Introduction. Indigenous visual and oral registers of non-humans in South American contexts of transformations
10.13125/americacritica/3858
This small dossier presents a joint ethnographic attempt to address indigenous relationships with external or foreign agents as they are embedded in the images of the devil of colonial Catholic missionaries in the Andes and Amazonia (Dimitri Karadimas) and the sarode of the Ayoreo in a context saturated by modern protestant proselytizers in the Chaco (María Cristina Dasso). These ethnographic approaches are concerned with describing what there is in those worlds, but also with illustrating different forms to approach it. They carry out their descriptions through two contrasted types of fieldwork data: Amerindian iconographic expressions and indigenous narrative forms. And also two contrasted approaches: a regional comparison of Andes and Amazonia, and a focus on the Ayoreo of the Chaco. The final picture of these current anthropological ethnographies depicts some of the contrasted contents and forms that are nowadays being highlighted by ontologically-inflected Amerindian studies.
Keywords: Andes; Amazon; Chaco; Ethnography; Amerindian
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Thematic section: Indigenous visual and oral registers of non-human entities in South America
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2019-10-29
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Juan Javier Rivera Andía
2019/10/29
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Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Alemania
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Introduction. Indigenous visual and oral registers of non-humans in South American contexts of transformations
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Juan Javier Rivera Andía. 2019. “Introduction. Indigenous visual and oral registers of non-
humans in South American contexts of transformations”. América Crítica 3(1): 9-17, ISSN:
2532- 6724, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13125/americacritica/3858.

Abstract
This small dossier presents a joint ethnographic attempt to address indigenous relationships
with external or foreign agents as they are embedded in the images of the devil of colonial
Catholic missionaries in the Andes and Amazonia (Dimitri Karadimas) and the sarode of the
Ayoreo in a context saturated by modern protestant proselytizers in the Chaco (María Cristina
Dasso). These ethnographic approaches are concerned with describing what there is in those
worlds, but also with illustrating different forms to approach it. They carry out their descriptions
through two contrasted types of fieldwork data: Amerindian iconographic expressions and in-
digenous narrative forms. And also two contrasted approaches: a regional comparison of Andes
and Amazonia, and a focus on the Ayoreo of the Chaco. The final picture of these current
anthropological ethnographies depicts some of the contrasted contents and forms that are now-
adays being highlighted by ontologically-inflected Amerindian studies.
Keywords: Andes; Amazon; Chaco; Ethnography; Amerindian

Resumen
Este breve conjunto de trabajos presenta un esfuerzo etnográfico conjunto de abordar algunas
de las relaciones amerindias con agentes externos sea tal como aparecen encarnados en
imágenes del demonio en los Andes y la Amazonía (Dimitri Karadimas), sea tal como se
expresan en los sarode de los ayoreo en un contexto saturado por el proselitismo protestante
contemporáneo (María Cristina Dasso). Ambas aproximaciones etnográficas ilustran, no sólo
descripciones distintas de los componentes de estos mundos indígenas, sino también formas
diversas de aproximarse a ellos. No solo utilizan, pues, tipos contrastados de datos etnograficos
(expresiones iconográficas y narrativas), sino también de aproximaciones (la comparación
regional entre áreas tan vastas como los Andes y la Amazonía) y el énfasis descriptivo de un
pueblo localizado en una región concreta. Finalmente, sin necesidad de una adscripción
explícita, la imagen final de estas etnografías antropológicas actuales bien podría mostrar
algunas de las encrucijadas temáticas y metdológicas que son actualmente resaltadas por los
estudios amerindios asociados al llamado “giro ontológico”.
Palabras clave: Andes; Amazonia; Chaco; Etnografía; Amerindio
Introduction. Indigenous visual and oral registers of non-humans
in South American contexts of transformations1

Juan Javier Rivera Andía
Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn

    A methodological imperative for ethnography

    In Framing Cosmologies, Allen Abramson and Martin Holbraad
propose a “cosmologically conscious anthropology” that takes into ac-
count the relevance of cosmological concerns to a deep understanding
of the contemporary world. In order to do so, its editors rejected the
“reductive impulse” that has made the notion of cosmology simply
collapse. Abramson and Holbraad regretted that, along with the rise of
cognitive anthropology, this “reductive impulse” had continuously
made “indigenous cosmologies become contingent, neutered and ulti-
mately epiphenomenal to something else”. As the exoticised effect of
the hierarchy of “modern us” over “primitive them”, indigenous cos-
mology was functionally differentiated as that part of the whole cul-
ture whose role was to totalise it (Abramson and Holbraad 2014: 2-9).
    This aim to abandon the “ideas about wholes that are naturally pre-
given” is in fact an expression of Framing Cosmologies’ determina-
tion to show “the varied imbrications of cosmological concerns with
political and economic practices” (Abramson and Holbraad 2014: 18-
19) – or, in Sahlins’ terms, the recognition that “the practical is also
the mythical” (2014: 159).
    According to Michael W. Scott, the cultivation of the astonishment
for what we observe during fieldwork “is not only the best disposition,
it is itself a mode of being, the mode of being – being as wonder”
(Abramson and Holbraad 2014: 33). In order to preserve wonder, an
anthropology interested in “multiplicity, flux, and generativity”
(Abramson and Holbraad 2014: 34) could resort to a particular meth-
odology. This methodological practice consists of an abstention simi-
lar to that proposed by Holbraad and Viveiros de Castro (2014): the


1
  Some sections of this introduction are a further development of Rivera Andía
(2019)




                                      9
anthropologist needs to “adopt a position of apositionality, a motile an-
alytical transit that […] is simultaneously no theoretical position, no-
where and no-when” (Abramson and Holbraad 2014: 37).
   In similar lines with Abramson’s and Holbraad’s “imbrications”
and with Scott’s wonder, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro invites us to re-
calibrate what is “real” in terms of those components of possible
worlds projected by indigenous concepts. And this recalibration re-
quires ethnographers to refrain from imposing their own forms of con-
ceptualization during fieldwork (Rivera Andía 2018). According to
Viveiros de Castro, “to think other thought” requires “an actualization
of […] yet unsuspected virtualities of thinking” (Viveiros de Castro
2015: 25). This analytical consequence is explicitly stated: “My ob-
jective is less the indigenous manner of thinking than its objects, the
possible world that its concepts project […] [since in fact] no world
that is ready to be viewed exists” (Viveiros de Castro 2015: 17). There-
fore, his methodological imperative implies not to explain the indige-
nous cosmology, but “to explicate it: to explore its consequences and
follow its implications” (Viveiros de Castro 2015: 219).
   In consequence, we need to rethink the main concept and object of
Anthropology: “we need an anthropological theory of conceptual im-
agination: the faculty of creating those intellectual objects and rela-
tions which furnish the indefinitely many possible worlds of which hu-
mans are capable” (Viveiros de Castro 2015: 53). Followed by other au-
thors (such as Martin Holbraad, Morten Axel Pedersen or Peter
Skafish), this position – usually summarised under the label of “spec-
ulative ontography” (Viveiros de Castro 2015: 75) – promotes a “radi-
cal reconceptualization of what ‘the social’ might be” (Viveiros de
Castro 2015: 16, 43).
   The most interesting thing in, for instance, Perspectivism (accord-
ing to Viveiros de Castro himself) is not that it illustrates an ethno-
graphic phenomenon but that it exemplifies this methodological im-
perative for anthropology thinking: the need to be able to exert radical
reconceptualizations that allow us to escape from a substantivist con-
ceptualization of categories such as “social” (and as its mirror, “na-
ture”), which are considered not “applicable” (Viveiros de Castro
2015: 242) to those indigenous cosmologies explored by anthropolo-
gists.
   Stressing the ontological turn’s “commitment to recalibrate the




                                   10
level at which analysis takes place” (Course 2010: 248), Holbraad has
characterised it as a radicalisation of three anthropological basic re-
quirements: reflexivity, conceptualisation and (empirical, methodo-
logical and theoretical) experimentation (Alberti et al. 2011). He in-
sists on the need of rejecting any previous compromise concerning
what type of phenomena could constitute an ethnographic discipline
and how the anthropological concepts should be transformed in order
to observe them. His radicalisation of reflexivity indeed gives concep-
tualisation a central place in the ontological turn, which aims to trans-
form critical reflexivity into conceptual creativity (Holbraad 2014:
128-137; Alberti et al. 2011: 907). Consequently, he describes his on-
tographic approach as a ‟break out of the circle of our conceptual rep-
ertoire” (Holbraad 2009: 433) using ‟the extraordinary data to recon-
ceptualize ordinary assumptions in extraordinary ways” (Holbraad
2009: 435; see also Lebner 2017: 225; Wardle & Schaffner 2017: 11).
According to him, a ‟copious effort” (Holbraad 2009: 434) or an ‟ex-
tra care” (436) is needed ‟to explore the enormous conceptual wealth
of the Western intellectual tradition in order to find concepts that may
[…] be appropriate to the analysis of animism” (436). What this dos-
sier would like to contribute to is to show some of the consequences of
this take of the so-called ‟ontological turn” as a strictly methodologi-
cal proposal (Salmon and Charbonnier 2014: 567; Charbonnier et al.
2017: 7; Jensen 2017: 530-531; Pedersen 2017: 229-230).


   Highland’s and Lowland’s incorporations of exogenous entities

   In this context, these two ethnographies underline how ethno-
graphic Amerindian studies can understand the multiplicity of concep-
tual and practical relationships that humans establish with the elements
that compose their environment. They try to facilitate the use of anthro-
pological imagination and the forging of new concepts and approaches
that could help release Amerindian studies from the “centrality and
paradigmatic clout” of certain “conventional tools” (Descola 2014:
278-279). Willing to acknowledge that much detailed research is nec-
essary to understand the multiplicity of conceptual and pratical rela-
tionships that humans establish with their environment, they want to




                                   11
test the potency of detailed ethnographic field studies that are not be-
holden to the most recent theoretical developments.
    As a whole, the works of María Cristina Dasso and Dimitri Karadi-
mas compiled here2 engage with those incessant transformations that
emerge at the interface of indigenous understandings of historical dy-
namics, current intercultural relations and expectations (High 2015:
74). Stressing either national or international dimensions, or internal
structures observed during fieldwork, the authors deal with one partic-
ularly recurrent figure in debates on “cultural changes” within indige-
nous peoples: the adoption and incorporation of foreign powers and
wealth. The studies joined in this section all account for transfor-
mations by paying attention to inner dynamics, rather than by focusing
(in terms of loss or infection) exclusively on exogenous (either re-
gional or national) conditions (Bessire 2014; High 2015).
    Beyond the thematic similarity of addressing alterity in Amerindian
worlds, both Dasso’s and Karadimas’ ethnographies can be put in per-
spective highlighting their main features. Considering either indige-
nous visual representations (such as different images of the devil in the
Andes and Amazonia) or a specific oral tradition (such as Ayoreo sa-
rode songs in the Chaco), they also constitute good examples of radi-
cally different (but equally suggestive) ethnographic approaches: a
broad regional comparison of images from Andean and Amazonian
areas, and a focus on specific narrative forms of the Ayoreo people of
the Chaco.
    Dimitri Karadimas deals with Amerindian images of the “devil”,
first in the Andean area. These images constitute for him a source of
indigenous worldings both in past and contemporary Andean cultures.
Among the many Andean rites that offer visual manifestations of the
devil, Karadimas pays attention to one of its most well-known and
multifaceted versions: the carnival of Oruro, in Bolivia. His article
links it to the local narratives about its origins, in particular to the myth
of a regretful legendary thief, which appears as an anthropomorphised
version of a specific insect closely connected to the devil. This Andean

2
 Following his will and as a very modest tribute to his comparative interest on the
Andes, I include here Dimitri Karadimas’ slight reformulation (in the original lan-
guage in which it was written, French) of his article published in English (Karadimas
2015) in a dossier I coordinated a few years ago.




                                         12
insect, in turn, recalls the identification between the devil and certain
Amazonian wasp. At the end, this work of Karadimas shows how mul-
tiple association between the devil and other Amerindian non- human
entities would indeed be a product of a trans-regional adaptive cultural
response.
   The study of María Cristina Dasso shows some of the effects of the
establishment of a new type of universe by Christianity as the product
of a particular “translation” made by missionaries who came to live
among the Ayoreo. She explores these processes of translation from
an Amerindian point of view showing the importance of embracing
not only concepts but also things that are “brought” from one world to
another. The emphasis of Dasso in the indigenous concern for the
identification of specific ontological components of Ayoreo life could
also foster a subsequent stress on the practical affairs linked to cosmo-
logical changes. Ayoreo have long been exposed to foreign ideologies
and practices and their songs certainly acknowledge the marks they
have exerted on their world.
   Both Dasso’s and Karadimas’ ethnographies constitute ethno-
graphic reflections not only of the transformations affecting these re-
gions of South America (Chaco and Amazonia, respectively), but also
of the aftermath of those transformation. They remind us of those an-
thropological projects – sometimes labeled as “ontography” – that aim
to grasp South American worlds that are turbulent, subdued, ignored
and “actively produced as non-existent” (Escobar 2016: 15; see also
Schavelzon 2016; Todd 2016: 15). Both Dasso and Karadimas present
ethnographic studies that aim to avoid prophetic futurisms and “ideal-
ized and nostalgic fantasies” (Shellenberger and Nordhaus 2011) in
order to pay attention to the “mixturas” (Ortiz Rescaniere and Yama-
moto Suda 1999) that pervade indigenous peoples’ ontologies
(Holbraad, Pedersen and Viveiros de Castro 2014; Bessire 2014: 228;
Povinelli 2001; Killick 2015; Lebner 2017: 225; Scott 2014; Carsten-
sen 2014).
   Either concerned with describing the content of particular indige-
nous worlds, or with the different possible forms to approach them,
Dasso and Karadimas attempt to ethnographically address Amerindian
collectives’ alterity and to produce a critique of indigenous relation-
ships with externally driven agents and forces. They opt to overcome
the hypnotic magic of “agribusiness writing” (Taussig 2015), carrying




                                   13
out their descriptions both through abstract indigenous concepts and
material things, and essaying (in different forms) an ethnography that
could prevent them from operating a mere adaptation to current theo-
retical trends. references

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   Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the AGAUR program, thanks to which I could enjoy a stay
at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and to the Department of Anthro-
pology of the Americas at the University of Bonn, where I could stay in 2019
thanks to the support of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. I also




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would like to thank the Marie Curie Alumni Association for its support.




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