The Myth of the Land Without Evil and the Tupinambá

Abstract

In dialogue with recent authors and based on readings of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century chronicles, this article presents a critical reflection regarding the postulation put forth by Alfred Métraux, Pierre Clastres, and Hélène Clastres, namely, the existence of a narrative (myth) of the Land Without Evil among the ancient Tupinambá people. In doing so, it develops a critique of their theses on three levels: methodological, historical, and political. First, it demonstrates that Pierre and Hélène Clastres maintained a methodologically essentialist and anti-historical orientation, made possible by Curt Nimuendaju (1914) and inaugurated by Alfred Métraux (1928), a path that anthropologically treated the Tupi-Guarani as a unified whole, disregarding diverse peoples’ ethnological and historical specificities. Subsequently, this article argues that Clastres’s underlying theses, namely, a confrontation between morubixabas and pajés/karaíbas, are historically unfounded as expressions of the conflict between the religious and the political, society and the emerging state. Finally, this article refutes the thesis that Tupinambá migrations during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries occurred despite colonial occupation, driven by internal conflicts within Tupinambá communities (society versus state), allegedly resulting in the search for the so-called Land Without Evil. Ultimately, this article seeks to describe a domain of Tupinambá thought, its relationship with death and the dead (fundamental to their physicalist cosmology), and to resituate the Tupinambá migrations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries within the context of anticolonial resistance among native peoples.