276 Current Anthropology Volume 55, Number 3, June 2014

The Rise of Indigenous Hypermarginality

Native Culture as a Neoliberal Politics of Life

by Lucas Bessire

Scholars have suggested that the current era of indigenous citizenship in Latin America is characterized by a
postmulticultural political order that effectively reverses the historical marginality of native populations in the region.
This conception, however, minimizes the established insight that the social apertures of neoliberal culturalism depend
on the creation of new exclusionary regimes based on the very same mechanisms of celebrating cultural difference.
Drawing on a decade of field-based inquiries into indigenous experiences of marginality in South America’s Gran
Chaco, this article identifies how the widespread political empowerment of an indigenous majority is structurally
predicated upon the hypermarginality of a stigmatized few. I describe the general features of hypermarginality as
lived experience and emergent political regime, in relation to three properties of the stratifying craft of the neoliberal
state: the contraction of authorized culture, the culturalization of legitimate indigenous life, and the state management
of a global economy of cultural preservation. This essay illustrates how hypermarginality is a concrete political
quandary that holds significant implications for social analysis and policy, including the need to rethink the rela-
tionships between the neoliberal and the indigenous in Latin America.

fluid group of perhaps 2 dozen Ayoreo-speaking people, most

What sort of presence in our minds, what sort of whatness
are they now to have? What sort of place in the world does
an “ex-primitive” have? (Clifford Geertz 2001:11)
Near the Ayoreo Indian encampment in a notorious villa
miseria of Santa Cruz, Bolivia, you can buy 10 cents worth
of shoe glue, or ore ojare, spooned into a little plastic bag. It
is an amount useless for actually gluing shoes, but it is pre-
cisely the minimum amount required to get high.
For an increasingly large number of young Ayoreo-speaking
people in Bolivia—descendants of the great Ayoreo confed-
eracies of the Bolivia/Paraguay borderlands who remained on
the margins of state influence until they were missionized by
North American evangelicals between 1947 and 1986—this is
the chosen means to escape an everyday life of crushing pov-
erty, disfiguring disease, and enduring colonial violence.
Young bodies lie askance unconscious on pavement in midday
sun; they say that ore ojare makes you feel “like you can do
anything,” or “like you are Rambo.” Like alcoholics or co-
queros, Ayoreo people say those who become addicted to ore
ojare have a vicio, a vice.
The vice of the glue sniffers is considered relatively benign
compared with the affliction of those known as Puyedie. The
name translates roughly as “the prohibited ones.” They are a
Lucas Bessire is Assistant Professor in the Department of
Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma (Dale Hall Tower 510-
C, 455 West Lindsey, Norman, Oklahoma 73019, U.S.A. [lucas
.bessire@ou.edu]). This paper was submitted 28 VI 12, accepted 31
VII 13, and electronically published 25 IV 14.
of them women. They live in an abandoned lot behind the
train station, where they earn enough money from sex work
of the most marginal kinds to support their life-defining vices
of smoking raw coca paste and consuming dirt or the bricks
that line open sewage ditches, which they grind up and eat.
In Search of the Ex-Primitive
Such scenes of Ayoreo marginality provide stark counter-
points to the general empowerment of indigenous peoples
believed to characterize the current era of “postmulticultural”
citizenship in Latin America, and Bolivia especially. Such em-
powering potentials, it is argued, arise not only from the
indigenization of popular politics (Albro 2005; Himpele 2007)
but also from broad social movements through which indig-
enous groups give voice to a populist, grassroots “demand
for a democratic government designed by the people them-
selves” (Postero 2006:225). Much of this scholarship suggests
that indigenous activism has revitalized and reoriented de-
mocracy for all citizens in Latin America.
The recent anthropology of Latin American indigeneity is
exciting precisely because it describes how the political up-
heavals set into motion by 1990s multiculturalism—“an
emancipatory development of world historical significance”
(Kenrick and Lewis 2004:9), “in which the very meanings of
citizenship and the state were rethought” (Jackson 2007:205;
see also Assies 2000; Brysk 2000; Sieder 2002; Turner 1993;
Yashar 2005)—continue to evolve toward a long-anticipated

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Bessire The Rise of Indigenous Hypermarginality
end: a state unwillingly restructured or entirely overthrown
by the creative protagonism of newly empowered “cultural
citizens.” Difference, in this schema, is no longer organized
as a political hierarchy but as distinct points of participation
in the state. “Culture is an end in itself,” as Ismail Serageldin
(1999:240) put it in a 1999 UN Development Program Report:
“It contributes to a society’s ability to promote self-esteem
and empowerment for everyone.” This imaginary of a hori-
zontal network allows proponents to argue that the result is
a reformed governance whereby “the exclusions of the past
will no longer go unnoticed” (Postero 2006:225).
Evidence that supports such a generally optimistic outlook
while detailing its complexities is abundant and compelling
(see esp. Gustafson 2009; Jackson and Warren 2005; Turner
1999; Warren 1998). Yet questions remain. Increased political
participation has not lessened socioeconomic inequalities for
all indigenous peoples in Latin America: it has unevenly re-
distributed them. In fact, disparities in health and wealth
between indigenous and nonindigenous citizens in Latin
America have either stagnated or increased over the last 2
decades of multicultural reforms (see Hall and Patrinos 2006;
UNDP 2010).
This essay begins with the premise that the anthropology
of postmulticulturalism must attend to its negative exceptions
as well as its emancipatory possibilities (see also Greene 2004;
Hale 2004, 2005; Muehlmann 2009; Povinelli 2002; Rivera
and Geidel 2010).1 Indeed, this dialectic between exclusion
and inclusion is characteristic of contemporary cultural pol-
itics. Specifically, I explore how the obvious social apertures
and logics of such redeployed culturalisms may depend upon
and create new regimes of what Didier Fassin (2009:49) calls
“biolegitimacy,” or the unequal construction of the meaning
and values of life. For Fassin, contemporary biopolitics are
best defined not so much as technologies for normalizing and
controlling living beings but as the recent creation of sharp
inequalities within “life as such.” These unevenly felt bio-
inequalities instantiate how governance pivots upon a new
politics of life, whereby the pursuit of its ideal definition also
means deciding “who should live and in the name of what”
1. As Elizabeth Povinelli has pointed out, multiculturalism means that
“no repugnant features are allowed—indigenous people are forced to
identify with their cultural traditions in a way that just so happens, in
an uncanny convergence of interests, to fit the national and legal imag-
inary of multiculturalism” (2002:34). That is, it creates an existential
double bind that makes all actual indigenous subjects to some degree
excluded from fully conforming to the politically authorized limits of
culture. This is what Charles Hale (2004:18) refers to when he points
out that such multicultural reforms “have pre-determined limits; benefits
to a few indigenous actors are predicated on the exclusion of the rest;
certain rights are to be enjoyed on the implicit conditions that others
will not be raised . . . it would be a mistake to equate the increasing
indigenous presence in the corridors of power with indigenous empow-
erment” (see also Hale 2006). Likewise, Kirk Dombrowski (2005:368)
signals how governmental control over the criteria by which cultural
rights may be normalized is “part of the bureaucratic technology for
normalizing a status of uncertainty, of marginality, of no status” for native
peoples in general.
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277
(Fassin 2009:52). I ask: Who, exactly, is allowed to live in the
name of culture? Who is allowed to die? What is at stake
when guarantees of cultural citizenship become indistinguish-
able from the biological components of citizenship for certain
historically oppressed peoples (see Franklin and Lock 2003;
Petryna 2002)?
The conspicuous conflation of authorized culture and in-
digenous biolegitimacy is not restricted to socioeconomic sta-
tistics, multiculturalist state policies, or the evolving strictures
of national and international law. It is also manifest through
a global moral economy for preserving cultural life, the logics
of humanitarian intervention and the renewed search for the
primitive (Diamond 1981) as an organizing principle for pop-
ular and scholarly horizons alike. It resurfaces within a current
ontological turn in social theory, whereby the figure of a
supposedly singular “Amerindian ontology” is the primary
inspiration for radical imaginaries of alternate modernities
based on inverting Enlightenment divides between nature/
culture or human/nonhuman (see Descola 2013; Latour 2009;
Viveiros de Castro 1998, 2004, 2010). “Primitive society,” as
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro wrote of Pierre Clastres, “is the
conceptual embodiment of the thesis that another world is
possible” (2010:15). Celebrating the purported incommen-
surability of primitive cosmologies as a basis for reflection,
theorists such as Ghassan Hage have argued that ethnography
can only remain politically relevant if it “allows for the flour-
ishing of the ethos of critical primitivist anthropology” (2012:
303). For like-minded scholars, the primitive is one of the
few valid sources for political and ethical critique in the con-
temporary.
Yet it is equally obvious that some peoples and their de-
scendants, especially those long imagined to border the hu-
man/nonhuman, cannot or refuse to enact their physical and
psychic alterity in ways that conform to the new criteria of
difference valued within postmulticultural politics. They are
those whom Clifford Geertz (2001:11) so memorably called
“ex-primitives”: ambiguous, unruly beings whose ties to le-
gitimating origins are rendered impossible, unreliable, or
newly suspect through active global investments in preserving
primitive lifeways as a public good and radical imaginary.
Such investments paradoxically authorize an amplified regime
of violence against the supposedly deculturated ex-primitive.
Those not eligible for the protections afforded to the cultural
subject are also denied the rights of liberal citizenship (see
also Brown 2006).
This essay thus offers one possible response to Geertz’s
elegiac question: the apparent diminishment of such beings
is a misleading fiction that nevertheless exerts violent force
against their lives, that such forces are not merely symbolic
but constitutive of contemporary politics, and that the eman-
cipatory effects attributed to the triumph of socially mobilized
multiculturalism emerge simultaneously from the systematic
negation of the humanity of a new indigenous subset. From
this vantage, it is no longer a mystery what sort of place in
the world ex-primitives have: the zone of targeted marginality
 278
reserved for those populations who refuse or are denied the
degree and liberally sanctioned kind of culture deemed nec-
essary for becoming intelligible and fully human, indigenous
or otherwise. For officials, scientists, and citizens alike, the
“whatness” of such groups increasingly dissolves not into per-
formances of marginality aimed at securing rights but into
the terms of social death.
Deemed unfit for economic production and already
stripped of all potentially valuable commodities—territory,
technology, tradition—the ex-primitive is relegated to her fi-
nal role as the figure of degradation, an avenue for the ex-
penditure of mourning, the receptacle of rage and transgres-
sive desire, and the cautionary object required for evoking
the revitalization, expiation, or salvation of more powerful
others. Moreover, this violence constitutes the realignments
of state, market, and citizenship glossed as late or neoliber-
alism, rather than representing a systemic dysfunction that a
more effective policing of culture will resolve. This dynamic
begs the question: What possibilities for political anthropol-
ogy emerge not from fantasies of a radical primitive alterity
but from the ethnography of the fractured and desiring sub-
jectivities of the ex-primitive?
The Rise of Hypermarginality
In what follows, I trace the figure of the Ayoreo-speaking
Puyedie as a manifestation of such emphatically global dy-
namics. I do so not to diminish the real agencies that a sup-
posedly antineoliberal, postmulticultural moment may imply
for many indigenous communities, but rather to craft a larger
argument about how the widespread empowerment of au-
thorized indigenous subjects is predicated on the new hyper-
marginality of a stigmatized multitude: those who do not fit
within the increasingly policed matrix of cultural life while
also remaining at the very bottom of local socioeconomic
class hierarchies.
Hypermarginality can be defined as a novel regime of social
depersonalization and structural violence deriving from the
conflation of politically authorized culture and indigenous
biolegitimacy across distinct political domains. It is an ideal-
type meant to draw attention to how a marked intensification
of exclusionary closure and culturalist violence in the present
is more than a failure to effectively implement multicultural
reforms. Rather, this amplification manifests the kinds of pol-
itics emerging when a limited schema of cultural difference
stands in for the sanctity of life as a core moral value within
secular democracy. This collapse redistributes bioinequality
and the material techniques for dispossessing certain stig-
matized groups, while co-opting those who benefit into uni-
versalizing discourses of empowerment and putting all at the
service of refashioned regimes of governance.
In such ways, indigenous hypermarginality instantiates and
expands what Loı̈c Wacquant (1996, 2008, 2010) has described
as “advanced marginality.” Instantiates, in that indigenous
hypermarginality demonstrates many of the same definitive
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Current Anthropology Volume 55, Number 3, June 2014
logics, properties, and causal ties to neoliberalism, including
an ethnic and class fragmentation through eroded sources of
wage labor, a local disconnection from macroeconomic
trends, sharp territorial dispossession, ecological dissolution,
and increasingly targeted forms of dehumanizing stigmati-
zation.2 Expands, in that indigenous hypermarginality is not
confined to the urban ghettos of the post-Fordist metropolis
nor their particular conflations of race, class, and place.
Rather, it is a deterritorialized form of marginality specific to
the law-instating murk of colonial domination and the op-
positional modes of culture that define “the indigenous” as
an actionable political category and an inhabitable subject
position (see Abercrombie 1991, 1998; Clifford 2001; Gordillo
2004; Li 2000; Myers 2002, 2004; Niezin 2003; Taussig 1987;
Tsing 2005; Turner 1999). That is, hypermarginality arises
when culture reappears as an articulation of ontological al-
terity, exceptional citizenship, and biolegitimacy, which nat-
uralizes the first to make the second indistinguishable from
the third. It is a development that articulates the well-doc-
umented capacities of late or neoliberal political economies
to redefine the values of life as such and fracture subjectivity.
It gains traction through the instrumentally misleading ap-
pearance of a state figure uniformly receding in the face of
popular and indigenous mobilizations.
The rise of hypermarginality requires a shift in the modes
of analysis and action aimed at indigenous empowerment in
Latin America and beyond. For research, the particular prop-
erties of hypermarginality and their relationship to the uneven
meanings and values of life within late liberalism require more
ethnographic investigation. For analysis, this peculiar form of
dehumanization belies the foundational premise of indige-
nous rights that indigeneity is largely defined by an a priori,
homogenous, and equally distributed experience of margin-
ality reducible to poverty, insufficient socioeconomic devel-
opment, or the lingering effects of imperial histories that a
more effective policing or protection of difference will alleviate
(see Cobo 1986; ILO 1954; Rodrı́gues-Piñero 2005). Rather,
hypermarginality draws attention to what is at stake when
gradients of life or bioinequalities are established through and
within the category of indigeneity.
Hypermarginal formations reveal contemporary indigene-
ity as a disjunctive political field comprising several causally
2. This includes a downward disintegration of socioeconomic class
and amplification of internal group conflict through increasing depen-
dence on precarious and arbitrary wage labor of the most basic kind,
that is, a class fragmentation through labor; a radical expansion of com-
modification, to include sex and body parts; the absence of reliable state
systems for social protection and their outsourcing to a variety of un-
regulated third-party humanitarian organizations; an absolute discon-
nection from macroeconomic trends of growth, so that national economic
growth is not distributed to those at the bottom of class hierarchies; a
concentration in stigmatized places that doubly intensifies the stigmas of
certain ethnoracial classifications; the loss of access to a viable, authentic
“homeland” wherein culture is widely believed to inhere; and a marked
sense of decay, degradation, animalization, and social fragmentation
(Wacquant 1996:123–128).
Bessire The Rise of Indigenous Hypermarginality
linked elements, including a government of life realized
through a malleable legal-theological category of culture that
is increasingly robust but applied with ever-narrowing pre-
cision; the invigorated political agency of those globally net-
worked indigenous populations or individuals able to suc-
cessfully claim authorized culture by conforming in part to
externally imposed definitions thereof; the transnational hy-
pervisibility of “isolated” or “uncontacted” primitive life and
cosmology; and the largely invisible sociospatial relegation of
supposedly deculturated ex-primitives to devastated hinter-
lands and the margins of civic space, where the stigma of
culture death is added to the already trebled stigmas of race,
place, and class (see Auyero 2000). Scholars often address
these elements singly or in pairs, thus obscuring how global
feedback loops bridge them all across various sites and do-
mains of practice. In the case of Ayoreo-speaking peoples of
the Bolivian and Paraguayan Gran Chaco, however, each of
these elements is apparent as a distinct facet of lived Ayoreo
experience. Ayoreo people inhabit two states with progressive
multicultural laws; they count among their members a small
number of cultural brokers representing tradition to outsiders,
two or three small voluntarily isolated bands, and a severely
marginalized majority. The looping relationships between
these modes mean that Ayoreo lives are a particularly com-
pelling site for the study of indigenous hypermarginality.
For political anthropology, the rise of hypermarginality im-
plies that it is no longer sufficient to restrict the search for
radical possibility to the contents of a primitive ontology or
“society against the state” (Clastres 1989, 2010). That is, the
anthropology of hypermarginality requires breaking with the
familiar premise that the subjugation of indigenous peoples
occurs along only one trajectory, namely, the reduction of an
a priori multiplicity to a homogeneous singular. Rather, it
suggests that the homogenization of multiplicity itself may
constitute a corollary and equally insidious form of dispos-
session. A decolonizing praxis in this case must account for
how the culturalization of legitimate life has not only secured
collective rights but has also underwritten the disavowal of
human rights in the name of native self-determination. The
task, then, is how to envision a framework for action not
based upon already existing colonial categories, but upon the
epistemic or ontological disobedience of indigenous sub-
jects whose projects of becoming are always immanent, un-
authorized, and leaking out in many directions at once (see
Mignolo 2009).
Vice and Madness
The Puyedie, or Prohibited Ones, live hidden in the tall grass
of an abandoned lot behind the train station. The grass is
their only shelter when it rains, the only source of privacy
when they are with a client. It is a scene of winding paths,
tattered blankets, sunken cheeks, swollen limbs, plastic bags.
Their clients are from the poorest stratum of cambas, or non-
indigenous residents of Santa Cruz. Sometimes the Puyedie
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279
earn up to $3 per client, but some pay in drugs. Others,
including police officers, do not pay at all. The group includes
a rotating cast of men who share the earnings of the women
and may intervene if someone is being beaten or raped. “We
earn well,” one Puye said in a series of remarkable interviews
with Irene Roca Ortı́z, a Bolivian anthropologist who directed
the first Ayoreo public health project in 2010–12 (see Roca
Ortı́z et al. 2012). “But it is only enough for the coca paste”
(Roca Ortı́z, personal communication, 2012).
Puyedie are largely defined in relation to their addiction to
smoking coca paste, an unrefined mash of coca leaves, sulfuric
acid, and kerosene, gasoline, or benzol. It is known in Ayoreo
slang as puyai (That-Which-Is-Taboo). This name is partic-
ularly significant, and it contains a history of its own. The
nomadic Ayoreo-speaking people of Bolivia and Paraguay
were long considered the über-savages of the Chaco frontier.
Never numbering more than several thousand individuals
grouped into a fluid number of politically autonomous bands,
they were known as Bárbaros (Barbarians) in Bolivia and Mo-
ros (Moors) in Paraguay. They were said to be incestuous
cannibals who spoke no language and had knees that bent
backward and feet consisting of a single, great claw. They were
greatly feared, shot on sight, and hunted down well into the
1970s: the men murdered, the women raped or dismembered,
the children captured for slaves and held as curiosities in zoos
(see Munzel [1973] and Perasso [1987] for more on killing
Indians in the Chaco).
As “unreached peoples,” Ayoreo were irresistible to Amer-
ican evangelical missionaries seized by a “consuming” and
“consistent passion for souls” (Johnston 1985:25). Indian
souls were labeled “Brown Gold,” “more precious even than
gold that perisheth,” for they were the only coin by which
eternal salvation, the Rapture of the Faithful, and the con-
summation of Christ’s union with his bride could be achieved
(Johnston 1985:44–45). Guided by captives obtained from
townspeople, missionaries contacted most Ayoreo-speaking
bands between 1947 and 1986 (although two small groups of
holdouts remain in the dwindling forests of the Bolivia/Par-
aguay borderlands). From the beginning, Ayoreo set up un-
authorized camps on the outskirts of towns and cities (see
Canova 2011). Today, the 6,000 members of this cross-border
group are now among the most marginalized of any native
peoples in this region, where Indians are frequently held in
conditions described as slavery (Bedoya and Bedoya 2005;
Kidd 1997; Maybury-Lewis and Howe 1980). Their spectac-
ular alterity presumably degraded by contact, they are rou-
tinely treated as subhuman matter out of place: a labor reserve
for charcoal production or sex work, souls already won, a
threat to civic hygiene, a source of myths and dissertations
and fungible bodily substances—hair, milk, blood.
In these harsh conditions, there are no reliable coordinates
for meaning; the grammar of the ordinary fails (see Das 2007).
Prior to contact, the word Puyai referred to a set of moral
prohibitions established through the originary differentiations
of humans and animals recounted in adode myth narratives.
 280
According to these narratives, all beings once shared a hu-
manoid form and limited language. The precontact world—
and moral human life—emerged through a series of trans-
formations. When each original being transformed, he or she
left behind a prohibition and a technique for social becoming:
how to make fire, find food, cure sickness, defend against
enemies. Protohumans became moral humans through the
power to master transformation and to objectify objectifi-
cation, within the limits established by the Puyai (see Bessire
2011b; Turner 2009). There were thousands of these prohi-
bitions, and together they articulated the defining limits of
moral humanity. In the aftermath of world-ending violence
and the upheavals of contact, however, the category of Puyai
was evacuated. The label Puyai still names the domain of the
profane and the immoral, but the specific practices to which
it applies have been inverted.
The mind-altering substance now called Puyai delivers as
much cocaine to the bloodstream as crack, along with ad-
ditional toxic chemicals. It is just as addictive as crack, and
one small envelope cost approximately 50 cents in 2010. The
increasing traction of Puyai among urban Ayoreo youth is
part of a wider regional trend, in which hundreds of
thousands of street children and urban poor in Latin America
have successfully been transformed into a consumer market
for the waste by-products of cocaine manufacturing (Iciardi
and Surratt 1998). “The first time you try it, you never want
to quit,” as one Ayoreo woman put it. “You just want more,
more, more.”
The vice of the Puyedie also includes eating dirt and the
bricks that line the bottom of open sewage ditches built as
part of civic hygiene programs. “It is another of our vices so
those bricks taste good to us.” “They had piled a lot of pieces
over there and each time someone passed by that place they
grabbed some of those pieces with the black things, the sewage
and they ate it.” One Puye woman said that it was the brick-
eating that led her to the coca-paste smoking, rather than
vice versa. She tried to hide it from her husband. “Then I
would remember and try it again and I liked it again. . . . I
ground the bricks into powder and I ate it, my mouth was
full of it and one day he saw me and spoke to me but I
couldn’t reply because my mouth was full of dust. So he beat
me.” They said that some of the women forgo any other kind
of food and eat so many bricks that they turn yellow. “When
that one defecates,” they laughed, “it is pure brick that comes
out.” The life of the Puyedie is prohibited life.
Negative Immanence
Ayoreo-speaking people use the word urusori to describe the
state of being drunk or high. The same word also refers to a
common form of madness associated with frightening en-
counters with Cojñone strangers or their technologies, such
as a jet plane unexpectedly passing overhead at dusk. Like
Puyai, the multiple meanings of the term narrate a dramatic
shift in Ayoreo senses of being in the world. Prior to contact,
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Current Anthropology Volume 55, Number 3, June 2014
this affliction was attributed to transgressing the puyaque pro-
hibitions of ritually powerful spirit beings, particularly Poji,
or Iguana. Like an iguana, the afflicted ones would run to
the forest, sleep in holes, and eat raw food. They shared an
instinctive compulsion to flee from their own people, a fear
of fire, a compromised language. This urusori madness re-
sulted from the loss of a certain kind of soul matter known
as ayipie. The ayipie includes the bodily seats of willpower,
memory, rationality, and social sentiments such as shame. In
short, it encompasses precisely the elements of moral hu-
manity.
Many Ayoreo say that contact and conversion to evangelical
Christianity represented a rupture that was as profound as
the originary differentiations of humans and animals related
in adode creation myths. Contact meant leaving behind the
moral ecology of Erami, the forest-world, and inhabiting a
new place called Cojñone-Gari (That-Which-Belongs-to-
Strangers), where life and agency were determined by Dupade,
the Christian God, for whom past moral selves are deeply
profane. Survival in Cojñone-Gari required Ayoreo to become
“New People,” a transformation only possible through the
evacuation and reconstitution of the ayipie soul matter into
a new form pleasing to Jesus. Most Ayoreo-speaking people
underwent this process, called chinoningase, which ideally
erased memory, reordered causality, and demanded the com-
plete abandonment of the practices and forms previously con-
sidered to manifest the sacred (see Bessire 2011a). During the
upheavals of contact, cases of urusori proliferated, yet the
symptoms changed. Those now stricken with urusori expe-
rience symptoms that bear a striking resemblance to precon-
tact lifeways resignified as dangerously profane. They turn
against the trappings of moral life in Cojñone-Gari. Unless
forcibly restrained, they attempt to shred their clothes, break
their dishes, and return to the forest. They do not act like
iguanas but like themselves prior to contact and conversion.
At this extreme point, such sensibilities coalesce into a
disordered formation of becoming. They reflect an Ayoreo
theory of moral humanity predicated on the value of rupture
and the capacity for self-transformation. Regardless of its pre-
cise cause, urusori reveals the loss of the ayipie. It is an inverted
state of being associated with the savage, the animal, the con-
taminated, and most especially, with the transgression of pu-
yaque moral limits. It is a form of historical consciousness
that expresses the domain of the prohibited and profane.
Urusori is the negative image of the ideal moral human. Yet
even this negation is rendered precarious and fractured by
the harsh conditions of postcontact life.
Each manifestation of urusori—spirit possession, inversions
of contact, drug delirium—is mutually exclusive and demands
a further negation as soon as it moves within semantic avail-
ability. These nonlinear, self-consuming processes constitute
a particular Ayoreo form of moral reasoning about the “ner-
vous system” of internal colonialism and state fetishism in
the Gran Chaco, one attuned to the lack of culture not as a
moral failing but as yet another pressure-ridge (or is it a
Bessire The Rise of Indigenous Hypermarginality
fissure?) in the space of death (Taussig 1992). Apocalyptic
eschatology negates world-ending violence and the rampant
ecological devastation of industrial agriculture. Conversion to
Christianity negates the prior human signified as savage by
outsiders and so ruthlessly exterminated in the past: an op-
eration standardized through electronic media practices (see
Bessire 2012b). The madness of memory or drugs negates the
Christian moral self and the social marginalization of the
supposedly deculturated ex-primitive at the same time.
These negations do not devolve into absolute loss, voiceless
abjection, or bare life but rather coalesce into a formation of
negative immanence, adapted to terror and death, rendered
sensible through the impossibility of sense, a formation that
is contrary to contradiction, that embraces the perpetual in-
sufficiency of Ayoreo life, and defiantly embraces this self-
negation as the conditions of subjective possibility (see also
Gordillo 2004, 2006). To become a Puye is the most extreme
expression of this negative possibilism (see Hirschman 1971).
It means embracing a self-conscious inhumanity, an inten-
tional self-defacement, a moral desubjectification. To turn
filth into food, to make coca-paste delirium into reason, is
to inhabit the space of death as the basis for life and to make
madness the norm in a world already out of control.
All too often, outsiders misrecognize these oppositional
Ayoreo life projects as evidence of the inevitable social death
attributed to primitives in general. In the words of Alfred
Métraux, the great ethnographer of the Chaco, “For us to be
able to study a primitive society, it must already be starting
to disintegrate” (in Clastres 1998:96). For urban Ayoreo, this
sense of cultural disintegration overlaps with the general social
decay already attributed to slum dwellers (see Canova 2011;
Portes 1972:273). This means that—for those who still insist
on reducing the validity of Ayoreo life to continuity with
traditional cosmology (Bórmida 1984; Dasso 2004; Fischer-
mann 2001), a hunter-gatherer moral economy (Renshaw
2002; von Bremen 2000), or a perspectival ontology—con-
temporary Ayoreo life must either contain a kernel of radical
alterity hidden under a misleading veneer of change or in-
carnate a process of ethnocide and culture death. As Ticio
Escobar put it long before he became the Paraguayan minister
of culture, evangelical ethnocide against Ayoreo “breaks the
spine of a people,” “pulverizes their communities,” and “con-
verts their members into caricatures of westerners and later
. . . sends them to a marginal underworld of begging, pros-
titution, alcoholism and petty crime where they end as beings
that have no place in their culture nor the culture of others”
(Escobar 1988:36–37). For Escobar, this process makes Ay-
oreo-speaking people into a peculiar form of nonhumanity,
whose “men wander as shadows of themselves through work
camps or colonies . . . and their women, defeated, arrive at
the towns to give themselves up as semi-slaves or prostitutes”
(1988:36). Culture death not only erases their humanity but
also is believed to manifest in psychopathologies, such as
suicide, apathy, substance abuse, and marginalization (see also
Stearman 1989). In this reckoning, failure to resist stands in
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281
for systematic subjugation. The supposedly deculturated ex-
primitive is then blamed for her own amplified dehumani-
zation.
Broken Lines of Flight
One 33-year-old Puye woman, Rosy, began huffing gasoline
in her early teens while living on an evangelical mission near
Santa Cruz, a bustling metropolitan area of more than 2 mil-
lion inhabitants. Like many Ayoreo people, she moved to an
Ayoreo squatter camp on the outskirts of the city in her early
teens, looking for a temporary wage-labor job. There, she
switched from gasoline to shoe glue but quit after it caused
her to abort a 7-month-old fetus. While in Santa Cruz, she
often stayed at the place called the Casa Campesina, built by
an advocacy nongovernmental organization (NGO) and in-
tended as a temporary lodging place for Ayoreo-speaking peo-
ple during their visits to the city (see Roca Ortı́z 2008). At
Casa Campesina, she learned how to smoke coca paste from
other Ayoreo. At the time, her mother was away working on
ranches. When she found out that Rosy had become a viciosa,
or one living “the life of vice,” her mother began to cry. “She
told me that she had heard that vices will kill me, that they
are bad, that they are against God. That is why she began to
cry, she began to feel bad all over.” Her older sister tried to
make her quit by tying her up with rope and beating her.
“She beat me badly with a piece of wood but I am strong
and I did not pay attention to her.”
Rosy told of passing out and waking up in strange places,
snatches of incoherent conversation, bribing police with
money or sex, and a life defined by violent confrontations
with Ayoreo and Cojñone alike. Rosy could not leave anything
in their camp because the other Puyedie would steal it. Many
of the Puyedie give themselves the names of animals, like
Vı́bora (Snake), Caballo (Horse), Por-si-acaso (Just in Case),
Salvaje (Savage). Rosy said that she knew her vices were dan-
gerous: “The vices kill us.” Many of her friends had already
died from their vices, more than she could keep track of.
“More than ten, more than twenty, I don’t know.” She herself
was frequently sick these days, from what she did not know.
“When you are a viciosa, any illness will grab you, you know.”
Even so, she said she would not give up her vices. “They are
sweet, unejna, to me.” She said if she was taken somewhere
else, away from her vices, she would return. Over the course
of the interviews with Irene Roca Ortı́z (personal commu-
nication, 2012), the stories unraveled into disaggregated frag-
ments. “She was jealous of her husband.” “Snake.” “I would
fuck an animal or the Devil.” “Who are you?” “Here comes
Horse.” “Let’s go.” Laughter.
Rosy emphasized that her deadly vices gave her life. She
said that without her vices, she became more like an animal.
She said she could not leave them. “You’d better tie me to a
tree,” she smiled, “or I won’t stay.” The same coarse rope is
used to tie down all those afflicted with the urusori of madness
or vice, to keep them from running off to an alterity at once
 282
inhuman and legitimating. And it is the same knot that always
slips.
This slippage is comparable to what Gilles Deleuze, as part
of his efforts to understand drug causality, referred to as the
“lines of flight” constituting a social that is constantly escaping
or leaking out in all directions: “The drug user creates active
lines of flight. But these lines roll up, start to turn into black
holes, with each drug user in a hole, as a group or individually,
like a periwinkle. Dug in instead of spaced out” (Deleuze
2006:153, quoted in Biehl 2011:70). João Biehl extends this
insight to the analysis of pharmaceutical subjectivity in gen-
eral, as a “continuous process of experimentation . . . an art
of existence and as a material and means of sociality and
governance” whose study “recasts totalizing assumptions of
the workings of collectivities and institutions” (2011:72). Such
conceptualizations envision drug consumption as “a com-
bined chemical/intimate/social/economic matter” that always
bridges the psychic and the political-economic (2011:70).
Likewise, the “disordered subjectivities” of Ayoreo-speaking
Puyedie should not be understood as psychopathologies pro-
duced by the disintegration of culture, but rather as radical
forms of immanence that simultaneously instantiate and sub-
vert the contradictory meanings and values attributed to in-
digenous “life as such” within the contemporary. That is, they
are the “dense transfer points” by which global political econ-
omies are fused with the most intimate forms of everyday
experience (Foucault 1978:103; Good et al. 2008).
The stories told by Rosy about chemical lines of flight
articulate precisely the fractured subjectivities of the ex-prim-
itive, caught as they are between visibility and erasure, vitality
and public death. Considered the biological residues of culture
death, the ex-primitive is not eligible for the protections newly
extended to cultural life. They are again treated as subhuman
Bárbaros to be exterminated or consumed, a “social problem”
and threat to civic hygiene (see Canova 2011; Roca Ortı́z
2008). They face systematic discrimination and are stigma-
tized as prostitutes and beggars. In the popular press, urban
Ayoreo are described as evidence of what happens when “ur-
ban sprawl devours a culture,” a group that has lost “the
foundations for the reproduction of their culture” and whose
“cultural fabric has been torn apart in the clash with main-
stream society” (see Infantas 2012). Or, as Sebastián Hurtado
Rodrı́guez, the deputy governor of one province in the de-
partment of Santa Cruz, put it in 2011, the Ayoreo in general
are “a defect [lacra] of society,” a group that “must become
useful human material for society and not a visible defect,
not a lamentable burden” (Correo del Sur 2011).
Few can articulate what kind of force emanates from these
perceptions of Ayoreo as a subhuman blemish or burden, but
there are times when everyone can feel it, when it builds from
thin air and unfurls in the atmosphere like a storm or a stench
that settles on the tongue. “Those Ayoreo are just savages you
know,” white man to white man on a dark street, “They’ll do
anything for a Coca-cola.” A certain tone in the laughter, a
certain shift in posture. “They like it when you are rough,
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Current Anthropology Volume 55, Number 3, June 2014
you know, give them a slap.” If one walks with any young
Ayoreo girl at night down the sandy roads and open sewers,
the threat is palpable. The unsmiling whistles, the mocking
shouts, the ones who follow silently in the shadows.
It is no coincidence that the “postmulticultural age”—
where an ethics of difference is imagined to partially reverse
historic inequalities—is marked by amplified violence against
Ayoreo-speaking people, and young urban dwelling women
in particular. Nor is it a coincidence that this violence is
characterized by an exceptional degree of brutality: the same
patterns of overkill, mutilation, intentionally prolonged mur-
ders, and the use of blunt instruments characteristic of bias
motivated violence or hate crimes (see Bell 2004). The teen-
ager cut from vagina to chin in one long rip. The girl whose
dismembered corpse was thrown into a vacant city lot in Santa
Cruz. The young woman whose intestines were cut out and
strung for 10 yards along a fence line. The 15-year-old girl
stripped naked and gang raped by rich teenagers from the
city who took pictures of it on their cell phones. The 5-year-
old girl sexually abused and beaten to death in a small Bolivian
town. Two years later, her 14-year-old sister, a part-time sex
worker just elected as the 2012 “Queen of Carnaval” by the
Ayoreo barrio in Santa Cruz, was found stripped, strangled,
and mutilated in the trash behind a bar. Her corpse was only
recognizable by the homemade tattoo of a heart on her arm
(El Dı́a 2011). (Indeed, some young urban Ayoreo say, with
a laugh, that they get tattoos precisely so their corpses will
be recognizable.)
At the same time, the frustrated desires for pure primitives
are once again displaced onto the two small Ayoreo bands
remaining in the dwindling forests of the Bolivia/Paraguay
borderlands. Described as “the last uncontacted Indians south
of the Amazon,” these people, perhaps 30 individuals in total,
are imagined to exist as “a single, inseparable unit” with the
ecological “heart of the Chaco” (IWGIA 2010:21; see also
Glauser 2007). Across the world, new managerial logics and
subjective horizons are being developed around the urgency
of preserving their imperiled existence. Website messages im-
ploring readers to take action against their imminent extinc-
tion have proven effective at raising funds for several com-
peting NGOs and generating waves of protests, like the one
in 2010 by demonstrators waving signs that read “Save the
Ayoreo” outside Paraguayan embassies throughout Europe.
Increasingly, legitimate Ayoreo life is indistinguishable from
the neocolonial fantasy of the “voluntarily isolated” primitive.
Yet the hypervisibility of the isolated subject is premised on
the valorization of a kind of life that can only be legitimate
to the degree that it remains outside of history, the market,
and social relation itself. This becomes a form of violence to
the degree that the ranking of cultural legitimacies blurs into
the ranking of biolegitimacies, as well as the displacement of
the life projects of actual indigenous peoples in the name of
the self-determination of an isolated subject that is always
already hyperreal (see Bessire 2012a).
The hypermarginality of Ayoreo-speaking peoples in the
Bessire The Rise of Indigenous Hypermarginality
Gran Chaco is maximally expressed among the Puyedie. It is
hard to imagine more thoroughly animalized beings, inserted
as they are into contradictory moral, political, and economic
orders through an unstable personhood of death. Like those
stricken mad by a frightening encounter with Cojñone or dark
spirits, the dehumanization of the Puyedie is a legible expe-
rience of negation for other Ayoreo. Both forms of urusori
are lines of flight that organize vital contents in a recognizably
nonhuman way through rupturing rupture itself. Yet even
these spiraling lines of flight are made tenuous or broken by
the oppositional kind of negation reserved for the decultur-
ated indigene within postmulticulturalist society. It is through
their public death that profound contradictions between the
“negative citizenship” of deculturated life, the resurgent moral
economies of primitivism, and the figure of a savagery that
must be sacrificed are uneasily reconciled (see also Biehl 2001:
141; Biehl 2005). The result for the hypermarginal subject is
an amplified political erasure without the possibility of mag-
ical powers or cultural revitalization or biomedical salvation
or sacrificial status or even a healing reincorporation into
market productivity. Rather, their routine animalization is a
negative image by which native culture instantiates a neolib-
eral politics of life.
Culture as a Neoliberal Politics of Life
The rise of indigenous hypermarginality implies both conti-
nuity and change. Colonial authorities, of course, have long
deployed culture as an ideal through and against which valid
indigenous life is delimited (see Brown 1996; Comaroff 1985;
Dirks 1992; Stoler 1989).3 As Taussig (1987, 1993) describes,
in Latin America this took the form of colonial drives to
create, extirpate, and ultimately enact savagery in order to
bend the magic of primitive alterity to political and economic
ends. Early twentieth-century efforts by Latin American gov-
ernments to solve the “Indian Problem” with forced accul-
turation programs arose simultaneously with the most gro-
tesque forms of public extermination. If genocidal sacrifice
failed, then stripping Indians of their less evolved cultures
was believed to be a necessary first step for exposing them to
the superior culture of rational modernity and integrating
them into productive relationships with the nation and the
market (see ILO 1954; Lucero 2003; Rodrı́guez-Piñero 2005:
55). It is worth noting that even these foundational efforts
to conceptualize indigenous rights, however, insisted on a
3. This, of course, is related to specific histories of “bios” in Latin
America. While I do not have space to develop this line of argumentation
here, it should be noted that although the linkages between indigenous
culture and legitimate life are particular and historically produced, this
does not preclude comparative analysis or foreclose the possibility that
the contemporary is marked by the rise of a new regime by which these
are politically fused. Culture is substituted for the value and meaning of
indigenous life. This cultural life is both irrational and legitimate only
to the degree that it is emphatically not bare life, but a morally ordered
kind of life that evokes its own negative image in the form of the de-
culturated.
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283
tripartite distinction between those populations descended
from ancient empires, “aboriginal forest-dwellers” and “mar-
ginals,” or those “who find themselves placed half-way be-
tween two strongly different cultural milieux and whose main
characteristic lies in an incomplete adhesion and participation
both in the national and the aboriginal milieus” (ILO 1954:
156). That is, the most degraded Indians were not those with
undeveloped cultures but those believed to have no culture
at all. What is distinct about the contemporary moment is
that the sociolegal recognition of cultural diversity has in-
verted assimilationist schema while intensifying the violent
marginalization of ex-primitives.
The marginal living conditions of Ayoreo-speaking people,
of course, are not new either. Much like the disordered sub-
jectivities of Ayoreo-speaking people, they reflect long his-
tories of slavery, genocide, dispossession, and displacement.
What I am arguing is that recent realignments of governance,
market, and citizenship have amplified these preexisting in-
equalities to the point whereby those excluded from the ma-
trix of culture are no longer deemed worthy of the same kind
of life, if they are worthy of any life at all. Disintegration and
death define the lives of supposedly deculturated ex-primi-
tives, a process that proliferates in both urban peripheries and
former wilderness zones where state authority has long been
precarious or expeditionary. This occurs against a backdrop
of familiar and well-documented trends typical of late or neo-
liberalism, including increasing disparities in wealth and
health between Ayoreo people and their nonindigenous coun-
terparts, the loss of viable ancestral territories to rampant
agro-industrial expansion, internal social fragmentation,
withering sources and opportunities for wage labor, and a
general disconnection of Ayoreo from macroeconomic trends
and social stigmatization. What is new is how these trends
and the incoherence upon which they depend are amplified
through state guarantees of cultural rights. That is, the po-
litical governance of culture redistributes and fundamentally
changes the nature of indigenous marginality. This occurs
through new linkages being made between authorized culture
and legitimate indigenous life.
As Wacquant (2012:68) has argued, the anthropology of
neoliberalism is roughly divided into two approaches: “a heg-
emonic economic conception anchored by variants of market
rule, on the one side, and an insurgent approach fuelled by
loose derivations of the Foucaultian notion of government-
ality, on the other.” The first approach to neoliberalism imag-
ines a state retreating or withering in the face of an expanding
market. The second approach defines neoliberalism as a fluid,
transnational set of rationalities, calculations, or technologies
that reorder the conduct of the governed themselves according
to widespread appropriation of market logics of comp-
etition, efficiency, and use. The notion of neoliberal
(post)multiculturalism, as developed by scholars of Latin
American indigeneity, is appealing precisely because it prom-
ises to synthesize these two academic models. Thus, neolib-
eralism ostensibly reveals “the state as an inefficient, often
 284
corrupt actor that only encumbers the market’s neutral and
unselfish actions” (Postero 2006:15). At the same time, schol-
ars suggest “the bottom line is that successful neoliberal sub-
jects must govern themselves in accordance with the logic of
global capitalism” (Postero 2006:16). Here, the ascendancy of
a neoliberal order is reflected in both the erosion of the state
and the creation of subjects who govern themselves according
to neoliberal rationalities. Yet the neoliberal governance of
indigenous subjects is often presumed to subsequently follow
an exceptional trajectory—postmulticulturalism—because of
what is believed to be an inherent antagonism of “the indig-
enous” and “the cultural” to “the neoliberal.” Thus, the pre-
sent can be described as an era characterized by “a new form
of protagonism that both incorporates and challenges the
underlying philosophies of neoliberalism,” through social mo-
bilizations that “push to make [neoliberal state] institutions
more inclusive” (Postero 2006:17, 225). In such models, the
indigenous appropriation of neoliberal logics explains the in-
creased traction of broad social movements, insofar as this
appropriation is imagined to create a postmulticultural al-
ternative and antineoliberal state characterized by inclusion.
Or, as the preamble to the 2009 Constitution of Bolivia puts
it, “We have left the colonial, republican and neoliberal State
in the past.”
The figure of the Ayoreo Puyedie suggests the co-occurrence
of an opposing dynamic. The exclusionary structures and
logics of recent years are not always threatened by indigenous
mobilizations, but rather, redistributed in response to them.
This implies a dual reversal of some conventional concep-
tualizations of the relationships between the indigenous and
the neoliberal. First, it suggests that the figure of the post-
multicultural Latin American state is characterized not by its
erosion but by its recasting as the indirect manager of con-
stantly shifting borders of life and death, human and non-
human, both embodied frontiers increasingly mediated by the
polysemous category of culture. Second, it implies that im-
buing a categorical feedback loop with the appearance of an
intrinsic structural antagonism between the rational neoliberal
and the cultural indigenous is precisely what allows gover-
nance to coalesce around a robust set of cultural rights and
the increasingly thorough dispossession of certain stigmatized
indigenous populations at the same time. Reformed institu-
tions do concede rights to a cultural citizenship, but in doing
so, they gain new authority to enforce the boundaries of what
does not count as legitimate or moral indigenous life.
The fact that structural inequalities and familiar exclusions
are not disappearing but deepening for stigmatized popula-
tions is predictable if neoliberalism is approached not as the
successful dismantling but the strategic reengineering of state
government and its animating matrices of contradiction, hi-
erarchy, and difference, whereby the tenets of liberal citizen-
ship remain the exclusive purview of a privileged few and are
denied to many. Here, late liberalism or neoliberalism is not
only a form of market-conforming state crafting that “consists
of an articulation of state, market and citizenship that har-
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Current Anthropology Volume 55, Number 3, June 2014
nesses the first to impose the stamp of the second onto the
third” (Wacquant 2012:71), but appears as a political recon-
figuration of the moral value and practical limits of “life as
such” whereby the distance between antiliberalisms and neo-
liberalisms is not as great as it may appear (see also Ferguson
2010). What makes postmulticultural indigeneity a distinct
formation of late liberalism is how this redistribution of the
value and meaning of life does not prima rily gain traction
through the figure of market rationalities internalized by in-
dividuals but through their piecemeal enshrinement in a po-
litically retooled notion of culture denied to potentially sub-
versive or disruptive groups. Culture here figures as a
disjunctive matrix of subjection and encompassment that is
coproduced simultaneously by the state, nonstate political
actors, and a transnational moral economy in which the cul-
tural life of indigenous subjects is indistinguishable from the
legitimacy of that life. It thus reveals how the legal government
of culture may imply what Benjamin (1999 [1921]) called
“law making” or law-instating violence. It reveals a funda-
mental lawlessness at the core of legalizing cultural rights,
through which culturalist governance is linked to the in-
strumental epistemic murk through which neocolonial
(dis)orders are violently reproduced and sustained through
the figure of their systematic negation (see Taussig 1987).
To summarize how the rise of indigenous hypermarginality
is related to neoliberal governance in Latin America today, I
offer the following three theses:
1. Neoliberal governance coalesces through the legal contrac-
tion of indigenous culture. The increasingly robust protections
afforded to culture-as-a-collective-right in Latin America co-
incides with a legal definition restricted to something like a
Herderian notion of bounded, stable difference or even cos-
mological alterity, as in recent legislation of “usos y costum-
bres” in Colombia, “formas peculiares de vida” in Paraguay,
or egalitarian administrative structures in Bolivia (see Albro
2005; Jackson 1995, 2007; Turner 1993, 1999). The result, in
practice, is that authorized culture does not correspond to
the painstakingly open-ended conceptualizations developed
within anthropology, but rather, denotes an artificially narrow
state of exception limited to an impoverished and petrified
subjectivity prescribed by politics and paradoxically reified as
an empirical reality by primitivist anthropologies. Indigenous
subjectivities based on desire, meaningful transformations, or
negative immanence—that is, actually existing indigenous al-
terities—are thereby stripped of the protections of citizenship
and exposed to violent extermination. This process coincides
with the culturalization of legitimate life.
2. Neoliberal governance coalesces through the culturalization
of legitimate indigenous life. Such logics are evident across a
domain of apparently opposed practices, from transnational
NGO advocacy and international law to national culturalist
policies, humanitarian interventions, and anthropological
scholarship. This instrumental slippage not only creates what
Alcida Ramos (1998) called the “hyperreal Indian” but also
imbues the imaginary of the neoliberal state with forceful
Bessire The Rise of Indigenous Hypermarginality
solidity, provides new techniques to police indigenous pop-
ulations, and grants new legitimacy to selectively deploy (or
ignore) violence against any unruly indigenous subjects who,
by definition, can never fully inhabit the limited category of
authorized culture. The result is a Hobbesian competition for
the scarce resources and rights arbitrarily disbursed in the
name of indigenous self-determination by a self-satisfied gov-
erning apparatus. It is this mechanism that Charles Hale,
building on Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, describes so well in his
evocative figure of the indio permitido.4 In such a schema, the
figure of the state gains moral authority through the imaginary
of its retreat or transformation into an “antineoliberal alter-
native,” and its various institutions and agents acquire power
to manage (often by doing nothing) the contents of a cultural
citizenship based on mutually exclusive premises. Social
movements aimed at securing cultural citizenship while not
contesting these limits paradoxically strengthen the denial of
the humanity of those collective native subjects deemed de-
culturated.
3. Neoliberal governance coalesces through state outsourcing
to culturalist humanitarianisms. The culturalization of legiti-
mate indigenous life is consolidated through its outsourcing
to what can be described as a global “culturalist humanitar-
ianism,” organized by NGO networks, funded by charity, and
concerned with preserving the sanctity of cultural life. Cul-
tural life, however, exists only as a collective and not as an
individual life. Thus, cultural loss is given a greater moral
weight than physical death; the sanctity of culture is privileged
over the sanctity of bodily life. Structural violence against
those considered to be insufficiently cultural is then glossed
as an indigenous failure to resist or an inability to fully com-
prehend their own origins. That is, the sociological conditions
of violent dispossession are mistaken for ontological degra-
dation, and the “distorted characteristics of the victimizer”
are imputed to the victims (Portes 1972:286). The sense that
these perceived failures require moral remediation spurs
movements to safeguard a culture neglected or imperiled by
its former possessors (see also Gledhill 2004). This is a col-
onizing operation that is crucial for the accumulations and
expenditures of contemporary humanitarianisms and the
emergence of culture as both a regime of biolegitimacy and
a political theology animated by the sanctity of life itself (see
Fassin 2012). These dynamics reveal how culture is redeployed
not as an empirical reality in need of a more precise catalog
of its contents or a more effective policing of its boundaries,
but rather as a sustaining metanarrative of a governmental
system whereby the tenets of democratic liberalism remain
the exclusive purview of the privileged few, even while in-
creasing inequality and amplified forms of dispossession de-
fine the lives of most.
4. Or one “who has passed the test of modernity, substituted protest
for proposal, and learned to be both authentic and conversant with the
dominant milieu. Its other is unruly, vindictive and conflict-prone” (Hale
2004:19).
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285
Global Dimensions of Hypermarginality
Hypermarginality—in its general features and forms—is not
limited to the particularities of the Ayoreo case. Indeed, sim-
ilarly hypermarginal and unauthorized ex-primitives can be
found inhabiting (neo)colonial margins across the Americas,
among urban squats and rural dead zones, concessioned res-
ervations and outsourced camps, disfigured ecologies and in-
dustrial deserts. In lowland South America, formations of
hypermarginality appear to be especially common among the
displaced descendants of formerly nomadic forest-dwelling
groups historically targeted by genocidal violence and evan-
gelical missionaries and now confined to the bottom of local
class hierarchies, such as Maká, Aché, and Manjuy people in
Paraguay; Sirionó and Yuquı́ in Bolivia; or Nukak in Colom-
bia.
Yet striking parallels appear both closer to home and farther
away among those peoples whose authenticity is deemed al-
ways spurious, whose being cannot be confined to colonial
limits, whose culture is labeled insufficient, whose lives are
always already degraded by the apparent loss of a legitimating
essence or ancestral source they never fully possessed. Hy-
permarginality emerges wherever the category of culture is
put at the service of sustaining bioinequalities rather than
their creative dissolution, a process that depends on making
the dehumanization of indigenous peoples appear as their
failure to effectively resist or to fully comprehend their own
origins, the inability to understand the implications of em-
bracing a desiring subjectivity, or the impotency of the stories
they tell about themselves. To be sure, hypermarginality is a
familiar type. Ethnographers have provided detailed and com-
plex accounts of its dynamics from around the globe. There
are iconic cases, such as the systematic animalization of so-
called Bushmen in southern Africa. Accounts by Gordon
(2000), Marshall (2002), and Wilmsen (1989) each show how
ethnographic and colonial imagery of their cultural alterity is
causally linked to sharp bioinequalities and their status as
“the most victimized and brutalized people in the bloody
history that is southern Africa” (Gordon 2000:10). Similar
examples can be found from the aboriginal town camps
around Alice Springs, Australia, to urban Indians in Canada,
from remote villages in Alaska to Latin American slums and
the Andaman Islands or the Meratus Mountains of Indonesia
described by Tsing (2005).
Moreover, the global rise of indigenous hypermarginality
itself is neither unique nor unpredictable. Rather, it occurs in
the context of proliferating regimes of sociospatial or scientific
isolation, and in the growing forces of an ex-territorializing
containment around the world (Agier 2007; Bauman 2011).
What are the Puyedie if not just another set of faces in a
groundswell of “bruised populations” that now wait inter-
minably in camps of all kinds? What are the isolated Ayoreo
bands if not refugees roaming the deserts of our collective
political imaginaries? No less than the desplazados of Colom-
bia or the Congo, Ayoreo-speaking people are perpetually
 286
relocated somewhere between the human and the nonhuman,
even as they creatively transform hypermarginal spaces into
the zones of livable life, authorized or otherwise. Such spread-
ing forms of exclusionary closure contradict the common
notion that the present is best defined as the Network Age,
or as a rising epoch of techno-political possibilities facilitated
through horizontal attachments and the democratizing break-
down of barriers of all kinds, from state to species (Latour
2005). Rather, we confront an increasingly polarized world.
Here, the idea that the present is defined by horizontal net-
works may well appear as the fetish or emblem of the lib-
eralism of a privileged few even as the durable denial of as-
sociation defines the lives of most (see also Bessire 2012a;
Bond 2013). In this case, authorized culture reappears as a
crucial medium for the stratifying craft of the neoliberal state.
Taking the relationship between these dynamics and ev-
eryday Ayoreo sensibilities as an ethnographic question also
poses new challenges for the practice of public anthropology.
As Robert Borofsky (2011) put it, public anthropology has
become a magic word capable of conjuring real effects from
thin air and thick description. Yet this magic consists mainly
in bringing together strikingly diverse styles of engagement
and modes of practice under a single rubric, such as public
education, the identification of inequality, collaborative re-
search, and community-based activism. Public anthropology
in indigenous Latin America is often roughly divided into two
distinct approaches. The first is a kind of expert anthropology
concerned with validating or authorizing the strategic essen-
tialisms of cultural alterity by institutions and communities,
as a way to leverage claims against the state for more effective
enforcement of rights and a more equitable distribution of
resources. The second comprises those who use ethnography
to effectively gain critical distance and bear witness to the
sociopolitical stakes around various sites and structures of
intervention.
Both approaches suffer a mirror defect that may hinder
their applicability to the case of indigenous hypermarginality.
The first, in its eagerness to play by the given rules, risks
reifying an exclusionary category and validating the logics of
accountability that are part of the problem in the first place.
That is, it restricts public anthropology and human possibility
to the radical potentials of culture-as-authorized-moral-con-
tent. The second approach, however, often overlooks the so-
cial presence of authorized culture entirely due to what is
perceived to be its compromised heuristic weight. One may
be complicit in the recent fetishism of primitive culture, the
other risks ignoring the social life of culture entirely. Both
approaches, then, fail to account for the real organizing force
that a politically revitalized culture concept exerts through
and against the limits of indigenous life: an operation that
particularly targets the ontological contents so eagerly sought
by primitivist anthropologies. Imagining a decolonizing ac-
ademic praxis in this situation requires abandoning the search
for the primitive, for legitimating origins, for a phenome-
nology of the sacred (see Smith 1999). It means turning in-
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Current Anthropology Volume 55, Number 3, June 2014
stead to a suspicious anthropology capable of asking how
unstable modes of dispossession and contradictory forms of
interpretation blur into the subjective immanence of the mar-
ginalized. It means grasping the radical forms of possibilism
that arise despite and because of the most degraded conditions
of human existence. It requires an exercise in radical opti-
mism.
Where are we to locate such off-centered analytic terms for
imagining a political anthropology of an actually existing in-
digenous alterity, one capable of unsettling the unequal give
and take of internal colonialism? Such a project can begin by
embracing the sense of the culture category as the nonsense
of colonial violence and abandoning the perception that our
capacity for engaged critique is restricted to the logics of
cultural alterity. “Culture is our central concept, and every-
thing else depends on it,” as Sol Tax argued (1975:514), but
not in the way that many public intellectuals of indigeneity
presume. It is high time to recognize that restricting the search
for radical possibility to the contents of a “primitive ontology”
or a “society against the state” is not the solution but part of
the problem. It risks reproducing a crucial metanarrative that
liberalism tells about itself and thus reanimating the colonial
space of death for ex-primitives like Ayoreo.
Yet what kind of figure can we conjure to offer something
better? Surely, the Ayoreo insist, do not look to them, to the
ruptured clothes of the Urusori or the swollen gums of the
Puyedie. They offer no comfort, no redemption, no healing
magic, no easy way to make sense of dehumanizing nonsense.
And that is precisely why they should not be ignored. Ayoreo
voices deny the easy escapes of a stable outside, to be inhabited
at our leisure. They let none of us off the hook. They mock
and confound any attempt to find a new origin, to tell a linear
story, to reanimate our logics of redemption. They pull us
down into the vortical flows of rupture. The antitheory of
rupturing-becoming they suggest brackets a form of moral
reasoning about the contemporary whereby immanence and
negation are collapsed in a series of contradictory and non-
linear ways. While such disordered sensibilities model and
reproduce the terms of the neoliberal and neocolonial situ-
ation whereby ex-primitives are denied their very humanity,
such sensibilities cannot simply be reduced to the terms of a
system bent on their destruction. Rather, Ayoreo proponents
of negative immanence stridently reclaim a capacity to trans-
form self and world, in terms that are not autonomous or
external to the colonial conjuncture but are also distinctly
Ayoreo. The crucial divergence is that these fluid Ayoreo pro-
jects invariably protest a fundamental link in the colonial
culturalist chain of cause and effect. They presume that con-
tinuity is rupture, and that being is always becoming.
The Stranger
Everywhere she turns, the Ayoreo-speaking Puye is both an
unexpected stranger and as predictable as the discarded plastic
bags that litter the villa miserı́a. Her outsideness threatens to
Bessire The Rise of Indigenous Hypermarginality 287

undo the outside itself, precisely because she mocks the fiction important comments. I gratefully acknowledge that it is based
of cosmological exteriority and thus reclaims the capacity on research supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and
for self-transformation according to unauthorized and co- a Mellon/ACLS Early Career Fellowship.
authored terms. Thus, the Puye may proclaim raucously that
vice is life, that urusori is the only form of reason that makes
sense these days. She stumbles and trips across three zones
of nonlife at once, a living death and deathly life that is the
mirror image to the differentiation and homogenization of
Comments
the human/nonhuman that is the technique of colonial terror, João Biehl
a mimetic difference the Puyedie sell, eat, and smoke. Lines Department of Anthropology, Princeton University, 116 Aaron
of flight devolve like the delirious mocking words of the Pu- Burr Hall, Princeton, New Jersey 08544-1011, U.S.A. (jbiehl@
yedie themselves into opposing negative images at the same princeton.edu). 6 I 14
time, chanted like an incantation to the herky-jerky rhythms
of negative becoming in a hypermarginal world.
Fugitive Field
Her voice was hoarse, her speech slurred:
For over a decade, the intrepid Lucas Bessire (2006, 2011a)
has been chronicling the postcontact travails of one of the
I was young when I came. world’s last voluntarily isolated group of hunter-gatherers,
Before the bus station. who walked out of the forest in northern Paraguay in the
I was young when I came. early 2000s. Using multiple and intense genres of engage-
I was pretty. ment—deep ethnography, affective filmmaking, and fast-
I lived with my gold teeth. paced theorizing—Bessire argues that the Ayoreo people are
I was a doctor! best considered not as a “society against the state” (as Clastres
I was a doctor! [2007] would say) but rather as “ex-primitives” (in Geertz’s
Now I have no teeth, you see. [2001] words), as they struggle to be present in contexts
But I was a doctor! shaped by endless violence, arbitrary neoliberal economic pol-
It is because of my vice. icies, myopic cultural politics, and unforgiving humanitari-
I was a doctor! anisms (see Biehl 2013:588–591).
Now I have beer! This dense, well-argued, and provocative article stems from
Now it is cocaine paste! Bessire’s engagement with people known as Puyedie (Prohib-
It is shoe glue! ited Ones), a group of Ayoreo-speaking people whose desti-
It is alcohol! tution and marginality are extreme even among the already-
I was a doctor. marginal Ayoreo. Traversing multiple “nonlives,” the Puyedie
I left him because he was jealous. self-objectify their defacement and inhumanity to unexpected
Listen to me. ends, both deadly and vital. Their “hypermarginality” con-
I was young. tradicts narratives of multicultural triumphalism, and their
I was beautiful. fraught existence calls to question a primitive ontology “that
I had gold teeth. is non-interiorizable by the planetary mega-machines”—in
They killed me. Eduardo Viveiros de Castros’s (2010:15) elegant but, in this
It doesn’t matter to me! context, vacuous words.
Here I am. In heartbreaking if all too brief vignettes (more expansion
and intermediary steps, please!), the culturally dead Puyedie
intrude into Bessire’s theoretical prose (yes, let some abstrac-
tion go and scale back!) and tell us, right to our faces: “Here
I am.” They are the beacon of a “suspicious anthropology,”
Acknowledgments
one that is confronted with no “easy escapes of a stable out-
This essay is based on ongoing conversations with and ma- side” but only “flows of rupture” or “negative immanence.”
terials generously shared by Irene Roca Ortı́z, including a Bessire draws from this strange vitality, and from various
series of interviews she conducted with Puyedie in Santa Cruz, bodies of contemporary social theory, to craft both a critical
Bolivia. David Bond offered incisive comments on its various and an affirmative direction in this article, written as it is
drafts, as did Stephanie Malia Hom, Doug Kiel, and members with a prophetic urgency: repeople anthropological thought!
of the 2012–13 Ethnography and Theory Working Group at The critical dimensions of the article shed light on the
the Institute for Advanced Study, particularly Didier Fassin, politics and scholarship around indigeneity in Latin America
Nicola Perugini, and Laurence Ralph. Special thanks are owed today. Bessire shows how recent realignments of governance,
to each of them, as well as to the anonymous reviewers for market, and citizenship have amplified “preexisting inequal-

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 288
ities to the point whereby those excluded from the matrix of
culture are no longer deemed worthy of the same kind of
life, if they are worthy of any life at all.” At the same time,
critical primitivist anthropology, searching for radical possi-
bility in Amerindian ontology, “risks reproducing a crucial
metanarrative that liberalism tells about itself and thus re-
animating the colonial space of death for ex-primitives like
the Ayoreo.”
Bessire thus powerfully suggests that both multicultural
politics and neoprimitivist discourses, by valorizing authentic
indigenous culture, may work to further exclude and debase
“ex-primitives”—those who have lost that connection to cul-
ture that would give their lives value. In this way, he sounds
an important cautionary note concerning the ontological
movement in contemporary anthropology. Bessire claims are
compelling and provocative and deserve both engagement and
fuller treatment: Are there, for instance, historical and political
connections between scholarship on indigeneity and the craft-
ing of multicultural policies in Latin America? Also, is there
an alternative form of politics that his lens of hypermarginality
might make visible?
The article’s affirmative dimensions hinge on the Puyedie’s
“everyday sensibilities,” which, Bessire suggests, may have the
power to transfigure objectification and disregard. Although
the Puyedie’s experience is legible only as negation for other
Ayoreo, the anthropologist argues for the creativity involved
in the Puyedie’s transformation of hypermarginal spaces into
“zones of livable life, authorized or otherwise”—something
akin to what I called “vital plurality” elsewhere (Biehl 2013:
592). Bessire asserts that, in order to unmask the organizing
force that a politically revitalized culture concept exerts, and
to rescue the possibilism present in the most degraded human
conditions, anthropology must summon a “radical opti-
mism.” This call is bold and inspiring, yet I would be inter-
ested to hear whether and how Bessire’s radical optimism
escapes the charges of wishful thinking that he attributes to
indigenous emancipatory politics, as well as to neoprimitivist
scholars in search of radical otherness. How different is it?
Bessire’s work is timely and terribly important, and both
the ethnographic corpus and critical social theory are better
because of it, rehumanized through it. But there is something
in the structure of this article that remains unsettled and calls
for further thought. In particular, the relationship between
the critical and affirmative dimensions of the argument are
less clear than the author may have intended. An ethnographic
fleshing out of “negative immanence” is in order, as is a deeper
reflection on that “will” that defiantly embraces self-negation,
and those people who exercise such a will. This would be a
chance for all of us to listen and learn, even more intently,
from Bessire’s ceaseless returns to these intolerable fields and
fugitive entities.5
5. I am deeply grateful to Bridget Purcell for her help in crafting and
editing these comments.
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Current Anthropology Volume 55, Number 3, June 2014
Claudia Briones
Instituto de Investigaciones en Diversidad Cultural y Procesos de
Cambio (IIDyPCa), Universidad Nacional de Rı́o Negro-CONI-
CET, B. Mitre 630 5º Piso, (8400) San Carlos de Bariloche, Rı́o
Negro, Argentina (brionesc@gmail.com). 18 XII 13
Bessire’s piece introduces disturbing ethnographic vignettes
of homeless Ayoreo—mostly women—known as Puyedie
(Prohibited Ones) to characterize the effects of the rise of a
new regime that fuses politically indigenous culture and le-
gitimate life and evokes its own negative image in the form
of the deculturated. By focusing upon the most miserable
living conditions, the author questions three current trends
in anthropological explanations. Against scholars suggesting
that indigenous activism has revitalized and reoriented de-
mocracy for all citizens in Latin America, he argues that a
new regime of “biolegitimacy” has redistributed rather than
diminished socioeconomic inequalities in Latin America.
Against those who celebrate the purported incommensura-
bility of primitive cosmologies, the author urges for a political
anthropology capable of showing that the multicultural pol-
itics of recognition operate in and through the systematic
negation of the humanity to a new indigenous subset: “the
supposedly deculturated ex-primitive,” abandoned to social
death. Against public anthropologists who engage either in
culture fetishisms to support strategic essentialisms or in a
critical stance that ignores the social life of culture entirely,
Bessire argues for a decolonizing ethnographic praxis, capable
of accounting for “the fractured and desiring subjectivities of
the ex-primitive.” All three caveats are pertinent indeed as a
general starting point.
Therefore, hypermarginality emerges as the theoretical con-
cept Bessire proposes to give account of the stigmatized and
deterritorialized form of exclusion based upon a culturali-
zation of legitimate life that denies the protections of citi-
zenship to actually existing indigenous alterities, that is, to
unruly indigenous subjects deemed as deculturated and thus
exposed to violent extermination. Amid a backdrop of neo-
liberal structural violence and social depersonalization, he in-
terprets the negative immanence of becoming a Puye less as
a psychopathology produced by the disintegration of culture
than as a form of embracing a self-conscious moral desub-
jectification.
Now, assessing the global dynamics of a neoliberal politics
of recognition—done in and through coalescing the effects
of heterogeneous policies that can both instantiate and subvert
cultural rights—is as problematic as judging how oppositional
are the “disordered subjectivities” of Ayoreo-speaking Puyedie,
seen as “forms of immanence that simultaneously instantiate
and subvert the contradictory meanings and values attributed
to indigenous ‘life as such’ within the contemporary.” Among
other things, issues of social and personal agency are at stake
in both debates. To be brief, are all the Ayoreo-speaking non-
Puyedie duped by the promise of cultural rights? Do they not
display practices that “simultaneously instantiate and subvert
Bessire The Rise of Indigenous Hypermarginality
the contradictory meanings and values attributed to indige-
nous ‘life as such’ within the contemporary” as well?
However, Bessire acknowledges “the real organizing force
that a politically revitalized culture concept exerts through
and against the limits of indigenous life.” But how should we
define culture? Whose culture or cultural readings?
The author states that “a decolonizing academic praxis in
this situation requires abandoning the search for the primitive,
for legitimating origins, for a phenomenology of the sacred.”
Instead, “a suspicious anthropology capable of asking how
unstable modes of dispossession and contradictory forms of
interpretation blur into the subjective immanence of the mar-
ginalized” would allow us to grasp “the radical forms of pos-
sibilism that arise despite and because of the most degraded
conditions of human existence.”
But is the search for legitimating origins the same thing as
doing a phenomenology of the sacred? Is it not the definition
of public anthropology as an “either/or” option—as if it were
staged once and for all, with a singular voice, to a monolithic
audience—playing the same polarizing game attributed to the
new regime of neoliberal biolegitimacy, and to modernity at
large? Why do we think that doing the ethnography of the
sacred is incompatible with the analysis of “how unstable
modes of dispossession and contradictory forms of interpre-
tation blur into the subjective immanence of the marginali-
zed”? What could we understand if we took all the different
Ayoreo perspectives seriously? For some reason, they do not
define glue sniffers as mere junkies, but as Puyedie (Prohibited
Ones). What does the notion of Puye tell us about the ways
in which Ayoreo people signify differently what it means to
become, to be, to perform as a proper person amid (again)
oppressive living conditions? What do the critical comments
that label some practices as Puye make about the path taken
by those who get trapped into the worst dealings that the
“white man world” offers to them? What are the broad po-
litical debates that the Ayoreos have about the best ways of
struggling for a better life (cultural rights included)?
In any event, Bessire points to an urgent and crucial debate
for those of us who still think that anthropologists do have debts,
means, and responsibilities vis-à-vis the struggle of indigenous
peoples to cope with and lessen centuries of domination that are
far from over, despite significant changes in the successive regimes
that have marked and recreated their alterity.
Bret Gustafson
Department of Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis,
Campus Box 1114, One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, Missouri
63130-4899, U.S.A. (bdgustaf@artsci.wustl.edu). 3 XI 13
The Hypermarginal Slot
Bessire describes indigenous “hypermarginality” and argues
for a reconceptualization of political anthropology, neolib-
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289
eralism, and indigeneity in Latin America. The theses offered
are familiar: the “legal contraction of indigeneity” (Povinelli
2002), the “culturalization of legitimate indigenous life” (Ra-
mos 1998; Rivera 2010, among others), and the “outsourcing”
of neoliberal culturalism (in many ethnographies, including
one critiqued here, Postero 2006). On hypermarginality, we
encounter Ayoreo sex workers (Puyedie) in Santa Cruz, Bo-
livia, taken to stand for the Ayoreo of the Gran Chaco of
Paraguay and Bolivia. These “ex-primitives” relegated to “cau-
tionary object[s]” are said to illustrate how neoliberal cul-
turalism enacts “biolegitimacy,” deciding who is “allowed to
live in the name of culture” and who is allowed to die. Bessire
suggests that scholars failed to recognize multiculturalism’s
limits, that culture talk threatens human rights to life, and
that political anthropologists should stop basing their politics
in cultural alterity (it is not clear who is guilty of all of this).
Indigenous marginality is significant, and the risks of culture
as politics are convincing, if largely familiar. Yet the article is
analytically and ethically problematic.
Bessire seems to suggest that neoliberalism and multicul-
turalism are all-powerful processes misobserved by scholars
and that now, standing in their wake, we can attribute to
them (scholars, neoliberalism, and multiculturalism) agentive
capacity to intensify hypermarginality. Bessire writes that “the
widespread empowerment of authorized indigenous subjects
is predicated on the new hypermarginality of a stigmatized
multitude.” If this is meant to be a statement of fact, no
evidence—other than pointing at the Puyedie—is offered. The
language of unspecified agencies is frustrating. Who is at-
tributing and predicating and negating? Where is this “wide-
spread empowerment of authorized indigenous subjects”?
Even in Bolivia, where indigenous resurgence is notable,
the policies deployed under multiculturalism made only frag-
mented adjustments to rule and struggle. Neoliberalism
emerged in the 1980s to accelerate a history of predatory
capitalism. It never seamlessly fused with land reform or col-
lective rights. The well-known situation of the Ayoreo predates
the cultural turn of the 1990s. Yet multiculturalism, much
less indigenous empowerment, never set deep roots in the
racist bastion of eastern Bolivia, much less in Paraguay. A
new regime emerged in 2006. No evidence is offered linking
these changes—for better or for worse—to Ayoreo lives. So
we cannot know what is or is not new. What is new is that
the Puyedie have been brought under the gaze of a new strand
of anthropology. Their marginalization must now contend
with forces of a different order. They have become rhetorical
device.
This strand risks a double appropriation. First, Bessire relies
heavily on Irene Roca Ortı́z’s ethnographic material. He adds
exegesis and a story about hypermarginality. Yet her exten-
sively quoted interview material is inadequately cited, while
some statements (“white man to white man”) suggest that he
too was there. In my reading, Roca Ortı́z and perhaps her
Ayoreo collaborators (Cutamiño and Picanaré) should be
coauthors.
 290
Roca Ortı́z’s material also becomes rhetorical device. As
with other such accounts of, death, suffering, raping, dis-
emboweling, eating shit, shitting bricks, snorting drugs, and
the like, the display of marginality’s violences provokes moral
sensibilities and destabilizes notions of humanity. Laudable
enough. Yet absent satisfactory social and political grounding,
a second appropriation, of the Puyedie, is effected.
This enables, even as it critiques, animalization and political
erasure. Given the Ayoreo’s supposed inability to articulate a
positionality, the author is left as moral beacon, and the hy-
permarginals are left as, well, hypermarginals. This modern-
izes what our forebears did: pursue mythical first contacts
with the most isolated primitives (i.e., “the most marginali-
zed” “ex-primitives”) and then represent them as undiscov-
ered exemplars of humanity’s past (i.e., dystopian present).
I understand that his goals are otherwise, but Bessire does
not adequately situate the Puyedie. There is no mention of
the Ayoreo political organization CANOB or NGOs that work
with the Ayoreo. The Ayoreo barrio is more than a site of
horror. At an Ayoreo school, taught by an Ayoreo high school
graduate, kids accustomed to libertine freedom enjoyed danc-
ing, in those years, to Daddy Yankee’s reggaetón “Gasoline.”
Organizations are working with urban populations of five
different indigenous peoples in Santa Cruz (M. Sahonero,
personal communication, October 31, 2013). None of this is
to suggest multicultural triumph. Indigenous marginalization
is real and ongoing. Yet were this milieu engaged, we would
have ground upon which to debate political anthropology,
ethnographic research, the misuses of culture, and the com-
plexity of Ayoreo lives. Instead, the social detachment of the
Puyedie and the political erasure of all Ayoreo proceed via
biophilosophical appropriation.
In return, Bessire argues that political anthropologists
should accept the possibilities of “rupturing-becoming” lived
by the Puyedie, to engage in a “suspicious anthropology” ask-
ing after the “subjective immanence of the marginalized”
while grasping “radical forms of possibilism” and exercising
“radical optimism.” Radical indeed.
Jean E. Jackson
Department of Anthropology, Massachusetts Institute of Technol-
ogy, E53-335f, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachu-
setts 02139, U.S.A. (jjackson@mit.edu). 12 XI 13
Lucas Bessire’s essay is both theoretically ambitious and eth-
nographically rich. He focuses on what we might call the
underside of official multiculturalism: the negative conse-
quences of the constitutional reforms that were passed as part
of Latin America’s democratic transition. Intended to foster
more inclusionary regimes as part of many countries’ nation-
building projects, the reforms also produce exclusionary ones
directed at indigenous groups that “cannot or refuse to enact
their physical and psychic alterity in ways that conform to
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Current Anthropology Volume 55, Number 3, June 2014
the new criteria of difference valued within postmulticultural
politics.” The stigma of cultural loss, added to the stigmas
associated with race, place, and class, produces hypermargin-
ality.
The essay builds on Charles Hale’s (2006) notion of the
indio permitido (authorized Indian), as well as his discussion
of whether multiculturalism “menaces” the region’s indige-
nous movement (Hale 2002). Like Hale, Bessire argues that
the assumed inherent antagonism of “the indigenous” and
“the neoliberal” is precisely that—assumed.
Bessire believes that the criteria for membership in the
authorized indigenous citizen category are shrinking, and he
foresees an ever-increasing contraction of what counts as a
successful performance of cultural essence. The primary ben-
efactor of this process, he argues, is a reconfigured neoliberal
state that, rather than withering away, becomes endowed with
an authority to police and enforce the boundaries of what
counts as legitimate indigenous culture, precisely by conced-
ing the rights of cultural citizenship to many indigenous peo-
ples.
He notes that many Ayoreo groups do not fit within the
middle ground of politically authorized culture because they
are located at either end of the indigenousness continuum.
At one extreme we have the putatively ahistorical “uncon-
tacted,” “primitive” native, and at the other end the “ani-
malized urban Indian.” The first are culturally pure Indians
who, if they are filmed from a helicopter, will become trans-
nationally hypervisible because the resulting video will im-
mediately go viral on the Internet. Of course, in fact, these
groups are hardly uncontacted—they are simply fleeing fur-
ther contact, hence the term “voluntarily isolated.” Bessire
discusses the mystique surrounding these groups, which de-
rives from the valorization of a kind of alterity that can only
be legitimate “to the degree that it remains outside of history,
the market, and social relation itself.”
The current situation of native peoples in South America,
both highland and lowland, is enormously bleak in far too
many parts of the region, but what has happened to the
Ayoreo (in earlier periods as well) is truly horrific. Not only
do the “animalized urban rejects” not merit recognition as
indigenous nor qualify for any state benefits, their recognition,
such as it is, is entirely negative. The Puyedie embody a kind
of prohibited humanity, being biologically, politically, and cul-
turally illegitimate. While at first glance such hypermargin-
alized Indians seem readily understandable as destitute, abject,
deculturated urban leftovers—a kind of living dead—Bessire
argues that their situation in fact emerges out of these new
processes associated with neoliberal culturalization regimes.
What I find especially thought provoking is the way his in-
depth analysis illustrates how the politically revitalized, “mal-
leable legal-theological” culture concept increasingly not only
operates as a general limit around indigenous citizenship but
also determines the degree of indigenous biolegitimacy. His
anger, although measured, comes through, for example, in
Bessire The Rise of Indigenous Hypermarginality
his point that “the supposedly deculturated ex-primitive is
then blamed for her own amplified dehumanization.”
The essay is a fine example of a critically engaged, “sus-
picious” anthropology, one that attends to both analytic and
normative issues. Bessire critiques some of public anthro-
pology’s underlying assumptions, as well as its failure to attend
to official multiculturalism’s rejects. Any number of authors
have studied the unforeseen consequences of neoliberal mul-
ticulturalism, but, as he points out, few scholars doing re-
search on indigeneity have focused on the exclusion part of
the equation, Elizabeth Povinelli being an important excep-
tion.
Bessire’s analysis in all likelihood applies to all 17 Latin
American countries with indigenous populations, but to vary-
ing degrees. At an abstract level, groups like the Puyedie are
found in every country, but perhaps not when the analysis is
concerned with flesh-and-blood individuals living in actual
places. His point about the important role played by urban
Ayoreos’ legacy of ontological rupture, as well as the point
about how hypermarginality is especially likely to be the fate
of those “ex-primitives” descended from formerly nomadic,
forest-dwelling people, suggest a more restricted applicability
of his explanatory scheme. Clearly, additional comparative
research is needed.
Irene Roca Ortı́z
Promoción de la Sustentabilidad y Conocimientos Compartidos
(Prosuco), Av. Ecuador 2253, La Paz, Bolivia (ireneroca@gmail
.com). 27 I 14
In this article, Lucas Bessire outlines an incisive critique of
so-called multicultural politics (or “intercultural politics” in
Bolivia), showing the extent to which these discourses have
created a new regime of indigenous legitimacy. This new dis-
course creates a radically essentialist imaginary of indigenous
cultures, whose traditions should be conserved as a “moral
reserve for humanity,” as declared by Evo Morales in his
inaugural presidential speech in 2006.
In the Bolivian context, this type of reflection is very nec-
essary, since state influence6 has fragmented and polarized
indigenous political activism. These essentialist discourses are
6. In 2011, a stance was taken against the megahighway project that
was to cross indigenous lands and an ecological preserve, the Indigenous
Territory Isiboro Secure National Park (Territorio Indı́gena Parque Na-
cional Isibore Secure, TIPNIS). This project, instigated by the Evo Morales
government in the name of progress and economic development of the
country, did not comply with the initial requirement of previous con-
sultation as stipulated by the ILO’s convention number 169—effective
in Bolivia. Since then, from CIDOB and CONAMAQ, the indigenous
confederations from the highlands and lowlands as well as their coun-
terparts from the central departments, including leaders from the most
remote communities, we have seen the fragmented and polarized stances
on the project and their support of the Evo Morales government and
the Movement toward Socialism (MAS).
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291
contradicted by the aspirations of development that in turn
are rationalized by the increasing political representation of
indigenous peoples as senior officials of the state. With the
creation of special constituencies for indigenous villages in
the Departmental and Plurinational Legislative Assemblies,
the Ayoreode have these types of positions for the first time.
This has created a transitory trajectory for individual social
ascendancy, rather than the possibility of bettering the con-
ditions of life in indigenous communities.
The Ayoreode have been established in the social imaginary
as the most “savage” and therefore “most indigenous” of Bo-
livian peoples. Increasingly represented in banners, posters,
and public events wearing their traditional attire, they are
represented as an egalitarian society in harmony with nature,
and a cliché version of the moral reserve necessary for hu-
manity writ large. At the same time, Ayoreode elders, women,
and children can be seen waiting at corner stoplights of some
of the major avenues in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, begging for
money. Adolescents and young people can be seen in their
tight-fitting, colorful clothing, prostituting themselves on the
outskirts of the city. The Puyedie (Prohibited Ones)—whose
lives revolve around the means of acquiring their next dose
of puyai (a cocaine-based paste) to overcome the feelings of
deprivation, hunger, cold, and perhaps, above all, indiffer-
ence—are those who are not even fit to live within the com-
munity. This reality, which unfolds in plain sight in the city
of Santa Cruz, is not a part of the official discourse on em-
powerment and valorization of indigenous peoples. Moreover,
for the Ayoreode assemblymen, it is a source of shame that
is justified as something that is not part of their culture since
it comes from the Cojñone (white people, nonindigenous).
Dispossessed from traditional culture, the “hypermarginality”
that Bessire’s analysis refers to is manifest in other strata of
the Ayoreode community, as well as within those accounts of
the Ayoreode still based on the ethnographic present.
In addition to providing a critique of the symbolic violence
that is perpetrated by the regime of radical alterity implied
by the ethnicization of politics, the article offers a critique of
the ethnography traditionally produced about Ayoreode peo-
ple, characterized by a nearly exclusive concentration on the
past and that which is understood to be the “original” and
“traditional” aspects of culture.
Finally, it is worth noting the specificity of the Bolivian
context relative to the third thesis proposed by Lucas Bessire
about the emergence of hypermarginality in Latin America
and its relation to neoliberal governance. If indeed NGOs
have played a decisive role in the promotion of intercultural
politics in Bolivia, and with great force since the 1990s, they
are progressively being displaced and even expelled by the
new plurinational state.7 In the context of a new Bolivian state
7. In May 2013, Evo Morales expelled USAID from Bolivia, accusing
it of political interference. In December of the same year, he announced
the expulsion of Ibis Dinamarca, the international cooperative fund that
had historically been associated with the promotion of intercultural pol-
 292
that proclaims itself to be antineoliberal and indigenous-plu-
rinational, but at the same time promotes neoliberal models
of development, the state seems to impose itself through and
contradict the culturalist approach, thus complicating the re-
gimes of violence that target indigenous peoples.
Reply
What makes the anthropology of indigeneity exciting and
problematic today is the unruliness of its ways of knowing.
Anthropological knowledge loops across time back into the
political and ontological fabric of the institutions, commu-
nities, and subjective horizons we study in ways that pointedly
exceed our disciplinary quibbles. More than anything else, the
article was an experimental attempt to grapple with this un-
ruliness and gesture to a limited set of its unevenly distributed
consequences. It was not intended as a finished program but
as a narrow, centrifugal provocation centered on the figure
of hypermarginality. The essay evoked this ideal type not as
a generic slot but as an opening that might signal the instru-
mental disjuncture between vital content and authorized form
in one specific domain that was violently politicized in part
because it has long been analytically overdetermined and vice
versa. Who was allowed to live in the name of a constricting
legitimate alterity, I wondered, and who was allowed to die?
How could we account for the turbulent contents that ex-
ceeded and ruptured forms of all kinds? I would like to thank
the distinguished commentators for the opportunity to clarify
my argument, and (with one exception) for the insightful
generosity with which they engaged and deepened this prov-
ocation.
Biehl’s invitation to address the tension between the essay’s
critical and affirmative dimensions is particularly helpful.
What I would like to insist upon is the wider constitutive
tension between the ongoing and systematic dispossession of
Ayoreo-speaking people, the exclusionary limits of a resurgent
neoprimitivism that is its hermeneutic corollary, and emer-
gent Ayoreo sensibilities about moral humanity. The causality
in question, of course, is never predetermined: it is emphat-
ically nonlinear and rotational. By emphasizing such fluidity,
the article aimed to evoke how competing political rational-
ities and creative experimentations were held in mutually sus-
taining but irreducible relation. Here, Jackson rightly calls
attention to the crucial dialectic between the “political sco-
icies and indigenous movements in Bolivia, lodging the same accusations.
This gradual disengagement of the indigenous voice in the government,
with respect to the NGOs, has increased since the 8th Indigenous March
for the Defense of TIPNIS (2011), which marked the separation of the
indigenous movement from the state. Accusing the international coop-
erative and the political opposition of financing the conflict, it promoted
an institutional parallelism between the organizations of the indigenous
movement around the (unconditional) support of the government.
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Current Anthropology Volume 55, Number 3, June 2014
tomization” (Wacquant’s term) of the supposedly decultur-
ated ex-primitive and the political hypervisibility of the sup-
posedly “uncontacted” Ayoreo bands. The quick oscillation
between these poles of ur-alterity and their defining negatives
allows culture to orchestrate a regime of biolegitimacy. Like-
wise, Roca Ortı́z gestures to a significant expansion of the
article by locating Ayoreo hypermarginality within the wider
cooptation and fracturing of the Bolivian indigenous rights
movement not by culturalist NGOs but by the Morales ad-
ministration. Rather than undermining the structures of hy-
permarginalism, she suggests, this cooptation might extend
them in ways unforeseen in my analysis. Thus, she aptly
fleshes out the productive disconnect between the celebratory
imagery of Ayoreo tradition, the assent of a handful of Ayoreo
“cultural brokers” to gubernatorial roles, and the enduring
liminality of those many who reject continuity with the prac-
tices that count as tradition and survive through sex work or
panhandling in urban centers.
Not coincidentally, these are also the poles that constituted
the supposed Ayoreo mainstream that both Briones and Gus-
tafson evoke for distinct ends. One aim of the article was to
interrupt the quick jump to parsing the authentic from the
spurious and the search for a normative alterity such selection
implied. I learned early on that Ayoreo cases simply did not
sustain politically active dichotomies of authorized-alterity-
as-formal-continuity versus formal-rupture-as-cultural-dis-
integration. The question, instead, became what to do with
those unruly vitalisms that did not seem to fit anywhere.
Nowhere was such excess as obvious as in the everyday so-
ciality of Barrio Bolı́var, the settlement I came to know over
11 months of fieldwork in Bolivia and also referenced by the
rather confused Gustafson. Obviously, I did not argue that
urban camps were simply sites of horror nor that their in-
habitants were incapable of moral or political positionality.
Indeed, the whole point of the essay was to hesitate within
such complex registers of self-positioning and reflect on the
sociopolitical labor accomplished in between their open-end-
edness and contradictory efforts to impose typological clo-
sure. The essay intended to protest precisely the common
sense—illustrated by Gustafson—that Ayoreo realities could
be taken for granted as self-evident or knowable in advance
to outside experts. I discovered that the preemptive objecti-
fication of Ayoreo humanity often required disavowing the
range of real obstacles that bedevil Ayoreo attempts at self-
determination via transformation. Such disavowals are not
the solution to violent marginalization but crucial for its per-
petuation.
As Briones correctly notes, the relationship between Puyedie
and non-Puyedie Ayoreo is instructive on this point: what
seemed like the most incontrovertible evidence of “cultural
loss” was legible as something else to many Ayoreo. This
legibility was unsettling not due to its radical incommensu-
rability with modernity but in how it expanded the idiom of
a particular moral assemblage (one that I have detailed at
greater length elsewhere). This assemblage was an Ayoreo life
Bessire The Rise of Indigenous Hypermarginality
project that made self-transformation a meaningful moral
agenda. Self-transformation implied reobjectifying the con-
tradictory ways that Ayoreo life was objectified in the contexts
of radio sound, genocidal violence, missionization, neoliberal
economic policies, and ecological devastation. Through this
mimetic redefinition of the self, Ayoreo uneasily reconciled
colonial binaries and cosmological principles in ways that
reasserted their capacity for metaobjectification and thus
moral humanity. Rupture was suffused with soteriological
value.
Amid this terrifying New World, it was impossible to ignore
the critical capacities and creative agencies so forcefully re-
tained by Ayoreo people despite—and even more disturbingly,
through—the nonsensical footings of authorized difference
and its constant displacement. The affirmative force of such
emergent Ayoreo sensibilities lay not in their noninteriorizable
qualities but in how they contained an experimental resilience
that continually reworked contingencies into becomings, vi-
olence into immanence. This resilience, I suggested, could be
found in even the most extreme conditions. The essay framed
such agencies in the terms of “radical optimism,” a phrasing
that admittedly fell short of conveying the strange potenti-
alities in question. Again, Biehl invites a productive distinc-
tion. Isn’t this optimism a kind of wishful thinking aligned
with the speculative projects of neoprimitivism and alter-mo-
dernity that I protested? To be clear, the essay was not aimed
against the fundamental importance of speculative thinking
in general or its undeniable sociopolitical potentials. What it
did argue against was a specific conceptual operation that first
measured indigenous life against a fantastic ideal of artificially
limited continuity or nonmodern ontological exteriority to
which this life was always-already insufficient, then crafted
the social taxonomies of an ostensibly more equitable future
upon the disavowed exclusions of this ideal, and finally im-
posed the terms of this future back onto the present as nor-
mative schema for ethnographic engagements with contem-
porary Native people and solidarity with their struggles. This
operation is pernicious—it risks the reinscription of bioine-
qualities in the name of challenging them, the colonization
of alterity in the name of its elitist liberation. However smart
its proponents, the model can only account for actually ex-
isting Ayoreo alterities in one of two ways: as a misleading
superficies of apparent change concealing a hidden substrate
of pure alterity, or as evidence of cultural disintegration and
ontological contamination. Within the tired logics of this
schema—the very logics of extermination, the logics of the
Indian hunt—Ayoreo are once again either liars or remnants.
The essay attempted to unsettle such finalizing logics as
well as the marginalities they continue to sustain and mask
in lowland South America. It sought an alternative in the
conceptual implications of the neither-nor-both-and-inside-
outside quality of Ayoreo entanglements. My attempt to take
these entanglements seriously did presume a kind of wishful
thinking—a sense that anthropology is peculiarly suited to
move through and around intolerable inequalities, a faith that
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293
it provides concrete ways to invoke a more equitable world.
This wishful thinking, however, is based on a distinct oper-
ation: one that works forward from the fine articulations of
precarious lives toward conceptual critique, from ethnography
toward theory, from present contingencies toward future
emergences, rather than vice versa. This can only begin by
creating openings within domains of potential otherwise fore-
closed for the ethnographer as well as his or her subjects. The
essay aspired to be one tentative step in this direction.
—Lucas Bessire
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