A Reader’s Diary: Anthropophagite Piety

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Advice for those who haunt used bookstores: any time you see something that's been published by Black Sparrow Press or North Point Press, buy it. A Quartet Encounters paperback? Just buy it. There are some presses, just a few, who seem to have been unable to release anything uninteresting. For a long time, Zone Books was one of them. It’s still excellent, don’t get me wrong, but its great years were the decade or two following its foundation around 1985. So of course I had to buy Pierre Clastres’s Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians, which in any case I vaguely remembered as a reference in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. But in truth what really piqued my curiosity was the name of the book’s translator: the renowned novelist Paul Auster. I won’t recount the story, conveyed in Auster’s introductory note, of how he came to translate the book and the strange fate of that translation, except to say that it reads like a work of Auster’s fiction (except for the opening line, which reads, jarringly and misleadingly, like one by Ford Madox Ford). Books of anthropology are always engaging thanks to the way their accounts of other people’s ways of life throw into relief the strangeness and arbitrariness of our own customs. That may be even more true than usual of Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians—whose bland title becomes more disconcerting as one reads, since Clastres quickly stops referring to the hunter-gatherers among whom he lived in 1963-64 in eastern Paraguay as Guayaki and instead, without explanation, calls them Atchei. (Wikipedia spells it Aché, and explains that Guayaki is a name given them by the larger neighboring peoples who speak Guarani, and by anthropologists, and that it is now considered derogatory.) Clastres uses the untranslated concepts of the Atchei as much as possible, so that his language itself is always estranging the Western reader. To take a passage at random, one about the successful hunting of a jaguar: “The women honored the baipu with loud chenga ruvara, the men yelled frightening jeproro, and Karekyrumbygi, who had killed him, was massaged with the bark of the piry tree.” One is never not a puzzled stranger here. But whether they are called Atchei or Guaraki, Clastres’s book is not a chronicle of them—which would be impossible since they lack a calendar. If anything, the book chronicles the French ethnographer’s attempts to delve into the lives and thinking of the Atchei and, in a way that it is impossible not to find intrusively inquisitive, to make them reveal their secrets. In this he succeeds, confirming the rumors circulated by seventeenth century Jesuits as well as their white and Guarani neighbors that the Atchei were cannibals—practitioners of what Clastres calls endo-cannibalism, which is to say, they are their own dead: “they used their stomachs as the final resting place of their companions,” and this not only because they considered human flesh and especially fat delicious, but because in doing so they protected themselves from the spirits of the dead, who apparently want nothing more than to drag the living back with them into the spirit world. Clastres presents his sensational findings in the most neutral way possible: to see everything in the Atchei’s way of life, even their cannibalism, as eminently reasonable, as exemplary of what in his conclusion he calls “the Atchei’s piety, the gravity of their presence in the world of things and the world of beings” and “their exemplary faithfulness to a very ancient knowledge that our own savage violence has squandered,” is to undermine his claim to knowledge along with the authority of whiteness that his scientific search had presumed. And yet it’s hard to forgive him that assumption of authority, or his belief that the Atchei were doomed. In 2008 an Atchei woman was appointed Minister of Indigenous Affairs in Paraguay.

Pierre Clastres, Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians, translated by Paul Auster, is published by Zone Books, New York, 1998.

BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.

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