From "Cultural Change" to "Deculturation": Making and Molding Cold War Violence in Paraguay during the 1970s

In just two decades, Aché researchers made an abrupt turn from viewing Western culture as civilizing to genocidal. For a cohort of French anthropological experts whose careers spanned the decades leading up to and following WWII and who served for international organizations like UNESCO, captured Aché children served as striking examples of how early exposure to Western education and public health could liberate Indigenous youth from the trappings of backwardness and primitivism and induce lasting “cultural change” that brought them into the modern world. Yet by the early 1970s, anthropologists, legal experts, political scientists, journalists and philosophers from Paraguay, German, Switzerland, the UK, and the US began to warn that the Aché – an Indigenous group from Paraguay who remained voluntarily isolated until the 1960s – were subject to genocidal extermination at the hands of an extractive Paraguayan dictatorship. In addition to being subject to terrible acts of physical violence, critics of the Paraguayan government warned that the Aché were subject to a process of “deculturation” defined as a process of where loss of culture destroys self-esteem and the will to live – a phenomenon that some called “psychic death”. What prompted human scientists to shift so abruptly in their interpretation of Western culture? Building on work by Marco Ramos and Ian Hacking, this paper argues that what was at stake in this shift is the historical ontological question of how experts “make and mold” the reality of violence during a period in which Cold War development projects became increasingly linked with genocide.