The healing words of the Ayoreo

This chapter deals with the intersection between language and traditional medicine of the Ayoreo, an Indigenous population of the Boreal Chaco in South America. In traditional Ayoreo culture, the word itself can exert magic power on reality, and this manifests itself in the taboo characters of myths and magic formulas. The latter are called sarode and are used for healing purposes. They are also taboo, so that it is hard to document them. Although nowadays fewer people know sarode, they are still used, and co-exist with modern medicine, which is not always available in many isolated communities. When the Ayoreo have been contacted, they have always paid a high death toll owing to diseases for which they did not have antibodies. This situation continues for the few Ayoreo who are still uncontacted. Past epidemics caused by contact have left traces in Ayoreo culture: I will show how a new magic formula to heal diseases brought by Western people originated after contact with Jesuits in the 18th century.