
est world. One former shaman told me that, after he had a
vision in the early 1980s, he put his entire group to work
digging a shallow ditch about a mile in length along one
side of a familiar path. If anyone stepped into the ditch, he
said, he or she would die. He told his people that if they
dug the ditch, then they would never die, that death would
stay in the ditch. “We dug that ditch,” I was told 20 years
later. “But he was a liar.” Others attempted to reproduce the
specific material forms they believed gave the cojnone spir-
itual power. One shaman, for instance, tried to make metal.
He put the men of the group to work digging a deep pit, in
which they mixed soil of five different colors and water. “It
did not work,” he told me. “But almost.”
A group captured by armed missionaries and
Guidaigosode-Ayoreo in the notorious and well-described
Wild Man hunt of 1986 had also tried to appropriate the
power of the cojnone by such mimicry of form in an effort
to evade capture. A flyover of the group’s village by New
Tribes Mission pilot Dean Lattin alerted the Totobiegosode
to an impending attack. One of the many preparations that
Bajo, the group’s shaman, ordered was the construction of
a short segment of wire fence of the type used by ranchers
in the vicinity (see also Stahl and Stahl 1988). The fence,
about fifteen meters long, was ruler straight and complete
with posts and several strands of wire. I was told that it was
built in the hope of discouraging cojnone from arriving at
that place, that the metal would either protect the village or
cause the cojnone to mistake it for an isolated ranch. It did
not work, and Bajo starved herself to death shortly after her
group was brought back to the mission in servitude.10
Members of the group contacted in 2004 also re-
counted how they tried to access the power of the co-
jnone through mimicry. They spent hours hidden under
thick brush, observing the inhabitants of isolated ranches.
They hypothesized that these outsiders must have access
to an unseen magical substance, which was explained to
me as taking the form of a tubular object about twelve
inches in length that generated light. This sticklike thing,
Totobiegosode reasoned, was impregnated with a form of
puhopie, or supernatural power, distinct from the one pos-
sessed by their own shamans. It provided the foreigners
748
with sustenance, for they never seemed to eat, and gave
their machines the force to move with great speed. “We
thought they could rub it on their bodies,” I was told. “And
they would fly around the world.” Totobiegosode entered
several abandoned houses, looking for this source of super-
human strength. When they did not find it, one member of
the group attempted to fabricate such a magical stick out of
hardwood and incantations. “He rubbed it on us, but it did
nothing.”
These stories are told with a gentle bitterness, when
they are told at all. Mimetic magic ultimately failed to sum-
mon a source of power great enough to provide an alter-
native to group death. According to Totobiegosode theo-
ries about human agency, this failure of transformation re-
flected a pervasive weakness relative to cojnone, a loss of
control over the means to summon moral and physical
power from the set of forces that hovered near Human Be-
ings.11 This implied that the boundaries of humanity were
becoming increasingly porous, leaving people at risk of af-
fliction, a sense that only intensified in the aftermath of
contact.
Contact afflictions
We suffered a lot in the forest and that is why we de-
cided to live with the whites. We thought that the food
of the cojnone was given for free. But now we know
that it costs a lot. We were hungry before. But it turns
out that they sell their food. Everything is very expen-
sive. Even beans are expensive. We thought that things
were free before. We thought that the cojnone always
gave away everything. We thought they would bring us
melons, beans. We thought that life among the cojnone
was very easy. We thought it was easy to learn their lan-
guage. We didn’t know about money.
Within four months of contact, the men of the so-called
new people had begun working as wage laborers alongside
bulldozers, fencing off pastures for a daily wage of $3–5.
With their meager earnings, they buy noodles, cookies, and
Coca-Cola. On such a diet, their bodies are often weak and
sick. People die from infections that would be minor else-
where. Teenagers are being diagnosed with rare forms of
cancer and, most recently, HIV. In a cruel irony, the shift to
sedentary villages means Totobiegosode are now exposed
to the spores of lung-damaging fungi that are commonly
buried in undisturbed Chaco soils. The ubiquitous golden
dust itself has become a potentially mortal contagion.
Ayoreo-speaking people do not usually distinguish
between physical health, moral well-being, and social
agency.12 Daily experiences of disease and social marginal-
ity, then, are seen to indicate a moral weakness intrin-
sic to Ayoreo and neighboring indigenous peoples (Bessire
2010a). Many people now believe that this weakness is
rooted in a past that Ayoreo must transcend to access

the fundamentally distinct sources of power in the place
they call “cojnone-gari,” or “that-which-belongs-to-non-
Ayoreo.” They consider it the space of modernity itself, and
so it has become. In this space, the past poses a constant
threat to social well-being, a potential source of danger and
contagion that must be actively repressed. Even remem-
bering the precontact past fondly is said to be capable of
causing infection, retribution from God for allowing one-
self to have a “bitter memory” (ayipie deroco). When one el-
der woman heard that I was saddened by the death of my
adopted father, she ridiculed me. “He was bad. It is good
that he died,” she said. “I hope all of us old people die soon,
so that all those bad old things will die too and be forgotten
forever.”
I never knew what responses a question about the past
would elicit, no matter how innocent or general it seemed.
One middle-aged and garrulous woman began to tremble
and sweat when I asked her about her mother’s teachings.
One day, a man who had killed many enemies agreed to
draw me a territorial map. The next day, he began to rock
back and forth and sing at the thought of drawing the map.
“Don’t worry,” the others said. “His mind is rotten. He has
no memory. Too many bad things.” Many people claim that
they cannot remember much of their former lives.
In the “experience of world-annihilating violence,”
Veena Das writes in the context of postpartition India,
the “grammar of the ordinary” (2007:8) fails, and the cri-
teria relating causality, justification, and action may be
abruptly ended or rendered opaque. For contemporary
Totobiegosode-Ayoreo, the aphasia of suffering and terror
has become a routine part of everyday life. Yet this silence is
distinct from the cases described by Das and other theorists
of trauma, in which violence causes the failure of language
and the social (cf. Caruth 1996). Among Totobiegosode,
apocalypticism reclaims the capacity for human transfor-
mation within such extreme experiences. Colonial violence
generates the social conditions under which apocalypti-
cism becomes appealing and intelligible, even as apoca-
lyptic sensibilities offer a way to reclaim life from death or
violent events from the domain of the unspeakable. Toto-
biegosode believers thus solidify the sense that the present
occurs within a radically different moral ecology than the
past did, one that is structured by the future return of Jesus
and the bodily transformation of true believers.
“Brown Gold”
The conversion of the 2004 group is being carried out by
their Totobiegosode relatives contacted in 1986, with whom
they share a village. Although it is provoked in part by vis-
its every three days from a bow-hunting North American
missionary named Bobby, Ayoreo themselves have become
the primary agents of proselytization. The Ayoreo-speaking
preachers charged with converting the “new people” draw
Apocalyptic futures  American Ethnologist
inspiration from the teachings of New Tribes missionaries,
who were given exclusive state mandates to initiate contact
with Ayoreo-speaking bands in Bolivia and later continued
this work in Paraguay (see Johnston 1985).
The New Tribes Mission was founded in August 1942
by three middle-class men in Chicago. Their leader was
a charismatic man named Paul Fleming. “[Fleming] did
not play around,” as one of his contemporaries put it. “He
was obsessed with this one great command of our Lord,
to preach the gospel to every creature” (Johnston 1985:2).
From its inception, the New Tribes focused on “the hardest
tribes.” The northern Ayoreo-speaking groups were known
in the 1940s only as Bárbaros, or Barbarians. They were reg-
ularly taken as slaves and shot on sight along the Chaco
frontier (see also Johnson 1966). These Ayoreo-speaking
people were the figures around which the New Tribes Mis-
sion was formed and were its first targets. “Our first mis-
sionaries made the Ayore tribe their immediate goal be-
cause they felt that other missionaries would never get
to them. The Ayores were infamous for their hostility”
(Johnston 1985:145). The first mission among Ayoreo was
established in 1947.
Seeing Indian souls as “Brown Gold,” “worth far more
to God than any nugget on Earth,” these missionaries were
motivated by their belief that the completion of the “Bride
of Christ” and the Rapture of the Faithful (when “Christ
comes for his Bride”) would not occur until all peoples
had heard the Word of God (Johnston 1985:22–30; see also
Brown Gold 1943). They parsed the native body into a di-
vinely salvageable interior substance and a degraded phys-
ical exterior. They were encouraged to desire native souls.
In fact, in recruiting missionaries in the 1940s, New Tribes
looked for those “seized” by a “consuming . . . passion for
souls” that “overwhelms the self” (Brown Gold 1944:5). New
Tribes missionary writings from the early contact period
with Ayoreo-speaking people also uniformly expressed dis-
gust at fallen and excessive Ayoreo bodies.
What is striking about early missionary self-reporting
is the degree to which Ayoreo-speaking people are seen
as already dying or as the walking dead. “In the natural,
it would be hard to love them, but when we realize that
they are wandering around in darkness and dying without
Christ, his love fills our heart and goes out to them” (Brown
Gold 1948a:10). Ayoreo were described as “more like ani-
mals than men”; that they “could sink so low as to be so
much like the forest” was a result of “man left to himself”
without God’s redeeming grace (Brown Gold 1951:8). Their
humanity could only be realized if they believed themselves
to be insufficient.
Ayoreo-speaking people at first were recalcitrant. “It
has been so hard to get words to give them the Gospel.
Little by little the idea of hell seems to be getting across”
(Brown Gold 1948b:5). But devastating epidemics and West-
ern medicine “opened doors” and unsettled bodily limits.
749
American Ethnologist  Volume 38 Number 4 November 2011
Missionaries often used epidemics to stage demonstrations
of the power of missionary grace over “satanic” witchcraft.
Norman and Mabel Hurst, missionaries at Tobite in the
early 1950s, describe how the failure of shamanic tech-
niques to protect against measles “has given us the oppor-
tunity to witness to them . . . and we have likened their poles
to the graven images that God spoke against in Exodus”
(Brown Gold 1952:9).
Others, like Bill Pencille of the South American In-
dian Mission at Zapoco, staged elaborate preparations of
medicine to demonstrate the same point. “I let them draw
their own conclusions. And the conclusion is that just as
their witch doctors have power over the spirits, so this great
spirit, Dupade [i.e., God], who sent me, has bestowed his
power on me” (Wagner 1967:249). The point of such dis-
plays was clear: Ayoreo bodies and souls were insufficient
and newly vulnerable. Such messages continue to be reit-
erated by Bobby, the missionary who now visits the “new
people” in their village:
As Bobby taught about the Ten Commandments he
held up a mirror, showing the jungle Ayores how he
could look into it and see himself. Then he took mud
and spread it all over his face. The people thought it was
hilarious, but Bobby brought out the seriousness of the
lesson. He told them how, in the mirror, he could see
the dirt all over his face and that God’s Law was like a
mirror. It showed people how they are dirty (sinful) be-
fore God. [New Tribes Mission 2005]
Ayoreo-speaking people converted en masse to Chris-
tianity in 1975 (see Hein 1990). Outside observers have
noted the rapid adoption of evangelical Christianity by
Ayoreo-speaking people with surprise. “What is suggested
by the data is that the Ayoreo conceive of their past life
in the woods as extremely hard and very contrary to the
will of God,” wrote a Mennonite visitor to an Ayoreo mis-
sion in 1977. “They have now, as a group, set their sights
on moving toward the civilized way” (New Tribes Mission
1977:5). David Maybury-Lewis reported an “extremely rare”
100 percent conversion rate among Guidaigosode-Ayoreo
at the New Tribes mission of El Faro Moro, Paraguay, in
1978 (Maybury-Lewis and Howe 1980:70), and even Sale-
sian missionaries were astonished that, by the mid-1970s,
“the majority of Ayoreo are fervent Christians” (Perasso
1987:40). This impression of fervor is cemented by Ayoreos’
marked tendency toward public professions of faith. Com-
mon expressions such as “God hated our ways before” or
“we were worthless and sinful” emphasize that Jesus is the
ultimate arbiter of power within the new metaphysical ecol-
ogy of cojnone-gari, a shared recognition that has made
Christianity now synonymous with both modernity and an
Ayoreo morality. Believers have developed a unique version
of Christian faith that both cites and exceeds missionary vi-
sions of Ayoreo humanity.
750
Touching and time
We are very afraid of the Word of God, because the Bible
says that he will come again in the near future, and it is
a sure thing that he will come. That is why we read the
Bible often. It says that he will come again, and we are
very afraid. It says that he will come again and he will
kill all of us who don’t believe in him. He will take only
those who are very faithful with him to his village, like
Norman and those that believe in him a lot, like Carodi
and Cadui. That is what will happen when God comes
to punish the Ayoreo.
Witnessing the violent conversion of the new group,
based largely on ridicule and domination, never failed to
bother me. I could not understand why the “new people”
did not object to it or simply leave the village to avoid it.
Part of my confusion, it seems, was that I perceived con-
version as a cognitive process aimed at dominating reason.
This is not necessarily the primary plane of belief and con-
tact among Totobiegosode, and such divergences are criti-
cal for understanding the appeal of apocalyptic imagery.
Many Ayoreo-speaking people say that touching, -isa,
is a particularly significant and violent act. Rather than only
a tactile exchange, it may also involve gaining possession of
another being’s will power. When hunting, the person who
touches an animal first rather than the person who deliv-
ers the fatal blow is the one who “kills” it. According to the
terms of traditional warfare, a warrior could take a member
of the enemy group captive by touching that person. The
touched ones, isagode, were incorporated into the family
structure of their touchers, isasorone, as servants, subordi-
nates, or slaves. Many isagode intentionally starved them-
selves to death, but I am not aware of any cases in which an
individual, once touched, attempted to escape.
The first Direquednejnaigosode-Ayoreo groups con-
tacted in Bolivia in the late 1940s interpreted the relation-
ships established in contact with missionaries as a form of
touching, in which contacted groups became the isagode
and the missionaries unwittingly became the isasorone.
This idea was extended by converted Guidaigosode-Ayoreo
(directed by missionaries who, by that time, had learned
the potency of the concept) to apply to the Totobiegosode
groups they contacted in 1979 and 1986 and brought back
to the mission of Campo Loro, where the families of the
newly contacted were divided up among the touchers. In
2004, the Totobiegosode who were touched in the human
hunt of 1986 added another layer to this term by applying
it to close relatives. Thus, members of E’s group became the
isagode possessions of their own relatives.
Touching became a key idiom by which Ayoreo-
speaking people made conversion to Christianity intel-
ligible. Today, many Ayoreo people use the same term,
isagode, to refer to individuals hired as wage laborers. Each
mode of touching—being captured by an enemy, contacted

by missionaries, hired by a boss, and converted to Chris-
tianity (touched by God)—causes a process of fundamen-
tal change, of chinoningase, the internal transformation im-
plied by becoming subordinate to another willful being. In
the case of conversion, I was told, the phrase meant that
“God grabs everything that is inside and it then belongs to
Him.” The concept can refer to the complete destruction or
alteration of an object (i.e., yinoningase yasore, I turned my
spear into a tent pole), the effects of a terminal illness (i.e.,
uajedie chinoningase yu, my cough has destroyed me), or
the process of adoption into a clan (Pukoi’date chinoningase
yu enga chiquenoi uyu, Pukoi’date transformed me into her
clan and now I am chiquenoi). God is also said to checae
the convert, a term that likens the transference of God’s will
power into the body of the new believer to pouring a liquid
from one container into another.
When God chinoningase, or converts, someone, he is
thought to create a new kind of person fit for life in cojnone-
gari. Conversion is associated with a radical transforma-
tion in human substance. Ayoreo-speaking people say that
faith in God chieta bacajeode, literally fills up your insides,
will, thoughts. This process of filling up means that God
erases the convert’s ayipie, a kind of soul-matter that en-
compasses the corporeal seat of memory (located in the
head), emotion, and will power (located in various abdomi-
nal organs). Through chinoningase and accepting the Word
of God, the insides and ayipie of the convert are reconsti-
tuted anew along the sentimental and temporal axes that
are pleasurable to Jesui. It is this erasure, -iro, of the con-
vert’s memory and its replacement by God’s spirit that sup-
posedly restrain what is possible to express about life before
conversion. This is why, Totobiegosode might say, so many
of them cannot remember too much of what happened be-
fore contact. “Your ayipie must be erased before you can be
saved by God.”
However harsh this process of becoming “new peo-
ple” may be, it is considered essential for human survival
in cojnone-gari. This position presumes that the contem-
porary terms of life itself are so radically altered that the
only hope for survival resides in the death of older hu-
man forms and the internal transformation of bodies (in
terms resonant with the ancient transformations of mythic
beings). Perhaps that is why Ayoreo people commonly re-
fer to those born after contact as disiejode, or orphans. Yet
Ayoreo believers do not simply “internalize” a colonial im-
age of themselves as “quasi-men ignorant of the truly true”
(Escobar 1988:33). Rather, they imagine their present hu-
manity to be a form of “immanence” (Deleuze 2005) that
is a precondition for their transformation into fully human
beings of another kind. Such Ayoreo beliefs, then, are a tes-
tament to the generative force of violence. They exceed both
missionary frameworks (with their particular notions of na-
tive souls and bodily interiority) and older Ayoreo ontolo-
gies, catalyzed by a potent touch.
Apocalyptic futures  American Ethnologist
Segregated memory
You all can use the spears that God gives us in the Bible
to defend against Satan if he arrives to your village. We
are in a war again, but not against other Ayoreo. Now we
are fighting against Satan. Satan wants to attack those
of us who believe in Jesus. Don’t forget that we are both-
ering Satan, but remember that God is stronger than
him. The person who remembers this will be taken with
God when he returns to end this world.
Apocalyptic futurism evacuates the time and terms
of the past. Today, Totobiegosode regularly use the word
nanique (literally, long ago time), to refer to all events that
occurred precontact. This was the case in 2004, when E’s
group was taught by relatives to use the word nanique to
refer to events that had happened only six months earlier,
when the group was still in the forest. The relatives used
words for the near past, such as dirica (literally, yesterday)
or irica (a while ago) to refer to events that happened up
to 20 years prior, after they had been contacted. The same
applies to casicaite and casodica, words that mean “some-
thing dead or absent a long time,” which are now used to
describe precontact social forms, even if contact was recent.
This shift also corresponds to the flattening out of precon-
tact time by a general discontinuance of those words—such
as naninguejna—capable of marking stages of the past.
Precisely such a rupture is hypothesized in the ide-
alized indigenous subject position: Whereas NGO officials
and anthropologists often desire to preserve or resuscitate
the homogenous time of tradition, many missionaries strive
to expunge it from the present. Yet Ayoreo-speaking people
mark this disjuncture in distinctive ways. One way they do
so is by applying words that once referred to ruptures be-
tween the time of myth and the time of sociality to the rup-
tures of the pre- and postcontact periods. For instance, the
term Jnanibajade (Original Men) can now refer to mythi-
cal beings; Old Testament Biblical characters such as Noah,
Jonas, or Adam; and Ayoreo-speaking people who refuse
direct contact. Taningane, a word literally meaning the
beginnings, can refer to mythical time, biblical time, and
precontact life. The overall effect is to emphasize that
human–nonhuman divides apply as much to processes of
contact as they did to the original differentiation of nature
and culture.
The religious conversion of human substance realigns
the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, the
moral and the immoral, or the healthy and the sick along
the temporal divide of contact. Such concepts and the
reworking of memory they imply are publicly performed in
village culto, or church services, in which a central compo-
nent is renarrating past events as evidence of God’s inter-
ventions for or against the narrator’s actions. A man tells
about a rock that mysteriously fell but narrowly missed
751
American Ethnologist  Volume 38 Number 4 November 2011
Figure 2. An abandoned house once inhabited by E and his group. Photo
by L. Bessire.
crushing his head as a warning from Jesus to repent.
Another talks of recovering from an intense fever as ev-
idence of God’s love for him or of an illness that com-
pelled him to accept Jesus as divinely inspired. Someone
may talk of reaching shoulder deep into a turtle den and en-
countering a rattlesnake that moved along his arm but did
not strike or of finding a job when his family was on the
brink of starvation. These miracle narratives reconstitute
and mystify the links between cause and effect in the time of
memory.
Such distinctions between past and future human
kinds are also spatially inscribed. Totobiegosode, for exam-
ple, at times still associate nanique and its animating forces
with certain contemporary places in the wilderness. This
use is consistent with a general schema in which Ayoreo
words for place and direction usually refer to experienced
time as well. Thus, jogadi can refer to a specific location as
well as a specific time; the future is referred to with words
that also mean before, in front of, above, and on the other
side; and the past is expressed with words that mean be-
hind, after, and what has been passed. Both the future and
the past may be near, far, a medium “distance,” between,
or otherwise located spatially vis-à-vis other moments. Up
and down, however, refer to parallel universes that repre-
sent distinct modes of nonlinear social time. This spatial-
ization of social time may at times threaten the strict segre-
gation of memory that Ayoreo say is a necessary condition
for apocalyptic redemption.
The Christian God, Dupade,13 is said to absolutely con-
trol the terms of human life in cojnone-gari. But the ex-
tent of his power is less clear for Ayoreo-speaking peo-
ple who encounter the material remnants of the past or
find themselves back in the places they used to inhabit.
Most of these zones and the occasional potsherd we en-
countered while hunting were treated with no particular
reverence. This was not the case, however, when we hap-
752
pened on one of their more permanent village sites, ore idai,
with its dome-shaped communal house, ore iguijnai. Be-
cause such houses were often abruptly abandoned and are
very durable, they could seem jarringly contemporary (see
Figure 2). Firewood remained neatly stacked and ready for
use, reeds for arrow shafts were tucked into the roof, tins
and blankets and bones were strewn about, favored paths
were still clearly visible. The sight could trigger deep emo-
tions. In one such place that has since been bulldozed, E
walked alone through overgrown gardens. “This was my
father’s garden. We were happy here.”
The rotation of apocalyptic horizons
Everyone alive now will surely see the end of this world.
This will happen when this generation is still alive, it
won’t happen to another generation. It will happen
in this generation. No one will be able to distinguish
Heaven and Earth when God comes, only the Word of
God. The things that we see here, like food and mo-
torcycles and jobs and money, seem to be important
things. But they will all disappear when God comes. We
will be in the village of God that will never die. No one
knows what time he will arrive, this afternoon, tomor-
row or the next day. At midnight or noon or six in the
morning. I don’t think it will be earlier than six . . . We
must be prepared because he can arrive any day.
Impending bodily transformation and the destruction
of the world are not much of a logical stretch for people who
believe they have already experienced such events. Many
Ayoreo say they are now waiting for Jesus. As in Kenelm Bur-
ridge’s (1960) description of collective myth dreams among
cargo believers in New Guinea, Ayoreo believers animate
this “structure of waiting” with half-articulated expecta-
tions, conflicts, and rumors. Stories of speaking dogs, sa-
tanic animals, and cannibalistic white men are common.
Yet these visions and hopes are also frequently frus-
trated by the precarious conditions of postcontact life.
Today, most Ayoreo-speaking people move between 38
communities, missions, urban squatter settlements, and
temporary labor camps arranged around the periphery of
their ancestral territories. The people who live in these sites
are among the boldest, poorest, and most marginal of any
native peoples in a region where Indians in general are ex-
pected to step off the sidewalk if a white man walks by and
are not served in certain restaurants. Ayoreo-speaking peo-
ple survive by wage labor for a variety of patrones when-
ever possible. They are also actively sought out to work
in shadow or illicit economies believed to fit their savage
nature, such as prostitution, begging, supplying bait crabs
to sport fishermen in Brazil, clearing pastures by hand,
hunting big cats, and catching spiders and reptiles for use in
Chinese and Korean traditional medicine or parrots for the
international pet trade. Once contacted, these former

“primitives” are disenfranchised as subhuman. They are
commonly targeted for violence and displaced by armed
soldiers from urban spaces on both sides of the border as
matter out of place, a threat to public hygiene and civil or-
der. They are too cultural or too modern, too primitive or
not primitive enough. In the absence of culture, they are
only valued for their brute labor power or their fungible
bodily substances.
Once every three or four months during my fieldwork,
a rumor swept through the communities that a foreign,
white-skinned man with mysterious powers had arrived in
the Mennonite colonies. Usually, the man had departed,
walking away down the road with a band of Indian dis-
ciples, just before the Ayoreo source of the rumor found
out about him. Poverty-stricken, monolingual Ayoreo fam-
ilies save money for months to travel to distant churches
in search of miracles. These miracle searches usually bear
no fruit, as in the case of my friend Juan, who took his wife
to find a place in Asunción where, they had heard, a man
could expel Satan and make people vomit out their diseases
with his touch. The sickness, Juan told me, would come out
in a hard multicolored ball that the man could destroy. “He
talks to God, saying, ‘Come here God, cure this person.’ And
then the person is cured. Surely there are miracles happen-
ing there.” I found Juan and his wife in Asunción camped
in an empty lot behind a Catholic church. Juan produced
an indecipherable map, consisting of a single line and two
words drawn onto a tattered napkin, and asked me to guide
him to the miracle place. A week later, the couple returned
to the Chaco.
Like miracles, clear causes and clean ends are elusive
for Ayoreo people, many of whom are starving or chroni-
cally ill. In cojnone-gari, Ayoreo are urged by the terms of
lumpen capitalist exchange to embody scenarios freighted
with senses of an ending. They are often compelled to be co-
participants in the destruction of the natural environment
that was previously the source of the hidden sacred.
The old people run up to a recently arrived visitor in the
New Tribes mission village of Campo Loro, 10 or 20 pushing
to the front of a larger crowd, all soft eyes and ravaged gums
and wild hair, pulling up tattered rags and pressing the vis-
itor’s hands to their ribs so that he or she would know that
they were not lying when they said they were starving and
asked for food. When the price of Paraguayan beef and un-
cleared land surged in the late 1990s, when the bulldozers
worked 24 hours a day, someone decided to donate food to
“the poor starving Indians,” subsidized in part by human-
itarian aid from a European government. Once a week for
several years, a truck carrying unusable bovine entrails from
the Mennonite slaughterhouse would drive through the set-
tlement, make a slow U-turn, and dump the wet offal on
the dusty ground. The news was shouted among the house-
holds and the race was on. Old ladies and children tram-
pled and pushed down other old ladies and children, fight-
Apocalyptic futures  American Ethnologist
ing over the small shreds of foul viscera, covered in bloody
mud.
These efforts have been replaced by a scheme to have
Ayoreo make charcoal, also sponsored in part by interna-
tional development aid. This scheme requires the inhabi-
tants of most Ayoreo communities—people who once be-
lieved that every plant, insect, and animal in the universe
had been a member of their tribe—to clear-cut the trees
and woody vegetation remaining on the small plots of land
they still control and burn them in underground pit ovens.
They are paid approximately six cents per kilogram of char-
coal produced. The grain and texture of the wood is visible
in the fossilized black lumps, which are sold to Mennonite
middlemen and eventually fuel backyard barbecues in Ger-
many. One of the highest-selling brands of this charcoal fea-
tures a half-naked cartoon Indian as its logo. The workers
emerge like half-remembered dreams, pallid skin visible in
sweat-lines through black soot. The fragile alkaline earth is
left bared to the sun.
Scenarios that may provoke frustration, confusion, and
despair (not to mention sympathy, nostalgia, or shame)
make a sort of hopeful sense in apocalypticism’s inverted
logics. The more intense the suffering, the nearer the new
beginning. And yet the conditions of postcontact life also
prevent the closure of such horizons and threaten the
integrity of the new kinds of humans Ayoreo believers
ideally imagine themselves to be. Memories of flesh occa-
sionally erupt into the present. Totobiegosode say that a
common affliction known as umusori can now be caused
by frightening encounters with white men and their tech-
nology, such as the sudden appearance of a cojnoi in the
forest or a jet airplane passing overhead at dusk. The fright
can cause a person’s ayipie—newly reconstituted by Jesus—
to leave his or her body. The mindless body is compelled to
strip off clothing, return to the forest and wander aimlessly,
eating uncooked things. Some of those afflicted by umu-
sori try to destroy all traces of cojnone around them, burn-
ing their clothes, breaking their dishes, and throwing away
their shotguns. Ayoreo people say a person afflicted by such
sickness acts “like an animal,” particularly the mythologi-
cally powerful iguana, but the symptoms also bear a strik-
ing resemblance to past forms of life now considered deeply
profane.
The space of the present is marked by existential con-
tradictions that unsettle any single notion of what consti-
tutes an ideal Ayoreo or indigenous person. Some younger
Ayoreo people do not even aspire to become true believ-
ers. As one young man put it, “The people of my genera-
tion are between the old things and the Word of God. We
don’t do what God’s Word tells us to do, but we don’t know
anything about the old things and no one will teach us. We
respect what the older people or the missionaries tell us but
then we forget it.” Rather than threatening apocalyptic hori-
zons, this dangerous lack can be interpreted as a necessary
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catalyst for individuals to cycle out and back into narratives
of impending crisis and loss, of life beyond humanity. And
this ability to reborder the human and the inhuman as a
viable space of life—however constricted and fraught with
despair—is what makes apocalyptic futurism an appealing
state of being and form of intelligibility for many Ayoreo-
speaking people.
Life within the labor of the negative
Above, I have outlined in broad strokes the social topog-
raphy of apocalyptic futurism among recently contacted
Ayoreo-speaking people. In particular, I have argued that
ethnographically tracking apocalypticism illuminates a set
of emergent subjectivities and senses of life that escape
the temporal confines of either “tradition” or “Christianity.”
Ayoreo believers and doubters turn the harsh terms of in-
digenous modernity inside out, even as new spaces are
opened for governance through this constant negation and
reconstitution of the modern negatives of “savagery” and its
double, “culture” (see also Gordillo 2004:255–256). Apoca-
lypticism asserts the capacity of Ayoreo-speaking people to
control the terms of self-transformation in situations of ex-
treme violence.
Accordingly, missionary attitudes and disciplinary
practices alone are not sufficient to explain the adoption
of apocalyptic futurism among Ayoreo-speaking peoples.
Throughout, I have suggested that examining Ayoreo apoc-
alypticism in terms of “a regime of living” instead of “native
culture” or a “colonized form of historical consciousness”
may help clarify its roles as an interpretive reservoir, “sit-
uated form of moral reasoning,” and criterion for the ob-
jectification and transformation of humanity (Collier and
Lakoff 2005). Doing so pushes an ethnographic analysis
of apocalyptic temporalities beyond questions of localized
changes of cultural values or traditional cosmology and into
questions of what Didier Fassin (2009:49–52) calls “biole-
gitimacy,” or the political authorization and ranking of the
terms of human life. For Ayoreo-speaking people, “contact”
can be defined as an incomplete movement through dis-
tinct and unevenly spread domains of biolegitimacy, from
the dehumanizing violence of the “precontact” past to con-
version to evangelical Christianity supervised by mission-
aries and, most recently, to the zones of life demarcated
by transnational formations of “culture” as spaces of gover-
nance and intervention. Apocalypticism is about indigene-
ity insofar as “becoming indigenous” is considered to imply
yet another form of humanity.
Through this process, many Ayoreo-speaking people
now conclude that modernity and indigeneity are both
regimes of life that are only inhabitable for a radically
transformed human. Thus, the common wordplay among
Ayoreo people, that “we are no longer Ayoreo [Human Be-
ings], we have become Ayore-Cojnoque [a phrase that im-
754
plies both ‘white Ayoreo’ and ‘human–nonhuman’].” Apoc-
alypticism organizes such processes of self-transformation.
In such ways, it is a form of intelligibility that allows Ayoreo-
speaking people to reconcile colonial discourses of savagery
with a long-standing sense of human–nonhuman divides,
now aligned around the temporal axes of contact and con-
version.
Yet, through an apocalyptic inversion of the colonial
labor of the negative, Ayoreo-speaking people recast such
negation of their past humanity as the space of modern
life. In doing so, they reclaim a fundamental capacity of
metaobjectification, the agency to speak and act beyond
these limits of the human, even as they become negative
outsides to the zone of “traditional culture” and, thus, po-
litical subjects of a certain kind. Through this process, they
bear witness to the deep contradictions implied by contem-
porary global regimes of life, specifically for those already
grouped into the transnational category of indigeneity.
Totobiegosode believers may not be comforting figures of
a resistant cultural alter, but they emphasize the resilience
and richness of life as such.
Rain
The bulldozers must stop when it rains or risk becoming en-
tombed in the mud for weeks. In a village at the edge of the
forest, other sounds emerge when the motors are silenced.
Brazilian disco music thumps from a speaker held together
with fiber twine. Wind rolls like a wave along the treetops,
raindrops patter against leaves and tin. A child giggles.
“I am the beautiful buds, returning in the forest,” the
old man sings. “I am the first fat rain. I am the scent of the
flowers carried on the wind.
“I sound like mei mei mei mei! Ti ti ti ti ti. Joooo! Joooo!
Se se se . . .”
Notes
Acknowledgments. Special thanks to Tom Abercrombie, Anya
Bernstein, David Bond, Paola Canova, Emily Martin, Fred My-
ers, Todd Nicewonger, Rafael Sanchez, Bambi Schieffelin, Michael
Taussig, and two anonymous reviewers for their generous com-
ments on earlier drafts of this article. I gratefully acknowledge that
it is based on research supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation
and an ACLS/Mellon Early Career Fellowship.
1. Apocalypticism is built around millennial precepts that
“promise imminent collective salvation for the faithful in a paradise
that will rise following an apocalyptic destruction ordained by the
gods” (Cohn 1970:13), in this case, that signaled by the second com-
ing of the Messiah, as described in the Revelations of Daniel and
John. It is a futurist schema, one that locates meaning in the present
from the vantage of an imagined future. In this article, I implicitly
argue against the general applicability of the term.
2. The people commonly known as the “Ayoreo Indians” are an
emergent, cross-border ethnic group of approximately six thou-
sand people. They speak several mutually intelligible dialects
of a language closely related to that of the Chamacoco, their

neighbors to the east; together, these two languages constitute
their own linguistic family. Historically, these seminomadic people
self-identified as part of extended matrilocal family units (jogasui),
grouped into local bands (urasade) that were organized into sev-
eral fluid, politically autonomous, and often mutually hostile con-
federations (gage) cross cut by ties of language and membership in
seven patrilineal exogamous clans. Each confederation controlled
specific territories, with joint-use areas accessible to all other hu-
man beings. These gage groups lived on rainy-season squash, bean,
and corn horticulture and dry-season foraging, and their yearly cal-
endar was punctuated by a ritual of renewal and visits to the large
saltpans in the center of their ancestral territory (see Bórmida and
Califano 1978; Fischermann 2001). Here, I take for granted that the
labels “Ayoreo” and “indigenous” emerge from specific political ge-
nealogies and mark projects of becoming. Both refer to the intense
labors of translation that define contact situations rather than any
timeless internal essence or stable ethnicity.
3. The Totobiegosode were imagined to be the ultimate primitive
Other on the Chaco frontier because of their reputation for feroc-
ity in warfare and because they were the last native people in the
Chaco to establish peaceful “contacts” with the outside world. Pres-
sured by epidemics, colonial encroachment, and brutal internecine
violence, northern Ayoreo-speaking groups had made first contact
with North American evangelical missionaries in 1947. Armed with
shotguns, the northern groups soon decimated the southern Ay-
oreo groups, which also sought refuge in missions. A series of con-
tacts with missionaries of six Christian denominations followed in
the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Today, these Ayoreo and their descen-
dants live in 38 villages strung along the periphery of their ancestral
territories, divided by colonial histories and the Bolivia–Paraguay
border. These settlements include evangelical and Catholic mis-
sions, communities founded by secular NGOs, several urban squat-
ter villages, and temporary camps near highways, railroads, and
sites of wage labor, on which Ayoreo people uniformly depend
for survival. Recent events—including the adoption of evangeli-
cal Christianity and a marked presence of Ayoreo as squatters, sex
workers, and beggars in urban zones—have led to the stereotyp-
ing of some Ayoreo populations as culturally degraded or “decul-
turated” by colonial contact (see Canova 2007).
4. By “apocalyptic futurism,” I refer to the ways in which apoc-
alyptic schema organize meaning in the present from the van-
tage of an imagined future. Jacques Derrida (1992) reminds schol-
ars that writing about apocalypticism is never innocent. Katy
Stewart and Susan Harding describe how indigenous apocalyp-
ticisms in Melanesia have been coproduced by ethnographic
economies, becoming “artifact[s] of entwined practices of strate-
gic mistranslation on the part of peoples undergoing some man-
ner of colonialism and of strategic stigmatization on the part of the
colonizing peoples” (1999:287). Apocalypticism—as belief and de-
scriptive economy—has often been preemptively attributed to in-
digenous peoples thought to be inevitably doomed or vanishing, a
“model for” Western eschatology and power posing as a “model of”
native futures. Indeed, cultural and literary critics have pointed to
the many ways apocalypticism is a central trope within a vast ar-
ray of post-Enlightenment political ideologies (i.e., Bull 1995; Del-
lamora 1995). For believers like the fundamentalist North Ameri-
can New Tribes missionaries—the self-styled “Soldiers of Christ”—
such colonial sleights of hand are central to the faith mission. Inter-
preting biblical passages to mean that the salvation of the faithful
and the end of the world will not occur until all nations have heard
the Word of God, New Tribes missionaries use the specter of Jesus’s
punishment of nonbelievers to hasten tribal peoples’ acceptance
of a militant Christianity. This technique means that accepting the
apocalyptic destruction of the present world is both a legitimating
Apocalyptic futures  American Ethnologist
justification and an essential precondition for the power of such
faith.
5. This idea of “schema” was drawn from Jean Piaget and Lev Vy-
gotsky and moved into anthropology by Terence Turner (1973) and
into sociology by Pierre Bourdieu (1990). Nancy D. Munn uses the
idea to refer to a “guiding, generative formula that underlies and
organizes significance in different overt symbolic formulations or
processes, and that is available as an implicit constructive form for
the handling of experience” (1986:121).
6. Not surprisingly, representations of indigenous visions of
apocalypse often gain traction in Western pop culture, in which
they are described as the “despised history of the sub-altern classes,
the defeated peoples, the extinct cultures” (Davis 2002:31). Apoca-
lyptic icons like the Maya and Hopi calendars or Wovoka’s vision
are put into service by contemporary doomsdayers seeking “a neo-
catastrophist epistemology for reinterpreting western history from
the standpoint of certain terminal features of the approaching mil-
lennial landscape” (Davis 2002:31).
7. Such issues are raised in the renewed ethnographic interest
in lived futures, the hopeful and other “not-yet” dimensions of so-
cial life (see, especially, Crapanzano 2004; Gell 1992; Guyer 2007;
Miyazaki 2006), as presaged in work by Ernst Bloch (1986), Frank
Kermode (1967), Eugene Minkowski (1970), and many others. Jane
I. Guyer, in particular, finds striking parallels in the ways that near
futures are evacuated by monetarism and evangelical Christian-
ity and suggests that “looking at precisely articulated ideologies
of time future can make the lived future a more tractable ethno-
graphic project than it has been in an era when memory, and ‘the
past in the present,’ was the main focus of temporal thinking in an-
thropology” (2007:411).
8. In such ways, this analysis draws inspiration from Gastón
Gordillo’s 2004 treatment of negativity as a useful framework for the
ethnographic analysis of internal colonialism in the Gran Chaco.
Like Gordillo, I also aim to suggest that “it is through contradic-
tions, which are not but negative relations of opposition, that sub-
jectivities and memories gain their cultural and historical force,
and for that reason, their agency” (2004:256).
9. This tannin-rich tree species was a valuable global commodity
and highly sought from the mid 19th century until the emergence
of synthetic tannins in the 1920s. Old stumps bear witness to the
teams of woodcutters who once traveled through the dense Chaco
forest.
10. See Escobar 1988, Hein 1990, and Perasso 1987 for detailed
accounts of this tragic event and the public outcry it caused against
the activities of the New Tribes Mission in Paraguay. After the
missionary plane discovered the village, a team of armed Ayoreo
and missionaries tracked down the Totobiegosode camp. In the
ensuing encounter, the Christian Ayoreo began “touching” the
Totobiegosode men, that is, taking them prisoner. In response,
the Totobiegosode started an attack that left five Christian Ayoreo
dead and four badly wounded. Demoralized and afraid, the Toto-
biegosode capitulated soon after and were taken back to the mis-
sion of Campo Loro, where they were treated as slavelike subordi-
nates. Ten years later, many of the survivors left to start their own
community on recently titled land.
11. Elsewhere (Bessire 2010b), I have described how such ex-
periences mean that Ayoreo people now occupy the social place
once reserved for shamed individuals, and I have examined how
the moral sentiment of shame is a primary register for Ayoreo in-
terpretations of indigeneity.
12. I do not have space here to address the crucial link between
bodily health, moral well-being, and political agency in the detail
it merits but have attempted to do so elsewhere (Bessire 2010a,
2010b, 2011).
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American Ethnologist  Volume 38 Number 4 November 2011
13. Dupade is an Ayoreoization of the Guarani word Tupa, the
name of the creator deity who resides in the sun. It was introduced
to the Ayoreo language by Jesuit missionaries in the 18th century
and taken up two centuries later by evangelical missionaries as de-
noting the closest approximation to “God” that existed in the Ay-
oreo language.
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