Behold the Black Caiman is a deeply engaging and poetically written book encompassing two periods of research fieldwork with Ayoreo people, one in Bolivia and the other one in Paraguay, between 2001 and 2009. Despite its transnational character, the author decides to avoid in the book a generic discussion on the differences between these two very different national contexts, and to focus on what he calls the condition of ‘hypermarginality’ of Ayoreo people (or at least of some of them; it is not that clear how encompassing the category is) in both countries.

The first chapter sets the tone of the book by offering an Ayoreo perception on the nature of anthropologists as devilish creatures – obsessed with myths and traditions – to then dismantle in the second chapter the historical myth of the Ayoreo as intrinsically belligerent people. The central chapters of the book contain some of the most beautiful and detailed ethnographic descriptions, and they are dedicated to the reactions and events that followed the encounters and clashes between New Tribes missionaries and Ayoreo groups in Paraguay (one of them, with whom Bessire carries out most of his fieldwork, had only recently come out from the forest). We learn how most Ayoreo have made a self-conscious decision to abandon nearly all of their past practices (a ‘form of becoming-through-negation’, p. 17), fully embracing their self-transformation as New People through Christianity, and how this is enacted and facilitated through the use of radio communication and its ability to co-substantiate the sound with a specific kind of soul matter (the ayipie). The theme of transformation is then deepened by discussing the role of shame in articulating it, and by presenting the choice on the part of some Ayoreo of ‘madness and vice as radical forms of negative becoming’ (p. 176) rather than as forms of pathological deviance.

Just like the black caiman evoked in the title, Bessire's historic and ethnographic descriptions of people starving to death, dismembered and sick bodies, man hunts, rapes and massacres keep haunting the reader's imagination throughout the whole book. With a radical statement, he asserts that ‘for contemporary Totobiegosode-Ayoreo, the aphasia of suffering and terror has become a routine part of everyday life’ (p. 136). At the same time, he asks the reader not to surrender to a mourning attitude but to adopt them as ‘guides to an anthropology of the contemporary that is critical, urgent and perhaps even optimistic’ (p. 21).

From the first pages he declares his will to resist a static and nostalgic description of so-called Ayoreo culture – or worst tradition – and to focus on ‘Indigenous becomings rather than the essences of their beings’ (p. 21). To make his point stronger and to make it sound as a rupture with his predecessors he explicitly points to the dangers and criticality of the ontological turn in social theory (p. 19). Nevertheless, besides stating that this theoretical framework essentialises indigenous people, he fails to truly engage with it and with the latest work of authors such as Mario Blaser and Marisol De la Cadena which do exactly the opposite. Instead, he keeps advocating for a ‘shift from an anthropology of Indigenous being to the anthropology of unauthorized becomings’ (p. 229) as if he were the first, or at least one of the few, to wish to do so.

It seems to me that Bessire's book offers a valuable take on topics such as the creation of a hyperreal, consented and morally irreproachable indian on the part of NGOs and multicultural states, adding to a long series of works on the issue in Latin America for more than a decade. In the last chapter on the politics of isolation, he adopts Fassin's terminology to argue that local NGO discourses on the protection of non-contacted Ayoreo people in Paraguay reinforces the hierarchy between lives that are worth being protected (because of their cultural purity and biodiversity promise) and lives that can implicitly be left to oblivion and starvation. His discourse analysis is poignant and precise. Nevertheless, he takes himself out of the ethnographic description of the local context and its power dynamics, and although he seems to imply that he was in a dialogue or even collaborating with one of the mentioned NGOs, the intricacies of these relationships are left out of the frame. For instance, and quite surprisingly, his main source of information on a crucial moment of tension between one local NGO and a group of Ayoreo people is an article written in a national newspaper which has often been criticised for its openly anti-NGO posture and its support for big landowners. On the other hand, the author is generous with poetic descriptions of his encounters with ‘hypermarginal’ Ayoreo such as Ujñari, ‘one of those old Ayoreo who see through you […] contact survivors who possessed the rarefied gaze of the unreachable […]’ (p. 48).

Bessire is asking us, his readers, to recognise and take seriously Ayoreo life projects even when they do not fulfil our desire for exotic otherness and the purity of tradition – but who are his readers? Leaving aside devilish anthropologists and paternalistic NGOs, it would be interesting to ask who the allies of indigenous people might be (and at what price) in a region, the Paraguayan Chaco, subject to strong economic interests, where the price of land is increasing dramatically, where drug traffickers are reported to have taken over the control of entire areas between Paraguay and Bolivia, and where cattle grazing – thanks to the building of new transnational roads – is becoming an all too profitable affair.