Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
they devise to reinvent
Nhande Rekó
- the ascetic and dangerous Guarani way of life
discussed by the above mentioned ethnographers since the early 1900s, and other
contemporary scholars.
7
In their play, the children challenge the Guarani adults'
conviction that the severe spiritual discipline of Nhande Rekó, encompassing strict
fasting, rejection of mundane pleasures or “temptations,” and intense praying and
dreaming, is a necessary condition to reach
kandire
, or immortality. Kandire enables
transcendence to the Ywy Marae'y, the Land-without-Evil. This is where Guarani
adults hope to live the “divine abundance,”
8
a place in which the land provides fruit
without being sowed and where the Guarani body can achieve the same everlasting
quality of the Ywy Marae'y itself (
ywy
land,
marae'y
indestructible).
Tupi-Guarani migrations were documented by Portuguese officials and missionaries
as early as the first half of the 16
th
century. Several thousand Indians at a time were
known to have abandoned their villages to follow a great karaí who had promised
them “a beautiful land where all the things would come naturally and abundantly,
without any difficulty nor labor” (Métraux 1979:21). Of the 10 to 12,000 Guarani that
headed north towards the Amazon river, only about 300 survived the journey (Hill
1995:vii). Guarani karaí appear, in these writings, not only as healers, but above all as
religious and political leaders who have the prophetic power, through the use of sung
and chanted “beautiful words,” to lead migrations to Ywy Marae'y (Clastres 1995).
These aspects of Guarani religious life, first described by anthropologists studying
people living as horticulturalists and hunters in the coastal Atlantic forest and
savannah, who were in good health and with relatively great cultural and political
autonomy, might seem irrelevant to the lives of the children of Itaóca at the turn of the
21
st
century. But, in fact, I found them to be key to the kids' performances, in which
such ideas both shape and express their own perceptions of major transformations
they are faced with today.
Under the Development Plan of the 1950s, the Brazilian federal government
drastically reduced the size of Guarani territories by opening the land in southern
Brazil to homesteading, and confining Guarani communities to undersized
reservations. Confinement in diminutive lands, often shared with traditional enemies
such as the Kaingang or Terena Indians, as well as expulsion from traditional lands,
strongly traumatized the Guarani, causing severe depopulation and the rise of infecto-
contagious diseases.
9
Losing control of the land where they hunted, planted their crops,
raised their children and buried their dead meant, to various Guarani communities, the
coming of a cataclysm. According to Schaden (1974) and Métraux (1948), the Guarani
interpreted the white men's strong presence on Indigenous territory as a sign for the
end of this earthly world. In reaction to this crisis, and previous ones, the Guarani of
southern Brazil have been known for setting off in huge migratory movements, always
headed north, and having the Atlantic Ocean as a guiding reference.
Experiencing Nhande Rekó and envisioning apocalypse has thus increasingly
meant subjecting oneself to tremendous suffering and humiliation on reservations,
banana and sugar cane plantations, hospitals, and garbage dumps. Guarani children
make clear that they realize that sickness and premature death impair the ability
