Conflict, Heritage and World-Making in the Chaco by Esther Breithoff

Author:Esther Breithoff [Breithoff, Esther]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Archaeology
ISBN: 9781787358065
Google: pGz6DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: UCL Press
Published: 2020-08-06T05:11:26+00:00

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure

When war broke out, the vision of a ‘civilised’ Chaco soon lay shattered amongst crippled trees, human limbs and metal debris. Mechanical forces had ravaged the landscape, exposing the ‘fragility of the natural world and of human beings [exposed] to the steel and iron of industrialised war’ (Saunders 2013, 29). The war destroyed everything in its path and left in its wake the remnants of a failed modernity. ‘The dream of reason’, writes González-Ruibal, ‘produces rubbish’ (González-Ruibal 2006a, 194). Thus, even in their most destructive form, Anthropocene conflicts both unmake and make worlds. In the wake of the Chaco War, the bush was littered with bits and pieces of war matériel that looked strangely out of place among the thorny shrubs: rifles, parts of military vehicles, shrapnel, oil canisters, a single boot. With the fighting over and the armies gone, these abandoned and often fragmented objects had turned into decaying matter void of their original purpose. Tim Edensor notes that having left the realm of human control, ‘the material status of objects in ruins is transient, so that they are in a state of becoming something else or almost nothing that is separately identifiable’ (Edensor 2005a, 319).

Prior to the war, resources were limited in the Chaco and people were for the most part self-sufficient, relying on the local environment for food and the provision of building materials. Yet the excess of ‘things’ generated by modern warfare had suddenly opened up new material possibilities. Iron and steel objects, especially, constituted a welcomed source of metal that was hitherto only scarcely available in the bush. With the train line from Km 145 to Puerto Casado as their only lifeline to the outside world, the Mennonites had to import all metal items. Metal, and particularly iron, was also a highly desired but rare commodity in indigenous communities. Written accounts by Jesuit missionaries dating back to the eighteenth century tell of monks exchanging metal tools for access to indigenous villages. At the end of the nineteenth century, explorers write about attacks by various indigenous groups in search of metal goods. The emergence of military forts throughout the 1920s and 1930s gave rise to further sporadic attacks by members of Ayoreo communities and competition would often result in conflict between different Ayoreo groups (Capdevila et al. 2010, 64–6). After the war, indigenous people collected leftover ammunition and other bits of metal for personal use in the production of metal spearheads and other tools (Capdevila et al. 2010, 65). Surprisingly, perhaps, they also traded precious pieces of metal for Mennonite bread, which they supposedly liked so much that, according to a local Mennonite saying, ‘Once he tasted Mennonite bread, the Indian never wanted to return to the bush again’ (Hans Fast, Mennonite guide based in Loma Plata, Colonia Menno, pers. comm.).

For their part, the Mennonites also collected scrap metal left behind by the armies on battlefields and along dirt tracks. Shortly after the war, the Mennonites received official permission from

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