The Orphaned Past: Ache Autonomy and Relationality in Times of Change by Warren Thompson A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Anthropology) in the University of Michigan 2019 Doctoral Committee Professor Webb Keane, Chair Professor Bruce Mannheim Professor Erik Mueggler Associate Professor Suzanne Oakdale, University of New Mexico Professor Emeritus Thomas Trautmann Warren Thompson [email protected] ORCID iD: 0000-0002-6963-2175 © Warren Thompson 2019 Acknowledgments The writing of this dissertation was made possible through a Block Grant Write- Up Fellowship and a Rackham Fellowship from the University of Michigan’s Anthropology Department. Research was funded through a doctoral research grant from the Fulbright Institute of International Education, a Rackham International Research Award from the University of Michigan, and two Dokumentation bedrohter Sprachen (DoBeS) grants administered through the Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI) in Nijmegen. I am grateful to these institutions for their support over the years. In particular, I wish to express my gratitude to Jost Gippert and Sebastian Drude for their advice and direction during the DoBeS grants and to Alexander Konig and Nick Wood at the MPI for technical support and the digitalization of a number of near-ruined recordings. The University of Michigan provided a stimulating intellectual environment to work through the ideas of this dissertation. The work of my committee members, Webb Keane, Bruce Mannheim, Erik Mueggler, Suzanne Oakdale, and Tom Trautmann has been an inspiration for my own, and their influence on the pages that follow will be clear to those familiar with their work. They have pushed me to develop and refine my ideas from the earliest stages of the dissertation to its final form, and their suggestions have benefitted the work immeasurably. During various stages of this project I benefited from the careful reading, critique, and ii recommendations of friends and colleagues. Adrian Deoanca, Georgia Ennis, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Jan David Hauck, Randeep Hothi, Matt Hull, Matan Kaminer, Eric Kelley, Ozge Korkmaz, Carlos Londoño-Sulkin, James Meador, Prash Naidu, Nishita Trisal, and Richard Reed read parts of the dissertation and offered valuable feedback. Hélène Clastres generously granted access to the field recordings of Pierre Clastres and León Cadogan. Richard Reed’s captivating lectures at Trinity University first cultivated my interest in Paraguay as an undergraduate. He suggested that I work with the Ache, and his generous introductions made my first years in Paraguay possible. While in Paraguay, I benefitted from the experience of Marilin Rehnfelt, Adelina Pussineri, Lucio Godoy S.V.D, and Mario Bogado. I am especially grateful to Marilin for her invitation to teach a class at the Universidad Católica “Nuestra Señora de la Asunción,” which allowed me to extend my fieldstay by several months. I thank Ivan Vera for his friendship and generosity during much needed respites from the field in Asunción. Bjarne and Rosalba Fostervold deserve special thanks for my introduction to the Ache in 2006 and for the unflagging generosity I have received from them ever since. Without their encouragement and support, this dissertation would have been impossible. They walk the walk. Over the years, Kim Hill has been unsparing with his knowledge and advice, and his long experience with the Ache has greatly enriched my own. Jan David Hauck and Eva Maria Roessler have been collaborators in the field, sparring partners while writing, and devoted friends throughout the time we have known each other. I cannot thank them enough. iii I wish to thank my wife, Lauren; my parents, Bob and Sarah; and my brother, Robert for their love, patience, and support. The Ache I have known over the years have endured unimaginable hardship with dignity and a joy that refuses to be extinguished. I have tried in this dissertation to communicate some sense of the enormity of the changes they have undergone since their settlement and what they considered essential to those changes. In particular, I wish to thank Geronimo Tatugi and Francisco Bepegi. I cherish my conversations with Chimbegi, Pikygi, Kuategi, Krachogi, Kwewegi, Kybwyaragi marĩ, and Achĩpurãngi marĩ, and I thank them for the care and patience they have shown so that I might “know well” the many things they have tried to teach me. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii List of Tables vi List of Figures vii List of Appendices viii Abstract ix Introduction 1 Chapter 1 The Give and Take of Ownership 27 Chapter 2 Other Times, Other Places 55 Chapter 3 Scolding, the Agonism of Ache Ethics 70 Chapter 4 The Dangerous Remainder 87 Chapter 5 Ownership and Bodily Integrity in the Settlement Process 115 Chapter 6 God the Owner, God the Healer 131 Chapter 7 Seeing is Believing 169 Conclusion 189 Appendices 193 References 205 v List of Tables Table 1.1 Age Grades 45 Table 8.1 Consonants 195 Table 8.2 Vowels 196 vi List of Figures Figure 1.1. Map of Paraguay 26 Figure 1.2 Minõngi carrying a tapir head, 1982 33 Figure 5.1 Jesus Manuel de Pereira, 1960 129 Figure 5.2 Pereira cutting an Ache man’s hair, 1960 130 Figure 5.3 The sinful body 162 vii List of Appendices Appendix 1 A Note on Orthography and Transcription 193 Appendix 2 Glossary of Ache Terms 198 Appendix 3 Account of September 1973 contact by NTM 200 viii Abstract The concept of “ownership” has assumed some prominence in the recent anthropology of lowland South America (Fausto 2002; 2012; Bonilla 2005; Costa 2017). “Ownership,” as it is typically defined, is a hierarchical relation that gradually develops between an “owner” and a person owned (whether human or non-human) through continued acts of care and feeding. In this dissertation, I explore the notion of ownership through the history of settlement of one group of South American hunter-gatherers, the Ache of eastern Paraguay. Attending to ownership relations between kin, between the living and dead, between Ache and Paraguayans, and between humanity and the Christian God, I argue that hierarchical relations of ownership contain important moral presuppositions. I describe how relations are evaluated in these domains to show that an essential aspect of ownership is the evaluation of it, and the risks inherent in the relation are integral to the continuous feeding and care that sustains it. ix Introduction One humid summer night in 2009, the grandmother Djakugi packed her carrying basket with a few possessions— an axe, a handleless knife with a worn blade, a woven-palm mat, and a plastic jug. She had heard the calls of her long-dead parents and brothers, and, moved by their siren-like pull, went to meet them. As her husband slept, Flora slipped the finely woven strap of her carrying basket over her forehead and shuffled across the clearing, and disappeared through the dark wall of vegetation. In the dawn hours of the next morning, Djakugi’s absence caused some alarm in the community, and a group of hunters assembled to search for her as a group of women speculated about the reasons for her absence. There was only a small patch of forest outside of the community left for her to retreat to, and the hunters had no difficulty in finding her. After following her trail for a short time, they found her sitting alone in a small forest clearing less than a kilometer outside the village. She wanted to die, she told them. She would join her dead kin in the western skies. “Come back,” the hunters pleaded. “You still have your half-sister,” they reminded her, hoping that the care she felt for her living relative would be enough to coax her back to the community. The excitement subsided upon her return, and satisfied at the resolution, people returned to their houses. Little more was said about her brief disappearance. As people returned to their routines, I wrestled with how to understand what had just 1 happened and what caused this episode. When I asked one young man why Djakugi had left the village, he lowered his eyes and laughed nervously. “She has lost her head,” he said. “She is crazy.” His words were revealing. Although he spoke in Spanish (I was not yet proficient in Ache), he retained the Ache word tollã, which means, literally, “headless.” According to the young man, there could be no reason, no understanding, guiding her actions. It was little wonder that the young, who knew their grandparent’s life in the forest only from stories, couldn’t relate to the old woman’s anguish. But years later I would come to learn that what the young man had attributed to senility was not an uncommon affliction for old women and men. Djakugi had been overcome by some sort of fugue state, where she, instead of forgetting the past, had completely succumbed to it. The images of dead kin that had pulled Djakugi away were more than upsetting recollections. As I was later told, sad and despondent people were said to forget their living kin and feel a pull toward their dead kin. Djakugi, aged and childless, her husband Chinigi long dead from snakebite, could no longer see herself in the world that surrounded her. Her memories had roused her dead kin and brought lured her to them. Her attempted “escape” was one of the early glimpses into the struggle with the past that that I encountered during the course of my fieldwork. Such struggles, as I would gradually learn, were intensely ethically laden, providing both the ground and the substance for everyday evaluations. Djakugi’s fugue state had put her at odds with the moral expectations of both the past and the present.