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Behold the Black Caiman: A Chronicle of Ayoreo Life
In 2004, one of the world’s last bands of voluntarily isolated nomads left behind their ancestral life in the dwindling thorn forests of northern Paraguay, fleeing ranchers’ bulldozers. Behold the Black Caiman is Lucas Bessire’s intimate chronicle of the journey of this small group of Ayoreo people, the terrifying new world they now face, and the precarious lives they are piecing together against the backdrop of soul-collecting missionaries, humanitarian NGOs, late liberal economic policies, and the highest deforestation rate in the world.
Drawing on ten years of fieldwork, Bessire highlights the stark disconnect between the desperate conditions of Ayoreo life for those out of the forest and the well-funded global efforts to preserve those Ayoreo still living in it. By showing how this disconnect reverberates within Ayoreo bodies and minds, his reflexive account takes aim at the devastating consequences of our society’s continued obsession with the primitive and raises important questions about anthropology’s potent capacity to further or impede indigenous struggles for sovereignty. The result is a timely update to the classic literary ethnographies of South America, a sustained critique of the so-called ontological turn―one of anthropology’s hottest trends―and, above all, an urgent call for scholars and activists alike to rethink their notions of difference.
Drawing on ten years of fieldwork, Bessire highlights the stark disconnect between the desperate conditions of Ayoreo life for those out of the forest and the well-funded global efforts to preserve those Ayoreo still living in it. By showing how this disconnect reverberates within Ayoreo bodies and minds, his reflexive account takes aim at the devastating consequences of our society’s continued obsession with the primitive and raises important questions about anthropology’s potent capacity to further or impede indigenous struggles for sovereignty. The result is a timely update to the classic literary ethnographies of South America, a sustained critique of the so-called ontological turn―one of anthropology’s hottest trends―and, above all, an urgent call for scholars and activists alike to rethink their notions of difference.
296 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 8, 2016
Lucas Bessire provides an unflinching and thoroughly considered ethnography of the "ex-primitive," not as a category of people that deserve fascination or romanticization but empathy and inclusion in the broader struggles of our times. With humility and wit he recounts the involvement of missionaries and, most shockingly, former forest dwellers in the hunt for Indians living in the vast Gran Chaco forests of Argentina. His text focuses on several such tribes as they live on the edge of the forest after contact and sedenterization. The lives that they turn to are filled with a religious (Christian) fervor that does not pine for traditions lost.
This is the key riddle Bessire grapples with in the book: how are people who have seemingly lost everything and been thrust into penury and destitution not angry or at least pining for the halcyon visions of forest freedoms lost. The answer lies in the power of local concepts that are mediated through radios, occasional hunts and a general sense of resignation. These are no forest-dwelling heroes set to reframe Western ontologies or capitalist logics. They are just dealing with illness, poverty and resignation, which are demons that have clung to their backs for decades, as they ran and hid from the terrors of Indian catchers and merciless bulldozers.
There is no emancipation in this book - only bare, stark, at times beautifully painted yet always pained, survival. On the margins of the forest, of the social imaginary and their own discarded traditions, the last of the Indians have nothing glittery to show us. Readers (mostly other anthropologists) who bother to read this arresting work will find a word undone long ago, yet still stumbling headlong into troubled futures.
This is the key riddle Bessire grapples with in the book: how are people who have seemingly lost everything and been thrust into penury and destitution not angry or at least pining for the halcyon visions of forest freedoms lost. The answer lies in the power of local concepts that are mediated through radios, occasional hunts and a general sense of resignation. These are no forest-dwelling heroes set to reframe Western ontologies or capitalist logics. They are just dealing with illness, poverty and resignation, which are demons that have clung to their backs for decades, as they ran and hid from the terrors of Indian catchers and merciless bulldozers.
There is no emancipation in this book - only bare, stark, at times beautifully painted yet always pained, survival. On the margins of the forest, of the social imaginary and their own discarded traditions, the last of the Indians have nothing glittery to show us. Readers (mostly other anthropologists) who bother to read this arresting work will find a word undone long ago, yet still stumbling headlong into troubled futures.
May 8, 2024
It is obvious Bessire put an extreme amount of thought and effort into this book. If you are skilled reading comprehension or have some formal anthro knowledge, it is a great read. I struggled with Bessire not using a chronological order, but it is worth the time to really understand if you have it!
December 31, 2016
I haven't read much Anthropology since taking a course in college. And even then, I think I skipped most of the readings.
Anthropologists can be great story tellers, and Bessire is among the best. But what's important aren't the stories as such, but the way Bessire uses them to call into question, and re-imagine, the anthropological project. The book has a fair amount of post-structural critical theory, derived partly from Michel Foucault. If that's not your favorite reading material, you can skip those bits and still get the point, I think.
What, after all, does it mean to go into a "primitive" society, extract their stories, and build a picture of a "primitive" culture that doesn't exist, that has always already been destroyed? As one of the Ayoreo puts it, anthropologists steal their stories and sell them: a startlingly accurate take on the economics of traditional anthropology. More than that, by defining a pure primitive culture, traditional anthropology provides a pretext for the oppression of tribespeople who have been forced out of that culture--often by brutal hunting expeditions. The dominant culture defines the terms under which the "primitive" tribespeople are allowed to live.
Instead, the project of anthropology needs to be about the conditions under which tribespeople are brought into contact with the dominant culture: how they adapt, how they come to terms with their conditions, how they survive in new homes that are little better than concentration camps. How do they deal with the continuous apocalypse of manhunts, introduced diseases, and earthmoving equipment decimating their forests? That is the story that anthropology needs to tell; and it is a story that calls into question the position of the value-neutral scientific outsider.
Anthropologists can be great story tellers, and Bessire is among the best. But what's important aren't the stories as such, but the way Bessire uses them to call into question, and re-imagine, the anthropological project. The book has a fair amount of post-structural critical theory, derived partly from Michel Foucault. If that's not your favorite reading material, you can skip those bits and still get the point, I think.
What, after all, does it mean to go into a "primitive" society, extract their stories, and build a picture of a "primitive" culture that doesn't exist, that has always already been destroyed? As one of the Ayoreo puts it, anthropologists steal their stories and sell them: a startlingly accurate take on the economics of traditional anthropology. More than that, by defining a pure primitive culture, traditional anthropology provides a pretext for the oppression of tribespeople who have been forced out of that culture--often by brutal hunting expeditions. The dominant culture defines the terms under which the "primitive" tribespeople are allowed to live.
Instead, the project of anthropology needs to be about the conditions under which tribespeople are brought into contact with the dominant culture: how they adapt, how they come to terms with their conditions, how they survive in new homes that are little better than concentration camps. How do they deal with the continuous apocalypse of manhunts, introduced diseases, and earthmoving equipment decimating their forests? That is the story that anthropology needs to tell; and it is a story that calls into question the position of the value-neutral scientific outsider.
July 15, 2025
Haunting and stunning depiction of the conditions of hunted Ayoreo life on the margins of industrial destruction and its transformations and continuities after the moment of "contact" (intentional usage of scare-quotes here). It is an utterly fascinating depiction of the ways in which an easily-essentialized culture is deeply permeated by the exigencies of life in precarity and external political economic forces.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews