Cartographies of Guarani translocations: The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

Abstract

Over the course of the twentieth century, Guarani ethnology produced a series of works whose genesis can be traced back to the migrations registered by Curt Nimuendajú and published in his work of 1914. On the Atlantic coast, various chroniclers had registered similar phenomena, since the beginning of the European Conquest, among diverse indigenous groups that were generically denominated Tupi-Guarani. Since then, many anthropologists have proposed to establish a common thread between the Tupi-Guarani migrations and those of the Guarani, frequently attributing the same motives and objectives to both: to escape the destruction of the world and enter the land of the immortals while still alive. However, a detailed examination of the bibliography, as well as various documentary sources, calls any such connection into question. This article is a study of the multiple forms of translocation observed among the Guarani during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and subsequently during the nineteenth and twentieth. Its objective is to analyse and distinguish these forms of translocation: on one hand, the migrations toward the land without evil in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; on the other, the war expeditions, raids, slave captures, flights from the Spanish colonisers and Portuguese bandeirantes, and attractions to the Jesuit missions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Keywords:
Guarani indians; Jesuit missions; Translocations; Migrations; Expeditions; Manuscripts from the Angelis Collection

Resumo

No decorrer do século XX a etnologia guarani produziu uma série de trabalhos cuja gênese se assentava nas migrações registradas por Nimuendaju e publicadas em sua obra de 1914. No litoral atlântico, diversos cronistas haviam registrado desde o início da Conquista fenômenos semelhantes entre diversos grupos indígenas que foram denominados genericamente como Tupi-Guarani. Desde então, muitos antropólogos se propuseram a estabelecer um fio condutor entre as migrações tupi-guarani e as dos Guarani, muitas vezes atribuindo a ambas os mesmos motivos e objetivos: escapar à destruição do mundo e adentrar em vida a terra dos imortais. Entretanto, um exame detalhado da bibliografia, bem como de algumas fontes documentais coloca em xeque este fio condutor. Este artigo é um estudo sobre as múltiplas formas de deslocamentos observadas entre os Guarani ao longo dos séculos XVI e XVII e posteriormente durante os séculos XIX e XX. O seu objetivo é analisar e distinguir essas formas de deslocamentos: de um lado, as migrações para a terra sem mal nos séculos XIX e XX, de outro, as expedições de guerra, pilhagens e captura de escravos, as fugas em face dos colonizadores espanhóis e bandeirantes portugueses e as atrações para as missões jesuíticas nos séculos XVI e XVII.

Palavras-chave:
Índios guarani; Missões jesuíticas; Deslocamentos; Migrações; Expedições; Manuscritos da Coleção de Angelis.

Resumen

En el transcurso del siglo XX la etnología guaraní produjo trabajos cuya génesis se asentaba en las migraciones registradas por Nimuendaju y publicadas en su obra, en 1914. En el litoral atlántico, diversos cronistas registraron desde el inicio de la Conquista fenómenos semejantes entre diversos grupos indígenas denominados genéricamente Tupi-Guaraní. Desde entonces, muchos antropólogos se propusieron establecer un hilo conductor entre las migraciones tupi-guaraní y la de los Guaraní, atribuyendo a ambas los mismos motivos y objetivos: escapar de la destrucción del mundo y adentrar, en vida, en la tierra de los inmortales. Sin embargo, un examen detallado de la bibliografía, así como de algunas fuentes documentales, pone en jaque ese hilo conductor. Este artículo es un estudio sobre las múltiples formas de desplazamiento observadas entre los Guaraní a lo largo de los siglos XVI y XVII y posteriormente durante los siglos XIX y XX. El objetivo es analizarlas y distinguirlas: de un lado, las migraciones hacia la tierra sin mal en los siglos XIX y XX; del otro, las expediciones de guerra, saqueos y captura de esclavos, las fugas de los colonizadores españoles y de los bandeirantes portugueses y el desplazamiento hacia las misiones jesuíticas en los siglos XVI y XVII.

Palabras clave:
Indios guaraní; Misiones jesuíticas; Desplazamientos; Migraciones; Expediciones; Manuscritos de la Colección de Angelis

Where did you come from? I came from Paraguay. From Paraguay we came. From the border between Paraguay and Mato Grosso. From the Paraguay border I came. I was small. All the Indians, the oldest, many of those who came died.

The above dialogue took place in 2012, in the Xambioá Indigenous Land. My interlocutor - Albino Karai Ataa, around 85 years old - was recounting a journey undertaken by his group in the 1930s from the Paraguayan-Brazilian frontier, guided by a shaman. They traversed the outskirts of Dourados and Campo Grande until arriving at Coxim (all cities and towns in the present-day state of Mato Grosso do Sul). They had travelled far away from the regions occupied by the Guarani and, taking a previously unexplored trajectory, reached the Araguaia river. Sometimes distancing themselves from the river course, sometimes moving closer, they arrived, around thirty years later, in the recently founded municipality of Mozarlândia in Goiás.

There the last shaman passed away, the son of the shaman who had begun this long trek and who had died years earlier in the vicinity of Rio Bonito, today Caiapônia, also in Goiás. The motives that led the Guarani to set off on this unusual route were the Chaco War⁴⁶ and what might be called the search for a physical and spiritual perfection. They wished to arrive at the edge of the ocean and, from there, reach a land of immortality (yvy ju⁴⁷). The edge of the ocean was the appropriate place for gaining access to this paradise and only the shamans were reputed to know these paths. The death of the last shaman put an end to the plans of these survivors, since there was nobody left to guide them.⁴⁸

The theme of the search for immortality by entering a golden land emerged in the academic debates through the ethnography of Nimuendajú, published in Germany in 1914. The topic continued to attract the attention of other authors like Alfred Métraux (1927), Léon Cadogan (1959), HélèneClastres (1978), Pierre Clastres (2003) and Egon Schaden (1974) , as well as critics, such as Bartomeu Melià (1981, 1990) and, more recently, Catherine Julien (2007) and Barbosa (2013).

The analysis of the translocations proposed in my ethnography (Mendes Júnior 2021) provided the stimulus for the research that gave rise to this article, which is a study of the multiple forms of translocation observed among the Guarani over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and later during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its analysis centres on the first three volumes of the Manuscritos da Coleção de Angelis (hereafter, Manuscritos…), organised by Jaime Cortesão and Hélio Vianna between 1951 and 1970 - a set of 141 documents produced between 1594 and 1760, in the southern portion of South America.

The selection of these periods is based on the territorial translocations that resulted both in the compression of the reductions in the Paraná-Uruguay interfluvial region and in the later expansion of the Sete Povos de Missões to the left bank of the Uruguay river (Neumann 1996).⁴⁹ The question is: did a continuity exist between the migrations toward the land without evil and the translocations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Was the search for the land without evil a phenomenon dating from the start of European Conquest or even pre-dating the latter (Nimuendajú 1987; Métraux 1927; Clastres 1978; Clastres 2003)? If not, how should the translocations,⁵⁰ records of which abound in the documentary sources, be interpreted?

Wishing to explore these translocations in more historical and ethnographic depth, I limited the historical and ethnographic context to the first Jesuit reductions founded in 1609 and 1610 in the former region of Guairá:⁵¹ Loreto and San Ignácio. The objective of this article is to analyse and distinguish the various forms of translocation observed among the Guarani: on one hand, the migrations towards the land without evil in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and on the other, the war expeditions, raids, slave captures, flights from the Spanish colonizers and Portuguese bandeirantes (slavers and adventurers), and the attraction of the indigenous population to the Jesuit missions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A detailed examination of the bibliography, as well as the data originating from this research, throws into question the common thesis of the historical depth of the migrations in search of the land without evil and poses another: were those movements recorded from the nineteenth century onwards also historical phenomena whose genesis lies in the transformations to the Guarani way of life in the face of the experience of the mission reductions?

The Guarani and the migrations towards the land without evil - nineteenth and twentieth centuries

In 1914, the German ethnographer Curt Nimuendajú published Die Sagen von der Erschaffung und Vernichtung der Welt als Grundlagen der Religion der Apapocúva-Guarani,⁵² an ethnography based on the record of four migrations undertaken by Guarani subgroups (Tañygua, Oguauíva and Apapocuva) from the south of the present-day state of Mato Grosso do Sul and Paraguay to the São Paulo coast. Nimuendajú first encountered the Guarani personally in 1905, in the west of São Paulo state, and lived among them until 1907, in an Apapocuva village located on the Batalha river, an affluent of the middle Tietê river. Subsequently he stayed among them occasionally until 1913.

According to the author, the migrations had ‘magical-religious’ motivations, when a shaman, inspired by dreams and visions, foresaw a cataclysm that would lead to the destruction of the world. He would therefore unite a group of people around him and lead them in the direction of the rising sun (the east) where they would be able to reach a land where nothing perished and there were no ills, a land without evil, the translation given by the author to the expression yvy marã e’ỹ.

The first of these migrations, begun by the Tañygua, had apparently taken place around 1820, led by one of their shamans who died some years later. According to Nimuendajú (1987: 9-10), the group, composed of about 150 people, departed from southern Mato Grosso do Sul heading eastwards in search of the land without evil. The shaman’s successor settled along with the group, in 1837, in the vicinity of Itariri on the south coast of São Paulo state. The Oguauíva were the second group to start to move. In 1830, on the outskirts of Itapetininga, their journey would confront its first setback, forcing them to return westwards, settling near to the property of the Baron of Antonina, located in the modern-day municipality of Itaporanga, in a strip of land donated to them by the baron.⁵³

The second setback occurred a short time later when the Oguauíva lands were invaded by colonists. Despite the seizure of their lands, they remained in this location until 1912 when Nimuendajú, working for the recently created Indian Protection Service (Serviço de Proteção aos Índios: SPI), persuaded them to relocate to the Araribá reserve, close to the municipality of Avaí in São Paulo state.

As well as Elliott’s accounts, which assisted Nimuendajú in his historical reconstruction of these migrations, the ethnographer was also able to meet the direct descendants of the groups that had initiated them. Differently to the Oguauíva, the group that took Nimuendajú in as a member, the Apapocuva, began their march eastwards around 1870, guided by two shamans who also foresaw the end of the world. In this case, the accounts collected by Nimuendajú on the motivations for their translocations came from people who had participated from the outset. The Apapocuva, like the other groups, faced resistance from the Brazilian authorities and oppression from the surrounding population. Their attempts to reach the sea were also thwarted. After travelling through the region of the middle Tietê river, this group also moved to the Araribá reserve.

In 1912, some 13 kilometres from São Paulo city, Nimuendajú encountered the remnants of a group originating from Paraguay who, the author reported, planned to reach the coast, cross the sea and enter the land of the immortals: six people, the last survivors of a group that had gradually perished on the way. Nimuendajú tried to convince them to move to Araribá, but faced with their endless refusals, decided to take them to the coast. He accompanied them to Praia Grande where they arrived under torrential rain that continued throughout the night. At dawn, the sun revealed the sea to the small group who were astonished and left speechless. For four days Nimuendajú sang and danced with his companions, who did all they could to obtain passage to the land of the immortals. Once again, he proposed that they settle in the Araribá reserve, an idea they reluctantly accepted. However, soon after their arrival, the group disappeared without trace.

At the origin of all the above migrations was, Nimuendajú informs us, just one cause -fear of the imminent destruction of the world by a cataclysm - and just one objective - entrance into the land without evil. The author categorically rejected the hypothesis that these marches eastwards were “due to pressure from enemy tribes; [or] the hope of finding better living conditions on the other shore of the Paraná; [or] the desire to join civilization more closely” (Nimuendajú 1987: 102).

For the author, the records of these migrations revealed particular cases of a broader phenomenon. Generalizing, he proposed that the same religious motivation had been the driving force of the migratory movements that impelled the Tupi,⁵⁴ during the colonial era, towards the eastern coast (ibid: 108). This proposition was founded on a supposed pan-Tupi-Guarani ethos that associated occupation of the coast, principally from Cananeia to Maranhão, with the desire to encounter a land without evil on the other side of the ocean. Setting out from the premises that better living conditions could be obtained inland rather than on the coast, the groups occupying the coast displayed inland habits, and, at the time of European Conquest, occupation of the coast by the Tupi was a recent fact, only a religious motivation could, so Nimuendajú reasoned, explain this presence (ibid: 107-108).

Another author whose data contributed to knowledge of the Guarani migrations towards the coast was Egon Schaden. Focusing specifically on the Guarani presence in the state of São Paulo, he observed that these groups were not remnants of the ancient Tupi, but originated from the migratory waves of people coming from the west who, since the beginning of the nineteenth century, had arrived fleeing from the imminent end of the world prophesised by their shamans (Schaden 1974). As well as referring to the migrations described by Nimuendajú (1987), Schaden reported other more recent migrations, originating in southern Paraguay in 1924, 1934 and 1946, whose participants had settled in two villages in São Paulo state: Rio Branco and Itariri. There was also another group in the Chapecó region of Santa Catarina state, encountered by the author in 1947, whose intention was to reach the coast.

Schaden, just like Nimuendajú before him, lived among the survivors of these and other migrations, such as the nhanderu⁵⁵ Miguel, “who had brought a group of Mbüa [a Guarani subdivision] on a long peregrination from the Paraguay to the Itariri, next to the Atlantic Ocean” (Schaden 1974: 121). On a visit to Bananal village in the state of São Paulo, two informants born on the coast told him about the journey undertaken by the previous generation under the leadership of the capitão Guatsu from Mato Grosso do Sul. They had come “to see the sea and perform ñemongaraí”⁵⁶ on the beach. They stated that the world was going to end. Many stayed in Alecrim village, others returned to Mato Grosso. Many ñanderú prayed to see whether Ñanderykeý⁵⁷ would come to fetch them (ibid: 169).

The two aforementioned authors leave no doubts about the constant translocations from west to east, nor about the motive for these translocations - fear of the imminent ending of the world - and the objective - the desire to reach the land without evil. The theme of the quest for the land without evil became the origin myth of Guarani ethnology.

Another motive that led some Guarani groups, the Mbya, to set off in search of a land of immortality, according to Schaden (1974) and Cadogan (1959), was the search for physical-spiritual perfection (aguyje) obtained through rigorous spiritual exercises - songs, dances and prayers - and a diet that excluded meat and food of western origin. To those who successfully attained this state, normally shamans, would be revealed the way to the land without evil and how to conduct their groups to the ocean shore from where they would cross, body and soul, to paradise (Cadogan 1959: 143).

Differently to Nimuendajú and Schaden, Cadogan did not base his work on the experience of people who had taken part in the migrations or descendants of them. His work was based on recording the sacred myths and songs of the Mbya of the present-day department of Guairá in southern Paraguay. The author took this mythology to propose, contrary to Nimuendajú (1987), that the translocations explained by the myths had been led by shamans after they had obtained the state of perfectibility and who “clung to their religion, language and traditions, [making] desperate attempts […] to avoid Spanish domination and assimilation” (Cadogan 1959: 144). The author added that these shamans “led their respective tribes in an exodus towards the sea in order to save them from the aforesaid domination” (ibid: 144-145). Fear of a cataclysm was absent among the groups with whom the author worked.

Comparing the works of Nimuendajú and Cadogan, we can note that the latter insinuated a correlation between migration and Spanish domination, something that Nimuendajú categorically rejected, claiming that the motivation of the groups studied was free of exogenous influences. This, however, was not the opinion of Egon Schaden for whom the theme of the end of the world in Guarani cosmology was a pale imitation of missionary Christianity.

A twentieth-century ethnology among the Guarani and Tupi

Within the broader framework of colonial Tupi-Guarani ethnology, Nimuendajú’s work exerted a strong influence on the French ethnologist Alfred Métraux. As mentioned previously, Nimuendajú had suggested that the migrations undertaken by the ancient Tupi and recorded by the chroniclers had religious motivations. The same kind of motivation that - according to Métraux (1927), based on the accounts of the Capuchin missionaries Claude d’Abbeville and Yves d’Evreux - had inspired a Tupinambá group to translocate around 1609.⁵⁸ However, this is the only instance where such a motive is attributed: among the other migrations analysed by the author, almost all were marked by flight from the Portuguese conquerors, save one, occurring in 1605 and headed towards Maranhão, which was apparently motivated by the desire to pillage and plunder.

The influence of Nimuendajú’s work on Métraux is methodological in that the French ethnologist returned to the former’s descriptions of the migrations to propose that they “are capable of providing insights into the characteristics and causes of the exodus of the other Guarani” (Métraux 1927: 13). Although his sources do not authorize such a claim, Métraux asserted that “the way in which the exodus of the Apapocuva took place and the obstacles that they had to overcome can give us a rough idea of what the ancient migrations of the Tupi-Guarani must have been like” (ibid: 14).

The author revives the hypothesis first ventured by Nimuendajú - that occupation of the coast by the ancient Tupi between the pre- and post-Conquest periods had a religious motivation analogous to those found among the nineteenth-century Guarani - to assert that the 1609 migration of the Tupinambá, registered by the Capuchin missionaries, provided solid support for Nimuendajú’s thesis.

As Viveiros de Castro (1987: xxvi) and Pompa (2004: 141) have observed, Nimuendajú’s ethnography introduced the theme of the migrations in search of the land without evil into ethnology. The main upshot of this was also arguably to establish the frameworks of Guarani ethnology for the rest of the twentieth century. This can be observed both in the influence exerted on ethnologists in the second half of the century and on Métraux (1927) in relation to the Tupi context. Nimuendajú and Métraux were concerned with establishing correlations between the recent migrations and those recorded from the beginning of European Conquest, based above all on religious motives - correlations appropriated by the latter author to propose a more general theory on the causes of the historical Tupi-Guarani translocations. Métraux proposed using what was known about the Guarani migrations of his time to shed light on what was unknown about the migrations of the past. Likewise, what was known about the Tupi migrations could fill the gaps in knowledge concerning the earlier Guarani migrations. In so doing, Pompa argues, Métraux presumed that the Tupi and Guarani translocations formed a homogenous body.⁵⁹

What neither Nimuendajú or Métraux appeared to admit was that these two cultural complexes were subject to historical vicissitudes responsible for internal transformations.⁶⁰ Nonetheless, Métraux recognised in his conclusion “that some of these migrations were motivated by the desire to escape the servitude that the Portuguese sought to impose on the Indians, while others stemmed from the stubborn belief of the Tupi-Guarani in the existence of an earthly Paradise situated either on the other side of the sea, to the east, or inland, to the west” (Métraux 1927: 36).

As Guarani ethnology flourished, the developments brought by Nimuendajú, Métraux, Schaden and Cadogan left their marks on the works of another two ethnologists: Pierre and Hélène Clastres. In Society Against the State, the former returned to the themes of the migrations in search of the land without evil among the fifteenth and sixteenth-century Tupi-Guarani to solve the problem of the non-emergence of Power and its corollary, the State, in so-called primitive societies. As the author showed, in these societies Power is dissociated from the chiefdom and the chief’s legitimacy is founded on the prestige acquired through oratory, generosity and the capacity to resolve conflicts.

Clastres revisited the Tupi-Guarani translocations systemised by Métraux and those registered by the chroniclers to propose that their motivations were distinct: neither the fear of the world’s destruction, nor the search for physical-spiritual perfection, but the negation of centralised Power and the emergence of the chief with power, the despot, as an embryo of the state political apparatus. According to the author, Power and State evolved pari passu with the population size of societies and one of the factors favouring maintenance of the ‘traditional’ indigenous chiefdom was the small size of these societies (2003: 229). The Tupi of the start of Conquest diverged strongly from the “usual primitive model,” Clastres asserts, since they presented a high level of demographic density: “…the Tupinamba villages, for instance, which numbered several thousand inhabitants, were not cities; but they did cease to belong to the ‘standard’ demographic range of the neighboring societies” (ibid: 230). They gave rise to the emergence of chiefs located halfway between the despot and the powerless chief (ibid: 230).

It is in this context of the emergence of an embryonic Power and, in the words of Clastres, “an awakening of society itself to its own nature as primitive society, an awakening, an uprising, that was directed against the chieftainship in a sense, if not explicitly; for, in any case, it had destructive effects on the power of the chiefs” (ibid: 231), that, he argued, the migratory movements erupted in these societies. At their origin are the karai, shamans, also figures of prestige, who called on as many people as possible to follow them in search of an indestructible land and escape what was recognisably the destruction of society: the inauguration of Power (ibid: 231).

As with the indigenous chief, this persuasion was achieved through use of the word, a speech that emphasized the need for them to escape primitive society’s condemnation, its destruction through the imminent institution of centralised Power and the State. Evil, for Clastres, emerges from within the society, a society that did not find its own means to contain the emergence of this Power and, for this reason, initiated and drove the search for a place where life was worth living. Here Clastres diverges radically from Nimuendajú (1987) for whom evil originated from the outside.

Hélène Clastres (1978), like Pierre Clastres (2003) and Métraux (1927), invoked the theme of the search for the land without evil to establish a line connecting the ancient coastal Tupi with the Guarani studied by Nimuendajú (1987) and Cadogan (1959). According to the author, despite the theme’s neglect by chroniclers in the process of reducing indigenous conceptions to their European understandings, for the Tupi, “[...] the Land-without-Evil was also a site accessible to the living, where one could go, body and soul, ‘without having gone through the ordeal of death’” (Clastres 1978: 31, original emphasis). Like the other authors, she associated the migratory movements with the action of shamans who assembled groups of varying sizes who would then depart amid songs and rituals, fleeing the world’s looming destruction.

Hélène Clastres believed that the cycles of migrations had come to an end some time earlier and that if the land without evil remained in the discourse of the Guarani it was thus as an object of speculation: “The Land-without-Evil, object of a true quest in the past, has become an object of speculation; from the men of action that they were, the prophets have become thinkers” (ibid: 85). An opinion shared by Pierre Clastres too for whom the contemporary Guarani shamans, in questioning the evil condition of the world, did nothing but “cling pathetically to the discourse of the prophets of times past” (Clastres 2003: 232).

Hélène Clastres’s work is strongly influenced by Cadogan’s exegeses of Guarani songs and myths. One of these glosses, encountered among the Mbya in southern Paraguay in the 1940s, is Onhemokandire:⁶¹ “with this locution they describe the transition to immortality without passing through the ordeal of death, that is, ascension to the sky after purifying the body through spiritual exercises” (Cadogan 1959: 59). Here the author recuperates Cadogan’s interpretation to link the passage to the land without evil to the Chiriguano expeditions to the foothills of the Andes at the start of the sixteenth century. Clastres, via the work of Métraux (1927), clearly makes use of the data presented by Nordenskiöld (1917).

The analyses of the theme of the migrations in search of the land without evil over the twentieth century allow two observations. Firstly, discussing the Guarani, Nimuendajú (1987) and Schaden (1974) recorded direct accounts from groups that undertook long migrations with the objective of reaching it. The motivation for these migrations, spanning from the start of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, was apparently to escape the imminent end of the world, in both cases, or the search for physical-spiritual perfection, in the latter. Schaden was joined by Cadogan (1959) for whom the theme of the land without evil emerged through the mythic accounts of his interlocutors.

Secondly, the records of the chroniclers cited by Métraux (1927) and followed up by Hélène Clastres (1978) and Pierre Clastres (2003) tell of innumerable Tupi groups moving along the Brazilian coast, motivated either by the wish to flee from the Portuguese colonizers (Métraux 1927) or by fear of the imminent end of the world (Clastres 1978; Métraux 1927; Nimuendajú 1987), or by flight from the tempting emergence of the State, disguised in the phantasm of centralized Power (Clastres 2003). It can be asked, though, were these men and women trekking across the land harried by the constant need to flee? While it is true that all these circumstances weighed against them and that they had been impelled, since early times, to search for a land without evil, there is no doubt that the image that Pierre and Hélène Clastres and Nimuendajú projected onto the Tupi and the Guarani leads to the impression that really “the Guarani always were the suffering part”⁶² (Nimuendajú 1987: 131).

We know that the Guarani and the Tupi moved over long distances. The issue is that, contrary to what these authors proposed, neither the motivations nor the objectives were always the same. The idea that the Tupi had arrived on the coast for religious reasons, as Nimuendajú (1987: 108) proposed, followed by all the other authors, is not something authorized by either the chronicles or the sources. A hypothesis that has been refuted by ethnology for some time, as Viveiros de Castro observed: “Nimuendajú seems to be mistaken when, trying to demonstrate that occupation of the Atlantic coast by the Tupi was due to religious factors (the desire to encounter paradise), he states that these coastal peoples depended more on hunting than on the exploitation of marine resources” (1987: xxii). Melià (1981:10) too questioned the hypostatization that, according to anthropologists, the Guarani made of the theme of the search for the land without evil. Examining the first Jesuit documents, the author claimed that the migratory dimension, so widely documented from the nineteenth century on, did not appear clearly in the historical texts analysed by himself. Along the same lines, Fausto (2005: 408) criticized the temporal and spatial flattening of the Tupi and Guarani translocations used as evidence of continuity - a praxis that would become one of the weak points of Guarani ethnology.

Challenges to the interpretations of Guarani translocations

I began this article with a dialogue between Senhor Albino and me about his departure from Paraguay. He was the last survivor of the group of people who had begun this journey in the 1930s. So, when I asked him why they had left Paraguay, his reply was:

From the other side of the Paraguay river the elders came so we came our cacique [chief] brought us to take us to the golden land our cacique would take us to this land here, to this here, to the golden land he would take us, he wanted to take us ⁶³

His reply was precise. They sought the golden land, the paradise of immortality, and did so precisely at a moment when the Chaco War was recruiting and consuming a large indigenous contingent in Paraguay and Bolivia. Albino’s sister-in-law, Benedita, recalled the stories of her father, already long deceased, of the time when he carried water to the Paraguayan soldiers in the trenches. The war was the end of the world. They sought to flee this destruction by an unusual route until the death of the last shaman. Thereafter his absence had various consequences, including abandonment of the initial plan, given the incapacity of the other members to conduct the survivors and, as a result, their dispersal into smaller units (Mendes Júnior 2018, 2021). In successive waves, the later descended the Araguaia river, settling in the vicinity of various towns in Mato Grosso and with the Karajá on the Bananal Island. At a later moment, they spread along the Araguaia-Tocantins interfluvial region, unaware of the whereabouts of the other groups, at least until the end of the 1970s.

The centrality of the figure of the shaman in leading the group appeared again in the speech of another interlocutor, Abílio Karai, during a conversation in Nova Jacundá village, Pará state. Abílio, around eighty years old, was asked by his nephew (his brother’s son), Leonardo, why they had not remained in Goiás or returned to Paraguay. Another precise reply: “our cacique⁶⁴ died, we no longer knew where to go, we no longer had that person to guide us. We no longer knew where we should go; we dispersed” (24/06/2013).

I have sought to characterise each of these translocations in distinct form: the first, taking place between the 1930s and 1960s, was a migration to the land without evil such as those recorded by Nimuendajú. A significant difference was the substitution of the cataclysm by war as a motive. The other characteristics were present: the guidance by a shaman and the desire to reach a land of immortals situated, in accordance with tradition, on the other side of the ocean (on the shamanic knowledge needed to conduct these translocations, also see Combès & Saignes 1991: 27). A majority opinion among my interlocutors was that this migration terminated after the death of the last shaman.

The second translocation I called mobility since the most common statement made was that after the departure of the first group from the shores of the Araguaia river, the others followed in search of their kin who had gone ahead. This type of translocation is more like those observed among the contemporary Guarani in the south and southeast of Brazil, whose dynamic is based on a kinship network dispersed through a multilocal socius (Pissolato 2007), and which some authors have denominated mobility (Garlet 1997; Pissolato 2007).

We can note, therefore, both the recurrence of the theme of the search for the land without evil and its motivational variations and also the appearance of other themes, such as the search for kin, in the interpretation of the translocations. Their arrivals on Bananal Island were succeeded by their departures and, despite the reasons leading the first group to leave the island being unclear, the motives for the others are precisely defined (Mendes Júnior 2018, 2021). The third group, having travelled through the Araguaia-Tocantins interfluvial region, encountered the first close to Imperatriz in Maranhão at the end of the 1970s.

The ethnographic context described above reveals two motives for the translocations. Would it not be legitimate to supose that the motives that impelled the Guarani to translocate during their experience with colonial society were diferent? Pompa asks should we not seek to deduce the motives and objectives of each translocation, past or present, through “the specific reading and study of ethnographic and historical facts”? (2004: 142) based on an exhaustive inquiry undertaken, wherever possible, in conjunction with the people who participated in them or through the available documentary sources.

This exercise would avoid analyses that seek to reduce the translocations recorded for the colonial-era Tupi and Guarani to those observed among the contemporary Guarani and vice-versa. It is also essential to stress here that these colonial-era Guarani and Tupi translocations do not form a homogenous block, something that the works of earlier authors (Nordenskiöld 1917) and recent authors (Combès & Saignes 1991; Julien 2007; Mendes Júnior 2021) make clear.

Three years after Nimuendajú’s ethnography, Nordenskiöld (1917) described what is known to be the first historically documented translocation undertaken by Guarani groups towards the Inca Empire.⁶⁵ The reports on which the author based this account derived primarily from the writings of Rui Diaz de Guzmán, Nuflo de Chaves and Francisco Ortiz Vergara.⁶⁶ This translocation apparently occurred at the start of the 1530s⁶⁷ when the Portuguese explorer Aleixo Garcia and his entourage - composed by another three Portuguese as well as Tupi from the coast, obeying the orders of Martin Afonso de Souza - arrived at the Paraguay river with the objective of discovering gold and silver deposits in the continental interior. In the region where Asunción would later be founded, they persuaded around 2,000 Guarani to follow them as far as the borders of the Inca Empire and from there they returned with plundered gold and silver. Aleixo Garcia sent emissaries to Brazil to report the discovery while he waited with the Guarani.

In the interval, the Guarani killed Aleixo Garcia and the members of his entourage, sparing only his son. An expedition composed of 60 soldiers was sent from Brazil, who were also killed by the Guarani between the Paraná and Paraguay rivers. Next, the Guarani headed to the province of Santa Cruz where “[they] carried on a bloody war with the original settlers and made numerous slaves”⁶⁸ (Nordenskiöld 1917: 106).

The writings of Nuflo de Chaves - cited here through Nordesnkiöld (1917) - provide clues to an expedition of Guarani groups (Chiriguano and Guaraio)⁶⁹ westwards. The explorer received an account from a Chiriguano chief, named Bambaguazú, of the clashes between them and the Candire - “the Indians of the hills” - according to Nordenskiöld (ibid: 114). Another account to which Nordenskiöld turned was that of Ortiz Vergara. In 1565, the latter travelled from the Paraguay river to the original location of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, “passed through larger uninhabited treats wich the original settlers had abandoned through fear of the Guaranis” (ibid: 115).

Published between the writings of Nimuendajú and Métraux, Nordenskiöld’s study was the first to contest the hypotheses discussed earlier concerning the Guarani translocations, principally the ideas of Nimuendajú and, later, Pierre and Hélène Clastres, who established a connection between the Guarani translocations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the Tupi translocations of the colonial period in search of the land without evil. Though underused by various Guarani specialists, Nordenskiöld assembled new elements to analyse the first Guarani translocations - to make war, raid and obtain ‘slaves’ - and his work has contributed to the discussion of themes among recent authors (Julien 2007) that classical Guarani ethnology (Cadogan 1959; Clastres 1978) consolidated on fragile bases.⁷⁰

One of these themes is immortality: the condition of those who reach the golden land “without discontinuity […] ‘without going through the ordeal of death’: onhemonkandire” (Clastres 1978: 89). Following the etymology presented in note 17, we can concur that for Hélène Clastres “to make oneself kandire” is to avoid dissolving the continuity between a life in this land and another life in the golden land, hence, to cross to paradise with the same earthly body. Clastres borrows an etymology proposed by Cadogan in which kandire is an “apocope of kã = bones, ndikuéri = remain fresh” (1959: 59). Combès and Saignes offer another association that associates war and cannibalism to the access to the land without evil among the Tupinambá. For the authors, it was the posthumous destiny of the great warriors who in the circle of war and cannibalism passed from killers to victims. The warrior “ritually devoured, was no more than ‘fresh bones’ ka-ndicueri” (1991: 23-24). Unlike the posthumous destiny of the Tupinambá warrior, Combès and Saignes point out that today kandire designates both the technique of accessing the land without evil and the process of making the body light.

Cadogan and Clastres were both aware that the term kandire designated at the time of European Conquest a “non-Guarani nation” (1959: 59), located to the west of the Rio Grande or Guapay, close to Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia. Even so, Clastres insists that the “migrations that led the Chiriguano to the foot of the Andes were related to the search for the Land-without-Evil” (1978: 31).⁷¹ A suggestion hastily associated with the name ‘Candire,’ which, as the author noted, the Chiriguano gave to the Inca Empire.

Cadogan’s interpretations, endorsed by Clastres, enjoyed a certain prestige in Guarani ethnology. Perhaps this was due to the scant investment of ethnologists in the documentary sources. However, this tendency has gradually faded over the years (Wilde 2009, Barbosa 2013, Julien 2007, Orantin 2021). Discussing the term kandire and its relation to the theme of the land without evil, a study by Catherine Julien (2007: 247) questioned its use by the anthropological literature.

According to the author and as we have seen previously, anthropology privileged the idea that the first expeditions were driven by the quest for the land without evil and overlooked the motives encountered in the documentary sources that correlated these movements with specific contexts. The documentation analysed by Julien was produced during three expeditions that the Spanish, setting out from Asunción, undertook in the company of the Guarani along the Paraguay river to the Pantanal: 1542-1543, led by Domingos de Irala; 1543-1544, led by Cabeza de Vaca; and 1557-1559, led by Nuflo de Chaves.

According to Julien, there were other expeditions that preceded the foundation of Asunción, in 1537, when the first Spanish began the search for precious metals. Aside from the expedition of Aleixo Garcia, already mentioned, the author indicates another led by Juan de Ayolas, in 1537, which culminated in his death and that of his entourage by the indigenous population (unspecified) who accompanied him when they returned from the Andean foothills to the Paraguay river (2007: 251).

In the documentation produced by Irala, Julien calls attention to the encounter between him and two Guarani-speaking interpreters who had been captured by Guaxarapo⁷² groups in earlier times: the first in the south of the Pantanal, the second further to the north. In 1543, at a port called Los Reyes (situated on the shores of the Paraguay river, upstream of the modern-day city of Corumbá), Irala encountered various Chané⁷³ men who, while still boys, had been captured by the Itatim (a Guarani group) when the latter were travelling through their territory westwards “to search for metal (para yr a buscar el metal)” (2007: 253). They also told him that Aleixo Garcia had crossed their territory in search of precious metals during the same period that they were attacked by the Itatim.

West of Los Reyes, Irala encountered another group whom he identified as Guarani-speaking. They mentioned earlier groups that had also left in search of precious metals. A Chané woman - a captive since youth who had been married to a Guarani man in the past - told Irala that other groups had travelled to the regions where precious metals were obtained, traversing various territories until reaching the ‘Canire’ (Kandire), the masters of metal (Julien 2007: 254). Given the accounts from Irala’s informants themselves about their capture, Julien suggests that not only the search for metals but also the desire for captives had motivated the Guarani translocations westwards (2007: 254). Combès and Saignes (1991) analysed the occupation of the region located between the Chaco and the southeast portion of the Andean foothills by the Chiriguano and the relations of subjugation imposed by them on the Chané.

As for Nuflo de Chaves, the 1557 expedition aimed to found a city to the north of Asunción among the Xarayé indigenous people,⁷⁴ which would allow continuation of the search for the source of gold used by them as ornamentation. Among this people, he met a man whose father, called Çaye, was also known as Candire. Çaye took the latter name after killing many people in the territory of the Candire. Julien notes that the term ‘Candire’ also designated both the chief of the Xarayé and the place where the metals could be obtained (Julien 2007: 255).⁷⁵

In another locality, Bambaguazu (which took the name of its chief), the residents told Chaves that the ‘Candire’ inhabited an enormous land, surrounded by trenches, situated in the high mountains where there was a great lake and they were owners of metal. In the settlement, Chaves also received information about another two localities where many of their members had been among the ‘Candire.’ After visiting both, Chaves learned that when he crossed the Guapay (or Rio Grande), he would find himself in ‘Candire’ territory.⁷⁶

As we have seen, Guarani ethnology’s interpretation of the expression kandire to mean the “passage to immortality without passing through death” traces back to Cadogan (1959: 59). However, it is Hélène Clastres who connects Cadogan’s interpretation to the Chiriguano expeditions to the Andes as a quest for the land without evil,⁷⁷ based especially on the reference to kandire in the documentary sources produced in the course of the 1557 expedition. A hypothesis on which Julien ironically remarks: “nothing in the documents effectively counters the proposal that a conceptualization like the Land without-Evil existed in the sixteenth century” (Julien 2007: 264); however, the author continues, not in terms of ideas like paradise, resurrection or evil, which among the Guarani of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries seemed to be derived from the Jesuit experience.

Julien, like Melià (1990), draws attention to use of the expression yvy marane’ỹ as quoted by Montoya (2011), who defined it as intact soil. In this sense, “the search for yvy marã e’ỹ can simply have been a move to lands not previously cultivated, a common agricultural practice in lowlands South American” (Julien 2007: 265). For Melià (1981: 10), this acceptation of the expression yvy marã e’ ỹ pointed to an “ecological and economic” use that had nothing to do with the prophetic meaning found among the Guarani groups from the second decade of the nineteenth century.

Diverse aspects of the translocations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

A critical reading of the bibliography on Guarani translocations between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries has provided a better understanding of their meanings, enabling a revision of the hypothesis that the migrations to the land without evil were a phenomenon emergent between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This revision was corroborated by the research conducted in the Manuscritos…, focusing analysis on the groups that inhabited the Guairá region, especially those living near to the reductions of Loreto and San Ignácio. The data from the research reveals an image of the Guarani as warriors bearing no relation to a despondent people who wanted a land that would allow them to escape destruction.

To comprehend the Guarani translocations in this region, it was necessary to reconstruct, as far as possible, various aspects of these societies: warfare and cannibalism offered the best data for a denser exploration of the theme. Descola (1993) called attention to the importance of the theme of war in the repertoire of Amazonian studies, which can be confirmed by a quick examination of the bibliography (Descola 1993; Fausto 2001; Fernandes 2006; Vilaça 1992; Viveiros de Castro 1986). The place occupied by warfare and cannibalism in Amazonian studies is due largely to the fact that some of these peoples practiced both until recently. The Wari’ (Vilaça 1992), Araweté (Viveiros de Castro 1986), Parakanã (Fausto 2001) and other peoples still retain a memory of these practices and proffer a discourse about them.

In relation to the Guarani, warfare and cannibalism - present in the documentary sources - were not explored in much depth. They very often emerge in works as a consequence or objective of the translocations (Julien 2007; Nordenskiöld 1917). The reasons for their absence in Guarani ethnology are due, on one hand, to the temporal distance involved. While the colonial sources mention the practice of cannibalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there are no reports of its practice subsequently.⁷⁸ On the other hand - on the premise that both belong to a distant past - we can only access them via the records. However, the dispersal of these records in archives and museums makes difficult, or even discourages, their study.

Among these records, those of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca and the priest Antonio Ruiz de Montoya provide the best descriptions of Guarani cannibalism. Cabeza de Vaca (2007: 131) was the first to perceive that war was motivated by revenge and, as a consequence, maintained a direct relationship to cannibalism and naming. The enemy was taken by his captors to their settlement where they transformed him into an affine (brother-in-law and son-in-law) by giving him wives. He was kept in carefully monitored freedom until the moment when he was solemnly executed.⁷⁹ Montoya (1997: 55), whose account follows a hiatus of almost one century after Cabeza de Vaca, observed similar treatment of the captured enemy. In the Manuscritos… there are records that correlate warfare with ritualised cannibalism. We can cite a brief description dated 1628.

A young Indian of the Gualacho nation arrived in his possession, captured during a war of the Taiaovas,⁸⁰ he was exchanged for a knife and, passing from hand to hand, arrived at this comarca and this cacique. Although this slave had served him for some years, one day he decided that he wanted to eat him and invited the neighbouring Indians to a drinking bout. The same cacique, having adorned himself with feathers for the feast, struck the poor Indian on the head with a maçana [wooden mace] and extended a solemn invitation to his guests.⁸¹

Though containing some lacunas, the above description is the most complete encountered and the recurrence with which the topic appears in the Manuscritos… leaves no doubt to its centrality, as well as to the association between war, cannibalism and feasts. Authors like Cabeza de Vaca (2007), Montoya (1997), Nordenskiöld (1917) Julien (2007) and the data found in the Manuscritos… reveal the prevalence of an image of the Guarani associated with warfare, plunder and cannibalism, some distance from the image of a people in flight, as found in the migrations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Warriors and cannibals! Other images included: “a valiant people in war,” “masters of the neighbouring nations,” “haughty and proud.” However, they only wanted to call the Spanish “brother-in-law or nephew.”⁸² What implications can be extracted from this imagery?

While kinship marked the initial relations between the indigenous population and the Spanish, enabling the founding of the city of Asunción,⁸³ the emergence of a mestizo population meant that these relations, by now frayed, gave way to the provision of personal services through the encomendas system.⁸⁴ In Guairá, the Guarani became familiar with this system from 1556 with the founding of the Royal City of Guairá. The inauguration of Vila Rica do Espírito Santo in 1589 accelerated the process of indigenous submission to this form of work (Mörner 1968), which led some groups who occupied the shores of the rivers close to these cities to retreat to more distant regions. Another factor, the actions of the bandeirantes from the beginning of the seventeenth century - whose objective was to capture indigenous infidels to sell as slaves in São Paulo - caused the dispersal of groups to regions far from these settlements.

It was only after the installation of the first Jesuit reductions in Guairá in 1609 - Loreto and San Ignacio - that poles attracting the population dispersed along the rivers and mountains were created. One of the factors that may have stimulated this attraction was the Spanish king’s ban on the freely reduced indigenous population from being subject to the encomendas system. The reductions emerged as refuges from encomenderos and bandeirantes (Haubert 1990; Sarreal 2014). However, a portion of the indigenous population linked to these two reductions were already caught in the encomendas system and could not be exempted from their condition. The Guarani found themselves in an awkward situation: outside the reductions, encomenderos and bandeirantes after their bodies; inside them, the Jesuits, avid for their souls. In 1612, the priest Joseph Cataldino, writing about the reductions of Loreto and San Ignacio, stated:

Our Lady of Loreto and the settlement of Roquilho; Saint Ignatius and Tamarac, […] there were in these reductions [around] two thousand Indians, those who pay tribute [men between 18 and 50 years old], since there are in total, counting children and women, around seven or eight thousand souls. […] the said reductions know that these priests made them and reduced them and not others, removing them from the forests, idolatries, evil rites and ceremonies in which they had been [living], and from fast-flowing rivers where they had to work excessively on rough, sick land that yields little, and where there are no horses to move around and, ordinarily, there is great peril of losing one’s life, and they know that from the province of Brazil and the town of São Paulo will come the Portuguese to raid [maloquear] the said regions of the said reductions, where, if the priests do not defend the Indians, there will be no natives in this province of Guairá. ⁸⁵

A subject that would be reiterated in another letter of 1629 in which the priest Simon Masseta related his clash with the cacique Guirabera when the latter insisted that the priest gift him with religious clothing: “I told him that I had come to teach the word of God and to defend them from the Devil and the Portuguese, not to bring him clothes”⁸⁶ (my emphasis).

The prohibition on making captives of the converted indigenous population was respected until 1628 when the priest Antônio Ruiz Montoya related the fact that the Portuguese had captured a group and, doubting that they were converts, tested their knowledge of Christian doctrine. Those who responded well were freed; the rest were enslaved.⁸⁷ Subsequently, as the priests Justo Mancilla and Simão Maceta recounted,⁸⁸ seventeen Christian indigenous people were again captured close to the reduction of Encarnación, east of Loreto, by members of another bandeira. The priest Montoya, seeing his attempt to recover his disciples fail, advanced with 1,200 indigenous people to the place where the Portuguese were stationed, prompting the head of the bandeira to agree to release them.

A short time passed and a cacique by the name of Tatavrana, who had been captured by the Portuguese and managed to escape, was demanded by the latter from the priests of another reduction, San Antônio, who refused to hand him over. On 30 January 1629, following approval from Antônio Raposo Tavares, the Portuguese, whose contingent was formed of around 100 Portuguese and 1,000 Tupi,⁸⁹ attacked the reduction in question, destroying it and taking with them the cacique and another 4,000 indigenous people. On 20 March of the same year, they attacked another reduction, Jesus Maria, where they massacred the entire population. Finally, three days after this last attack, they destroyed the reduction of San Miguel, close to the first, which had been abandoned when the priests learned what had happened at San Antônio.

In 1630, in the face of the destructions that had been occurring since the start of the previous year and of the imminent risk of a new bandeirante attack, the provincial priest Nicolau Duran asked the Royal Audience of Chuquisaca for permission to move the reductions of Loreto and San Ignácio to regions further south of the Paraná river. After receiving permission, they quickly began work on constructing rafts and canoes to transport a population of around 12,000 indigenous people downriver. An account by the priest Montoya shows that the decision to flee was not based on any idle fear. The Portuguese indeed arrived:

We had travelled two days downriver when some Indians, slower to leave, caught up with us. From them we learned how those pernicious enemies had been overcome with fury on discovering they had been cheated. Had they been just a little quicker, they would have undoubtedly caught us and conquered a very fine and rich prey. (Montoya 1997: 152)

Final considerations

In this article I proposed an analysis of the Guarani translocations in terms of their multiple meanings. To do so I explored a classic theme in Guarani ethnology, namely the migrations to the land without evil. Paraphrasing Nimuendajú, these migrations can be said to have been the ‘driving force’ for comprehending other forms of translocation observed among Guarani groups since the beginning of European Conquest. It is important to emphasize that over the course of the article I have privileged analysing the translocations in relation to diverse actors: enemies, captives, encomenderos, bandeirantes, missionaries. Next, I showed the particularities of each, questioning above all the idea of a continuity between these translocations and some of those that emerged from the nineteenth century and became known as the quest for the land without evil.

The decision to live in the reductions, as a form of escaping either the hardships of the encomendas or the subjugation of the bandeirantes, brought consequences, such as the appropriation and resignification of ideas in both directions: from the priests to the indigenous population and vice-versa. The tone of these flows oscillated frequently between conversion and resistance. We saw earlier how Guiravera, one of the biggest opponents of religious conversion in Guairá, asked the priest Simon Masseta for religious clothing. Why did he do so? There are innumerable examples in the documentary sources of shamans appropriating religious artefacts to perform their own activities and thus oppose the Jesuits.⁹⁰

Questioning the continuity between the translocations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and those of the colonial period does not mean denying that the migrations in search of the land without evil were real events. However, these events are localised in time and space. As Nimuendajú showed, they began around 1820, between the far south of Mato Grosso do Sul and eastern Paraguay, and ended to the east and north of Brazil in the 1960s, with the groups almost never managing to realise their desire to reach the sea. As I sought to show, interspersed among their motives were events produced in the course of a historical process, such as the Chaco War, and shamanic interpretations.

Historical or cosmological causalities? This does not seem to be the question for an anthropology that has long abandoned notions such as purity and authenticity, especially in relation to societies whose social reproduction depends to a large extent on appropriation from the outside, “cannibal societies” to use the expression of Viveiros de Castro (1986: 384). This is a critique that Fausto also makes of those analyses that resorted to the conceptions of culture and tradition underlying ideas of the purity and authenticity of the Guarani ‘religion’ (2005: 392). I also suggest that these are not adequate conceptions for comprehending the multiple meanings involved in the translocations during different periods.

Regarding the migrations that took place during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the literature reveals the difficulty of projecting onto the Tupi the same motives that drove the Guarani from the nineteenth century onwards. For the former, the flight from the Portuguese conquerors is well-known (Métraux 1927). But in relation to the Guarani, the works of Nordenskiöld (1917), Julien (2007) and the Manuscritos… reveal societies marked by the prestige won in war, plunder and the subjugation of enemy peoples along the right shore of the Paraguay river. These populations were certainly not like those described by ethnologists who discussed the theme of the land without evil, a people terrified by the imminent end of the world - cataclysmology (Nimuendajú 1987; Clastres 1978) - or by the end of their world - expropriations and wars (Cadogan 1959; Melià 1990; Mendes Júnior 2021). The data from Guairá not only shows that war drove the groups but also corroborates the image of a fearless people.

The encounter with the European colonisers profoundly marked their social relations. From the alliances between the indigenous population and the Spanish emerged a criolla population that, along with the Spanish, strove from the 1560s to subject the indigenous workforce to the encomiendas system - intensified after the discovery of yerba mate in the Maracayu mountains in Paraguay around 1600 (Manuscritos… I, II). Thereafter, the Guarani social structures were profoundly transformed, which would give rise to another type of translocation, the flights, intensified with the bandeiras.

With the establishment of the Jesuit reductions in 1609 - accompanying the ban on the use of the indigenous workforce in the encomiendas for a ten-year period - a movement of attracting indigenous peoples was observed that led to the emergence of a population around the missions much greater than usual for these groups until then. Loreto and San Ignácio had a population of around 8,000 indigenous people in 1612; in 1629, the same year as its destruction, San Antonio had 4,000 and Jesus Maria another 3,000 (Manuscritos… I). The third type of translocation, therefore, were the attractions of indigenous groups to join the reductions - whether they had been dispersed due to the internal dynamics that formed smaller units along the rivers and in the uplands, or those who had fled from the colonisers and bandeirantes.

The fourth type of translocation is also a form of flight, one distinct, though, from the others since it could unite larger or smaller contingents. What differentiated this type of flight was the action of priests in leading the groups fleeing from the advance of the bandeiras. Here I recall the departure of 12,000 indigenous people led by seven priests from Loreto and San Ignácio to a region further south of the Paraná river. In the reduction of Mboiboi too, in Itatim, its members followed the priest Barnabé de Bonilla to the shores of the Ypane river, in 1648, fleeing the bandeirantes (Manuscritos… II).

This fourth type of translocation raises a question that many ethnologists have sought to eschew and that, unfortunately, due to the limitations of the information available in the Manuscritos…, cannot be explored in more depth in this article. Were these flights led by priests a kind of genesis of the migrations guided by shamans from the start of the nineteenth century and that erupted around 40 years after the expulsion of the Jesuits? The documentation analysed here allows the formulation of this hypothesis, one that remains to be investigated in future research.

Acknowledgements

I thank the Research Support Program of the National Library Foundation for the research grant awarded between October 2018 and September 2019. My thanks also for the readings and valuable comments of Amanda Migliora, Aparecida Vilaça, Elizabeth Pissolato, Isabel Martínez, Joaquin Ruiz, Tatiana Cipiniuk, Valéria Macedo, Vicente Pereira and the anonymous reviewers.

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• MELIÀ, Bartomeu; SAUL, Marcos Vinícios & MURARO, Valmir. 1987. O Guarani: uma bibliografia etnológica Santo Ângelo: Fundação Missioneira de Ensino Superior.
• MENDES JÚNIOR, Rafael Fernandes. 2018. “Os Mbya desceram o Araguaia: parentesco e dispersão”. In: Dominique Tilkin Gollois & Valéria Macedo (orgs.), Nas Redes Guarani: Saberes, traduções, transformações São Paulo: Hedra. pp. 339-360.
• MENDES JÚNIOR, Rafael Fernandes. 2021. A terra sem mal: uma saga guarani Rio de Janeiro: EdURFJ.
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• MONTOYA, Antonio Ruiz de. 1997 [1639]. Conquista espiritual feita pelos padres da Companhia de Jesus nas províncias do Paraguai, Paraná, Uruguai e Tape Porto Alegre: Martins Livreiro.
• MONTOYA, Antonio Ruiz de. 2011 [1639]. Tesoro de la lengua Guaraní Asunción: Cepag.
• MÖRNER, Magnus. 1968 [1953]. Atividades Politicas y economicas de los jesuitas en el Rio de la Plata Buenos Aires: Paidos.
• NEUMANN, Eduardo. 1996. O trabalho guarani missioneiro no Rio da Prata colonial, 1640-1750 Porto Alegre: Martins Livreiro .
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• VIVEIROS DE CASTRO, Eduardo. 1987. “Nimuendaju e os Guarani”. In: Curt Unkel Nimuendaju, As lendas da criação e destruição do mundo como fundamentos da religião dos Apapocúva-GuaraniSão Paulo: Hucitec/Edusp.

Notes

• 46
  A conflict between Bolivia and Paraguay that lasted between 1932 and 1935.
• 47
  Yvy ju, which literally signified golden land, is a correlate of yvy marã e’ỹ, translated by Nimuendajú (1987) as land without evil. This translation diverges from the one presented by the priest Antonio Ruiz de Montoya (2011: 298), intact soil, followed by Melià (1990: 33) and Julien (2007: 264). Native words will be cited as registered by the authors concerned. This explains the variations in ñanderu and nhanderu, candire and kandire.
• 48
  For an analysis of this journey, I recommend Mendes Júnior (2021). Here I merely reiterate that, along with the shaman, many other people died, which led to a certain disintegration of the group.
• 49
  The translocations occurring in the eighteenth century gained momentum after the signing of the Treaty of Madrid (1750) and their analysis lies beyond the scope of this article: for the post-1750 period, however, I recommend Garcia (2009).
• 50
  I use the term translocation to refer to any movement of these groups in space. Elsewhere (Mendes Júnior 2021), I employed the terms migration and mobility; the former to refer to the translocations in search of the land without evil and the latter to refer to those oriented by kin relations pre-established between groups and people who shared the same territories.
• 51
  The Guairá region was part of the Jesuit Province of Paraguay and covered a portion of the modern-day state of Paraná. It was bounded to the north by the Paranapanema river, to the south by the Iguaçu river, to the west by the Paraná river, and to the east by the Tibagi river (Mörner 1968; Neumann 1996).
• 52
  Translated into Portuguese in 1987 under the title As lendas da criação e destruição do mundo como fundamentos da religião dos Apapocúva-Guarani. São Paulo: Hucitec/Edusp.
• 53
  In an article published in the journal of the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro in 1856, João Enrique Elliott, in the service of the Baron of Antonina at the time, described the arrival of various ‘Cayuaz’ on the baron’s farm estate in 1844. They settled on a portion of land where a short time later a chapel in honour of Saint John the Baptist would be founded. Elliott’s description concerns a Cayuaz group that seems to have crossed the Paraná river just below the mouth of the Ivahi. They travelled upriver as far as the ruins of Vila Rica and later journeyed from the mark (comarca) of Curitiba to São Paulo’s southern coast, finally settling on the farm estate of the Baron of Antonina (1856:435). Barbosa (2013) was the first to note a discrepancy between the accounts of Elliott and Nimuendajú. The form in which he problematizes the Guarani migrations of the nineteenth century is also thought-provoking; however, I lack the space to extend discussion of this topic here.
• 54
  I use the term Tupi to refer to the set of peoples (Tupinambá, Tupinaés, Tupiniquim, Potiguara) who between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries occupied the region that extends from the south coast of São Paulo to Maranhão. They are linguistically related peoples belonging to the Tupi-Guarani language complex (Combès & Saignes 1991).
• 55
  Nhanderu: where nhande is the first-person plural (we) inclusive pronoun (the speaker’s interlocutor is included), r is an epenthesis, and u signifies father. It is employed to refer to divinities, as in Nhanderu Tupã and Nhanderu ete, (Our Father Tupã and Our True Father). Among some Guarani groups it also designates shamans, as in the cases cited here, in the groups that live in the north of Brazil and in Mato Grosso do Sul. The coastal groups more often use the term opita’i va’e. Literally, one who smokes. This reflects the fact that the pipe and tobacco are the main instruments used by these shamans. Here o is the prefix indicating the third person singular and plural, pita is the intransitive verb to smoke, and va’e is a nominaliser (Dooley 2013). Other terms utilized are karai and its corresponding female form kunhã karai, where kunhã signifies woman, and pajé (mbaje, paye). The latter, however, has an ambiguous meaning and frequently refers to someone who practices sorcery (see too Fausto 2005:408).
• 56
  A ceremony in which personal names are revealed (see Nimuendajú 1987; Mendes Júnior 2021).
• 57
  The name of one of the Guarani divinities. Literally, our older brother, where r is an epenthesis and -ike’y is the term for older brother (male speaker).
• 58
  “During one of his voyages, probably in 1609, the French official la Ravardière encountered, close to the Isle of Santana, the Potiguara of Pernambuco who had abandoned their country to conquer the earthly Paradise” (Métraux 1927: 15).
• 59
  “Because of the similarities presented by the two cultural groupings (the coastal Tupinambá of the colonial period observed by the chroniclers and the Guarani of Paraguay and southern Brazil registered by ethnographers in the first half of this [the twentieth] century), they were identified as a single Tupi-Guarani ‘system.’ […] Based on this identification, the ‘myth of the Land Without Evil’ and the consequent ‘messianism’ were defined in general as a cosmological set intrinsic to Tupi-Guarani culture as a whole” (Pompa 2004: 142).
• 60
  Jesuit practice in the Province of Paraguay differed in many respects from what occurred in the Portuguese colony. In Spanish America, the Jesuits - in contrast to their colleagues in Brazil whose works greatly benefitted colonial policy (Castelnau-L’Estoile 2000) - strove to maintain isolated those indigenous groups that they successfully reduced (Haubert 1990; Mörner 1968).
• 61
  An expression composed by o (^{see note 11)} + nhe reflexive particle + mo causative particle. It can be translated as “it makes itself kandire.”
• 62
  In this same section, Nimuendajú asked: “Where does this pessimism come from then? Firstly, it can be supposed that the Guarani, even before the arrival of the Europeans, carried the seed of the decline and death of the race, and that character trait would reflect this state” (Nimuendajú 1987: 131).
• 63
  Paraguai rovai kue’i tuja kue ou/ ha’e gui roju/ ore cacique rogueru karã/ rogueraa haguã yvy ju py/ orecacique rogueraa va’ekue yvy apy py, kova’e apy py, akaty yvyju py/ rogueraa va’e kue, rogueraa xe.
• 64
  The term cacique was used in colonial documents from the end of the sixteenth century to designate the chiefs of local groups and did not always coincide with the figure of the shamans. However, in the speech of my interlocutor, the cacique and the shaman were the same person.
• 65
  For a detailed study of the expansion of the Chiriguano towards the Inca Empire, I recommend the work of Combès and Saignes (1991).
• 66
  Rui Diaz de Guzmán, lieutenant governor of Guairá between 1594 and 1596 and of Santiago de Xerez between 1596 and 1599, was the first Creole historian of Southern America (Cortesão 1951: 78). Nuflo de Chaves, a Spanish explorer, was a member of the Cabeza de Vaca expedition between 1541 and 1542. Ortiz Vergara, another Spanish explorer, replaced Domingos Martinez de Irala as governor of Rio de la Plata after the latter’s death in 1557, before being removed in 1567.
• 67
  Nordenskiöld identifies the year 1526 as the date of this expedition but this seems doubtful since Martim Afonso de Souza left Lisbon for Brazil only on 3 December 1530.
• 68
  Use of the expression ‘slave’ in the colonial literature remains controversial. According to Santos-Granero (2009: 48-49), with the exception of the Kalinago and Conibo - who imposed a form of servitude on their war captives - across most of the continent these slaves referred to captives transformed into affines (women) or adopted (children). Another notable fact was the practice, found among the Chiriguano from the end of the sixteenth century, of selling captives as slaves to the Spanish (Combès & Saignes 1991: 65).
• 69
  According to Combès and Saignes, the Guaraio are remnants of Guarani (Itatim) groups fragmented by Portuguese and Spanish pressures from the second half of the seventeenth century (1991: 32).
• 70
  Melià et al. (1987: 53) pointed out that the essays of Pierre and Hélène Clastres, “are built on highly fragmentary and selective data, cited in a general and unscientific manner with regard to both the reading of historical sources and the utilization of second-hand empirical data.” An opinion shared by Descola and Taylor: “…the status of Pierre Clastres’ works is no less paradoxical […]: Society Against the State is the first work of tropical Americanism to have caused a huge stir among the discipline as a whole, and even far beyond, since it proposed a very general paradigm or a set of postulates. For the first time, ethnographic material deriving from the South American lowlands directly fed a powerful hypothesis on the nature of social relations. Once again, however, the relationship between ethnography and theory was distorted since the Savages that Clastres presents are no longer the Guayaki or the Chaco Indians, or any particular society, but rather a hybrid construct upon which a theory of the social bond was projected. A trajectory inspired by classical political philosophy that appeared to the eyes of non-specialists to be an orthodox ethnological theory” (Descola & Taylor 1993: 20).
• 71
  According to Combès and Saignes “[in the] sixteenth century, ‘Candire’ designated the name of the land without evil of the Chiriguano and the Guarayo” (1991: 24).
• 72
  In the sixteenth century, the Guaxarapo were a group of canoeists located upriver of Asunción, possibly members of the Guaycuru linguistic family (Martínez 2018:288).
• 73
  An Arawakan-speaking people inhabiting the southeast portion of the Andean foothills (Combès & Saignes 1991: 18)
• 74
  The Xaraye were an Arawakan-speaking people who lived on the borders of the Pantanal region once called Laguna de los Xarayes. Subsequently they became known as Saraveca, Sarave, Zarave (Martínez 2018; my thanks to Gustavo Godoy for the information on this people).
• 75
  Located close to a large lake in the Araracanguá mountains. I was unable to find references to the localization of these mountains.
• 76
  See Nordenskiöld: “When the ‘Chiriguano’ had passed the Rio Guapay, they saw the border village of the Candire country” (1917: 114).
• 77
  Although Combès and Saignes (1991) maintain the relations between kandire and a place of immortality, inherited from Clastres (1978), their data and analyses provide solid elements in favour of an expansion westwards motivated by wars, plundering and the capture of ‘slaves.’
• 78
  A more detailed examination of the cannibalism rituals among the colonial-era Guarani still remains to be done. However, Fausto’s observation concerning the contemporary Guarani is suggestive when he describes “a negation of cannibalism as a general condition of the cosmos and a mechanism of social reproduction,” which the author labels ‘dejaguarization’ (2005: 396). Other Amazonian examples can also be cited here where the poles of shamanism and war coincide (Viveiros de Castro 1986: 530-531; Andrade 1992: 136; Vilaça 1992: 60).
• 79
  After describing the conducting of the enemy to the village plaza, the adolescents enter the scene: “The boys arrived with little axes, the largest of them, the leader’s son, is the first to strike him with the axe on the head until the blood flows. Next, the others begin to strike and while they are hitting him, the surrounding Indians shout and encourage them to be brave, to have the courage to confront the wars and kill their enemies; they should remember that the man who is there has already killed their people. When they finish killing him, the Indian who killed him takes his name, becoming called by this name as a sign of valour” (Cabeza de Vaca, 2007: 131-132, my italics). Also note that, as mentioned previously, the chief of the Xarayé, Çaye, began to be called Kandire too after killing many of the latter people in their territories.
• 80
  A Guarani subgroup led by a chief called Tayaova or Tayaoba (depending on the source).
• 81
  Annual letter from P. Nicolas Mastrillo Durán in which he reports the state of the reductions of the Province of Paraguay during the years 1626 and 1627. Only the part concerning the reductions of Guairá is transcribed. Córdova, 12 November 1628 (Manuscripts… I).
• 82
  “Report by an anonymous Jesuit on the cities of Paraguay and Guairá, Spaniards, Indians and mestizos,” December 1620 (Manuscripts… I).
• 83
  The Spanish, travelling up the Paraguay river, were convinced by the Guarani to stay at this site. The Spanish were given women and daughters and were called brothers-in-law. As each Spaniard had as many wives as he wished, they soon had so many mestizo children that they were able to populate all the towns (^{see previous note)}.
• 84
  “Through the encomienda, a group of indigenous families, small or large, depending on the case, became, with their own caciques, subject to the authority of a Spanish encomendero. The latter was legally obliged to protect the Indians who were encomendados to him in this form and to take care of their religious instruction […] He would acquire the right to benefit from the personal services of the Indians for the various necessities of work and to demand from them the payment of diverse economic services” (Capdequi 1946: 37, quoted in Cortesão 1951: 490).
• 85
  Report on the foundation of the reductions of Guairá. Made at the request of the respective father superior Joseph Cataldino. Santa Fé, 02/02/1614 (Manuscritos… I) “Nuestra S.ra de Loreto, y el pueblo de Roquillo; S.to Ignacio y Tamarca, y que abra en las dichas rreducciones [cerca] de dos mil indios estos de tassa que serán por todos con hijos y mugeres como siete o ocho mil almas. Las quales dichas rreducciones de suso sabe que los dichos P.es las hicieron y rredujieron ellos, y no otros sacándolos de los montes, ydolatrias, e rritos, y seremonias y su mal vivir en que estavan, y de rrios caudalosissimos donde han tenido exesivos trabajos por ser tierra aspera emferma, y de malas comidas, y no aver cabalgaduras en que poder andar y de ordinario con gran rriesgo de perder las vidas y q sabe q de la pro.cia del brasil, y villa de S. Pablo vienen los Portugueses a maloquear a los dichos repartimientos de las dichas rreducciones de suso donde se los dichos P.es no defendiessen los dichos Indios no huviera naturales ningunos em la dicha provincia de Guayra”.
• 86
  Letter from the priest Simão Masseta to the provincial priest Nicolau Duran, informing him about the foundation of the reduction of Jesus Maria, in the land of the Taiaobas, and the works endured. Jesus Maria, 25/1/1629 (Manuscritos… I) dixele q avia venido a enseñarles la palabra de Dios y defenderles del Dem.º y Portug.es y no a traerle ropas.
• 87
  Annual letter of the priest Antonio Ruiz, father superior of the mission of the Guairá. Addressed to the priest Nicolau Duran, provincial priest of the Company of Jesus, 2/7/1628 (Manuscritos… I).
• 88
  Report made to the king and to the provincial priest Francisco Vasquez de Trujillo on the damage caused by the great bandeira of Raposo Tavares on the missions of Guairá in the years 1628-1629. City of Salvador, Bahia de Todos os Santos, 10/10/1629 (Manuscritos… 1).
• 89
  Report by Manuel Juan de Morales, from the town of São Paulo, sent to his Majesty, on the affairs and mischief of its residents, 1636 (Manuscritos… I).
• 90
  For other forms of resistance prior to the implantation of the Jesuit missions, see Roulet (1993); Chamorro (1998); on the Tupi context, see Vainfas (2022).

Notes

• 91
  Translated by David Rodgers

• Erratum

  In the article Cartographies of Guarani translocations: The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, by Rafael Fernandes Mendes Júnior, with DOI number 10.1590/1678-49442022v28n2a202, section Articles of journal Mana. Studies in Social Anthropology, volume 28, number 2, published in September 2020, page 24, footnote number 16:
  For:
  see note 11
  Read:
  see note 10

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  05 Sept 2022
• Date of issue
  2022

History

• Received
  30 Nov 2021
• Accepted
  20 June 2022