Ferreira Tupi Guarani

Tupi-Guarani Apocalyptic Visions of Time and the Body

On an April morning in 1999, as I stood talking to Mariano Tupa-Mirim, an 18-year-old Guarani Mbya who works as a health agent on the Terra Indi'gena Guarani de Itaoca, in southern Brazil, I watched three-year-old Joacir, fiveyear-old Angelina and eight-year-old Edson play ambulance." The childrens grandfather, karat (shaman) Henrique Firmino, watched them from the family s kitchen, a large thatch-roofed construction with no walls, packed dirt floors, and a row of cotton hammocks slung across the wooden beams. Alzira Fernandes, the abstract karai s wife, prepared noodle soup"—spaghetti Guarani children of Southern Brazil who live off gar- collected at the nearbv bage dumps subvert the tribes cultural order by turn- dumpsite cooked in salty ing the future into the present in their role-playing water—while pushing acmities While the Tupi-speaking Guarani adults her newborn grandson, believe that severe hunger and scarcity are necessary Claudinei, in a hammock conditions for the passage to the Land-without-Evil, by the fire. The woman the kids suggest that the mythic paradise can be a mundane reality. Miniature vegetable gardens and tried, unsuccessfully, to scare away the flies that toy truckloads of rood create the "divine abundance featured in the promised land. Non-Indian grave- insisted on cruising over yard diggers and missionary preachers are trans- the babys body. Because formed into Guarani warriors and prophets by young the\ are located on the shamans who blow tobacco on improvised dolls. northernmost section of The childrens critique of human society bears wit- the reservation. Mbya ness that the high incidence of infant mortality can houses are only 800 transform the tribes apocalyptic \isions of time and meters (half a mile) from the body, because it calls for major changes in col- the city garbage dump. In lective behavior, including the acceptance of the comanother hammock lay forts of sedentary agricultural life. Jurandir da Silv.i, age one Ox !,»•>•»,>! i.v Latin American \iuknptltgy

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Mariana K. Leal Ferreira University of Tennessee

and a half, who had just returned from the Mongagua Municipal Hospital, where he was treated for second degree burns on his back, chest and head. An albino, Jurandirs skin could not tolerate an entire day under the sun at the dump, where both his parents scavenged for food. The child was only given some lotion and antibiotics when I personally took him to the City Hospital of Mongagua, after two unsuccessful visits his mother had previously made. Dr. Pedro, the physician in charge of the office the day I took Jurandir in, said he had not paid any attention to the bov the resumo day before because to him CriarKjas guarani vivendo em lixoes do sul brasileiro 'the boy did not even subvertem a ordem cultural do propno povo ao look like an Indian, but antecipar o fucuro em brincadeiras do cotidiano. like a mendigo (homeEnquanto adultos guarani, pertencentes ao tronco less)." The man went on lingiiistico tupi, acreditam que a fome e a escassez severas to say that "had [he] sao condi<;6es necessarias para transcender aTerra-semknown that the boy was a Mal, as crian^as sugerem que o parai'so mi'tico pode ser real Indian, [he] would reaJidade mundana. Ro^as em miniatura e caminhoes have seen him prompt- de brinquedo carregados de comida recriam a "divina ly." Dr. Pedro was afraid abundancia" da terra prometida. Coveiros e missionanos that I, as a "doctor" my- nao-indios sao transformados em guerreiros e profetas self, would file a com- guarani por jovens pajes, que assopram fumaca em plaint against him, since bonecos improvisados. A cri'tica das cnan<;as a sociedade the Fundacao Nacional de humana e testemunha de que a alta incidencia de Saiide (FUNASA), re- morcalidade infantil pode alterar as visoes apocalipticas sponsible for indigenous de tempo e do corpo guarani porque exigem mudan^as health in Brazil, requires importantes no comportamento coletivo do povo, that Indians be given pri- incluindo a aceita^ao dos confortos da agncultura ority treatment.' He add- sedentaria.

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ed that maybe, as an anthropologist, I could help him learn "how to identify Indians from whites, since now that they don't go naked around anymore or wear feathers, it is hard to tell." These children, however, are indeed 21st century Brazilian Indians, associates of the largest indigenous nation in Brazil, the 38,000-member Tupispeaking Guarani. In their play, they demonstrate a systematic response to the dehumanizing conditions under which their parents live and work on the reservation, at dumpsites, in hospitals and as cheap labor force for missionaries, farmers, tourists and government officials. Their games, three of which I describe here, interpret the everyday experiences of life in this coastal village in the southern state of Sao Paulo through a radical re-interpretation of the Guarani religious concept of Ymy Maraey,3 the Land-without-Evil, an apocalyptic vision of time and the body familiar to anthropologists, especially through the writings of Helene Clastres (1995 [1975]) and ethnographers of the early and mid 1900s (Cadogan 1950, 1959; Metraux 1927, 1948, 1979[1928]; Schaden 1963, 1974[1962]; Unkel 1987[1914]). In the process, they reject the passivity of their elders, who seem to have been bludgeoned into accepting the continual assaults and violations of their dignity as human beings that have become part of everyday Guarani life in Itaoca. In this essay, I discuss the importance of childhood agency in conditions of social inequality. I want to understand how the Guarani Nhandeva and the Guarani Mbya of southern Brazil experience and create the world they live in, by looking at the children's critique of human society as expressed in their enactment of daily life. I elect the autonomy of the children's universe as my basic proposition and argue, with Hardman (1973:87) and other social theorists, that children should be studied as people "in their own right, and not just as receptacles of adult teaching." A call for children to be understood as social actors, who fashion their own worlds in the midst of excruciating circumstances, has been advanced by various anthropologists (Chin 1999; Hart 1979, 1997; James et al. 1998; James and Prout 1997; Nunes 1997). The kids' world appears, in these studies, not merely as a small-scale replica of the adults' quest for survival, but as a relatively autonomous domain, regulated by its own sound reasoning. Acknowledging the importance of children as agents of their own destinies can show social scientists, administrators, policy makers and health professionals where investments can be made in order to improve the quality of life of populations confined to the bottom rung of the social ladder. The emphasis on childhood agency also brings theoretical and methodological contributions to the social sciences, and especially to anthropology, where children are still seen "as a defective form of adult, social only in their future potential, but not in their present being" (James et al. 1998:6). 130

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The anthropological literature about Tupi peoples—the first to be contacted by Portuguese colonizers along the Brazilian coast—conveys a great deal of information about "native" children. Children are socialized into adulthood, and invariably defined as "miniatures of an adult world" (Fernandes 1951:224) or as "small scale adults" (Baldus 1937:44). In the chapter "Individual and Family" of the classic Fundamental Aspects ofGuarani Culture, Egon

Schaden classifies as "almost negligible the infant Guarani culture" (1974:60). Children's activities, including their play, are reduced to imitations of their elders' actions, and no agency is ever granted to the little ones: they are social only in their future potential as grown-ups.4 Guarani culture and the cultures of other Tupi-speaking groups appear as a homogeneous whole shared by all the children, who are only expected to learn and accept the set of traditionally sanctioned norms that determine behavior.5 The present ethnographic essay reveals that this is not true for contemporary Guarani children in southern Brazil. The energy of the kids' performances aptly conveys their perceptions of the dehumanizing situation they face on the reservation, and strategies they devise to reinvent Nhande Rekd—the ascetic and dangerous Guarani way of life discussed by the above mentioned ethnologists since the early 1900s, and other contemporary scholars (Brandao 1992; Chamorro 1998; Ferreira and Suhrbier 2002; Meihy 1991; Melia 1987; Suhrbier and Ferreira 2001; Viveiros de Castro 1987). In their play, the children challenge the Guarani adults' conviction that the severe spiritual discipline of Nhande Reko, 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,"6 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 {yury land, maraey indestructible). Tupi-Guarani migrations to the Land-without-Evil were documented by Portuguese officials and missionaries as early as the first half of the 16th century. Several thousand Indians at a time were known to have abandoned their villages to follow a great karai who had promised them "a beautiful land where all the things would come naturally and abundantly, without any difficulty nor labor" (Metraux 1927:21). Of the 10 to 12 thousand Guarani that headed north towards the Amazon river, only about 300 survived the journey (Hill 1995:vii). Guarani karaf 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). Tupi-Guarani Apocalyptic Visions of Time and the Body

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These aspects of Guarani religious life, first described by anthropologists studying people living as horticulturalists and hunters in the coastal Atlantic forest and the savannah, who were in good health and with relatively great cultural and political autonomy, might seem irrelevant to the lives of the children of Itaoca at the turn of the 21st 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. Encapsulation 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 (Almeida 1988; Clastres 1995; COMIN 1988; Ferreira 1998b, 1999b, 1999c, 1999d, 2001b; Meihy 1991, 1994; Monteiro 1984). 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 (1963) and Metraux (1948), the Guarani interpreted the white men's strong presence on Indian 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 Reko 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 to transcend the finite existence of humankind on Ymy Mbaemegua—this bad, destructible world—to the infinitude of the Ywy Marae'y, the Land-without-Evil (Clastres 1995:76). This earthly realm is imperfect because doomed to future destruction, while the heavenly domain is characterized by unlimited opulence and leisure, no work, and denial of all prohibitions. "This amounts to say that evil—labor, law—is the society. The absence of evil—the Land-without-Evil—is the counter-order" (Clastres 1995:56). In their play, the children reveal how they have chosen to battle inequality, recreate reciprocity and reinvent Guarani apocalypse. Fr6m their perspective, unless the idyllic qualities of the mythic paradise are reproduced here and now on this wicked world, they will not attain kandire, but die prematurely and end up in the Cemite'rw da Igualdade. This is the municipal cemetery in Mongagud—a small beach resort located on the southern coast of the state of 132

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Sao Paulo, 80 kilometers from Sao Paulo City—where Guarani kids are buried in cardboard coffins cemented side-by-side in cubby holes in an eight-foot wall. They die of starvation and dehydration, tetanus, typhoid fever, leptospirosis and tuberculosis, but are nevertheless buried "without discrimination," as one of the cemetery's keepers put it in 1999. "They should be grateful," the man added, "they have a place to drop dead" {devemficarfelizes por ter onde cair mortos). The performances presented in this piece reveal that the little ones want to achieve kandire without dying, and illustrate the ways in which the children have transfigured Nhande Rek6 in order to remain well and alive, recreating the abundance of the Ywy Marae'y here and now, rather than in an unapproachable overseas eternity. While play may be a complicated matter because its politics are often considered ambiguous, it is not only in their daily play and work that Guarani children reveal an impressive comprehension of, and propose creative solutions to, the painful and complex issues they face today. The children at Itaoca extend their political commentaries on reality through their songs, in or outside of the opy or prayer house, as will be seen, as well as through their graphic representations of the world they experience. In their drawings, Guarani children and young adults also suggest that the Land-without-Evil can be an earthly reality. The barren, infertile reservation land is transformed into a lush and thriving territory, covered with plentiful vegetable gardens and rich hunting grounds. The immediacy of the cities' dumpsites, banana farms and cemeteries is smothered out of the portraits. Sickly, famished children often materialize as xondaro— warriors whose bodies have achieved the immortal essence of the mythic paradise. The aesthetic quality of small-scale representations of Guarani social life draws its value from the dimensions of a changing world the youngsters are trying to create and convey through the work of art, and play. In these drawings, too, the younger generations elaborate their political commentaries on reality, such as in the drawing presented below, produced by the Mbya teenager Celso Benite in 1999, when I asked him to draw about his vida (life) at Itaoca. The drawing depicts, as Celso explained, Guarani children at work, cutting brush and planting corn, while others are on the road to visit their parents. At the bottom, the artist added the following words: "We had lots of woods. The white man entered, fenced [them] in and cut down lots of woods" (Ferreira and Suhrbier 2002; Suhrbier and Ferreira 2001). The ideas conveyed in these drawings, as the ones expressed in role-playing activities, are not immature, nor do they lack an understanding of what "really happens." Neither are the Guarani children's critique of human society merely an "inversion" of the ideas contended by their parents and other adults, Tupi-Guarani Apocalyptic Visions of Time and the Body

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asToren (1993:463) proposes. More and more attention has been paid to childrens perceptions of the world, because ideas that traditionally trickled down from the ruling or middle classes are now emanating from the bottom— from teenagers, preteens, and even younger children (Hart 1997). Escalating economic woes in many poor nations, such as Ecuador, Colombia, Rwanda, and Zambia, have spurred the formation of childrens councils, a major movement that is taking many different forms in various countries (Wright 2000:2) Three role-playing activities selected for this piece, performed in 1998 and 1999 by children between the ages of two and 12, illuminate the relevance of childhood agency in recreating Tupi-Guarani apocalyptic visions of time and the body. The performances, presented ahead as texts describing the role-playing activity or game event itself, are (1) the singer, the cook and the tin can gatherer; (2) the doctor, the Indian and the ambulance driver; and 3 travelers, missionaries and Guarani warriors. Ethnographic, empirical research among children has the power to reveal 'a completely different world, so different that we seem to be confronted by a different order of being Reynolds 1974:34). I was able to observe and talk to Guarani Mbyi and Guarani Nhandeva children at the Itaoca Indigenous Land, in the city of Mongagui, and nearby sites on the southern coast of the state of Sao Paulo, between March 1997 and October 1999. Boys and girls were observed and interviewed at spaces they predominantly play and work: water spigots where they actually wash family clothing, but with make-believe foam because ver\ rarely can the\ afford real soap; house patios in which they cook scraps of food from the Mongagui dumpsite, while dreaming it is their much awaited feijoada (black beans with pork), frango assado (roasted chicken) and churrasqutnho (barbecued meat); barren, sandy fields phgucd with ants and other insects where the kids plant miniature gaidcns and sometimes pretend to harvest basketfuls of juic\ man134

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gos, tangerines, avocados and bananas; and the opy or prayer house in which they sing and dance to the sound of violins and drums played by young shaman apprentices. These are the few spaces over which the children have some degree of power and control, and where the choices they make impact first and foremost their present situation, and also yield predictive power over the future. I was also able to follow the children around in hospitals, health centers, banana farms, and at the city of Mongagud's garbage dump and cemetery. The dump and the cemetery are located side by side on the northernmost border of the Ita6ca Indigenous Land, in the municipality of Mongagud. The various health facilities and banana farms are situated in what is known as the Baixada Santista—the metropolitan and the suburban areas located near the city— and the Port of Santos, advertised as "the door to the main Latin American market" by the Brazilian government. Two of my own children, Pedro and Djuni, who were eight and 13 at the time they accompanied me to the Itaoca Village in 1998-99, helped me envision intricacies of Guarani role-playing activities by pointing out to me that the kids were frequently "playing" hospital, ambulance, cemetery, burial, and missionary, and by showing me their toys. We were initially struck by a fouryear-old girl carrying a small Guarani basket with its usual geometric decorations, filled with used antibiotics containers and a few syringes she collected at different health care centers in Mongagua, after being treated for spider bites, bronchitis, scabies, diarrhea, pneumonia and various undiagnosed tumors on her head. When the girl's "babies" cried, she gave them a shot, because she didn't want them to "die." While at first the activities seemed to be make-believe performances in which the Guarani children were fantasizing or "just playing," it later became clear that they were also busy at work, engaged in a worldmaking process informed by, among other things, their very own perceptions of the dangers and risks they face today in a situation of what is now called "globality" (Albrow 1996). In the state of globality, the deregulation of world markets adds to the vulnerability of a large portion of the world's poor. In Brazil, now the seventh largest economy in the world, the increasing gap between the rich and the poor, and widespread corruption in governmental agencies—including the National Indian Foundation, or FUNAI (Fundacao Nacional do fndio), as I have shown elsewhere (Ferreira 1998c)—have thrown the Guarani and the majority of the country's 216 indigenous peoples into a situation of extreme poverty. To make matters worse, the Guarani look like poor peasants, rather than Indians. They do not wear body-paint, feather headdresses or other stereotypical Indian ornaments. When compared to the tall, strong and bold Ge-speaking Kayap6, Xavante and Suya of central Brazil, for Tupi-Guarani Apocalyptic Visions of Time and the Body

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instance, the Guarani appear less attractive due to their low stature, emaciated appearance and shy attitude. Ge populations of central and northern Brazil, who have realized the political possibilities of dress and undress, and the advantages of wearing body ornamentation to look like "real" Indians (Conklin 1997), have received considerably more attention from FUNAI, anthropologists, national and international NGOs and the broader Brazilian society. Because the Guarani, as well as the Kaingang and Terena of southern Brazil, do not look or act like Indians (performing "war dances," for instance), their situation as boias-frias or neo-slaves—who either take or are given antidepressants (including Prozac) to tolerate the 12-hour day, six-day workweek on sugar cane plantations (Ferreira 2001, in press), or who work as garbage collectors on the coast—does not cause much indignation. As the white, middleclass teenager who set Galdino Pataxo on fire as he slept on a bench in Brasilia, the country's capital, explained in 1996: "I didn't know he was an Indian, I thought he was a mendigo (homeless)." Had Galdino been wearing a headdress or some other bodily ornament, he might not have been killed (Conklin 2000; Ferreira 1998b). In sum, the agonizing situation of the Guarani people in Southern Brazil, who are confined in diminutive reservations, receiving little or no institutional support from FUNAI, from the municipality of Mongagua where they reside, and very little popular sympathy is a historical product in which globality and the distorted and romanticized image of the "real," authentic Indian play major roles. Because the Guarani are poor, and because they refuse to conform to stereotypes of cultural authenticity, they are qualified as mendigos, or less than human, and are thus denied access to basic human rights. Today, the desire to be viewed as Guarani, rather than poor peasants, has lead Guarani children and young adults to decide to incorporate certain alien features (feather headdresses, for instance) to their cultural repertoire, especially when displaying themselves in public. Luiz Karaf, the young headmen of the Itaoca village, wears a head ornament at important business meetings among non-Indians so that, as he put it in July 1998, "the white folks listen to what I have to say." Luiz Karaf, 24 years old in the year 2001, represents a generation in which we can clearly see Guarani children and young adults as agents of their own destinies.

The Guarani Population in Brazil In Brazil alone, the total population of the Guarani nation has been estimated at 38,000 individuals, divided into three subgroups: the Guarani Kaiowd or Pai Tavytera, located in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul; the Guarani Mbyd, located in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Espfrito Santos, Parana", Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul; and the Guarani Nhandeva, also known as Avakatuete' and Chiripd, who live in Mato Grosso do Sul, Sao Paulo and Parani (ISA 136

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2001:11). The largest Guarani populations outside of Brazil can be found in Paraguay, where approximately 25,000 Kaiowd live (ISA 2001:11), followed by Argentina with 10,500, and 5,000 in Bolivia (http://lanic.utexas.edu/la/ sa, 5/16/01). In the state of Sao Paulo, where the Ita6ca Indigenous Land that interests us is located, there are currently 1,307 Mbyd distributed in 13 territories (whether officially demarcated or not), and 445 Nhandeva living in three indigenous lands and two coastal shantytowns in the cities of Itanhaem and Mongagud (Ferreira 1999d). The three Guarani subgroups—Mbya, Kaiowa and Nhandeva—are affiliated with the Tupi-Guarani linguistic branch. The first two, Mbyd and Kaiowd, speak the Guarani language with slight dialectal variation, and share cultural knowledges and practices about apocalyptic time, transitory space, and the ideal of the indestructible human body (Brandao 1992; Cadogan 1950, 1959; Chamorro 1998; Clastres 1995; Meihy 1991, 1994; Melia 1987; Schaden 1974; Unkel 1987; Viveiros de Castro 1987). Historical perspectives on the migratory movements of the Guarani show a concentration of Kaiowa in the area of the Paraguayan Chaco migrating towards southwestern Brazil (what is now Mato Grosso do Sul), while large groups of Mbya were initially contacted by Spanish conquistadors in Argentina and southern Brazil (Brandao 1992; Cherobim 1986; Metraux 1948; Monteiro 1984).The third Guarani subgroup, named Nhandeva by anthropologist Egon Schaden (1974:2), is comprised of remnants of various Tupi-speaking groups, such as the Apapokiiva, Avakatuete, Tanhygua and Chiripa. These nations were almost entirely decimated by Portuguese and Spanish conquistadors, and ended up forming small contingents of people in Sao Paulo, Parana and Mato Grosso do Sul who are basically Portuguese speakers today. The extent to which the Nhandeva share the cultural repertoire of the other two Guarani groups is not clear. Early studies about the Nhandeva categorized them as "acculturated" Indians inevitably headed towards extinction (Cadogan 1950; Me'traux 1948; Schaden 1974). It is important to note, however, that Guarani self-identification differs from the ethnic designations coined by anthropologists. The Guarani Nhandeva identify themselves as "Tupi-Guarani" or simply "Tupi." This is the case, for instance, of the 150 individuals living in Aldeinha, a shantytown in Itanhaem, 30 kilometers south of Ita6ca. Headed by Catarina Guarani, the group founded the Awd Nimbonjeredju Association of Tupi-Guarani Indians, representing the Tupi-Guarani Indians (or Nhandeva, according to Schaden) of the southern coast of Sao Paulo. The Nhandeva designation, in turn, is claimed by both the Mbyd and Kaiowd, because they are all related to Nhande Ru, the Guarani Creator. When I asked Mbyd elders if the Tupi were also Nhandeva, they agreed, but added that the Tupi were not Nhandeva Hete'i, Tupi-Guarani Apocalyptic Visions of Time and the Body

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or "real" {verdadeiro) Nhandeva. Candido Ramirez, the oldest living Mbyd karaf in Sao Paulo (88 years old in 2001), now living in Itadca, explained the various ways in which the Guarani designate themselves and one another:

Candido: We are all Nhandeva, because we are the sons ifilhos) of Nhande Ru. But only we are Nhandeva Hete'i because we are Nhandeva verdadeiros. The Tupi are Nhandeva, but not Nhandeva Hete'i because they are mixed people {gente misturadd). "Mbya" is the exact translation {tradugao exatd) for Guarani, and Mbya Hete'i is the real Mbya, the one who visits relatives {aquele que visita os parentes). Because, see, we are people who are always traveling, moving from one place to another. So when someone from another village comes to visit us but we don't know who he is, we call him "Mbya." We know he is Guarani, that's all. But we don't know his family, if he is Hete'i or not. So we call him Mbya. All Guarani are Mbya because we are always visiting each other. But when we talk {conversar) and discover who that person is, we call him "Nhandeva'e." We know he's our relative, related to Nhande Ru {parente do Nhande Ru). Later on we talk some more and that person may become "Nhandeva Hete'i" because we know he is not mixed. Mariana: How about women, is it the same for them? C: Yes, it is the same. A woman visiting from Pindoty [a village near the city of Cananeia] is "Mbya" until we know her, and then she becomes "Nhandeva'e" and "Nhandeva Hete'i." M: How about the Kaiowa, are they also Nhandeva? C: Yes, they are. When they visit they are also "Mbya." But their language is a little bit different. The differences between Guarani modes of self-identification and anthropologists' nomenclatures for each of the subgroups account for some of the disparities in demographic information about the people, and generate quite a bit of confusion. This is especially the case when authors do not clarify what they mean by Mbya, Nhandeva, or Tupi-Guarani. Most scholars today use Schaden's (1974) definitions—Mbya, Kaiowa and Nhandeva—although a few, like Helene Clastres (1995), use the term "Tupi-Guarani" to talk about the different Guarani societies and do not attempt to differentiate among them. Others, like Mauro Cherobim (1986), get caught between Schaden's classification, now officially adopted by the Brazilian government and NGOs in Brazil such as ISA (2001), and the Guarani's explanations, and coin yet a 138

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third (usually very confusing) classification. According to Cherobim, who writes about the Guarani of Sao Paulo, "The Nandeva [sic] consider themselves 'guarani' and the Mbiia, 'tupi'" (1986:26). Due to the lack of "reciprocal acceptance" of these definitions, the author then chooses to work with the distinction "indio" versus "civilizado" (1986:27). In this study, I follow the classification advanced by Schaden (1974) and use the term Mbyd to designate the Tupi-speaking adults and children who live in Itadca and who identify themselves as "Guarani verdadeiros" or "Hete'i," and "Nhandeva" to distinguish Portuguese-speaking individuals who identify themselves as Tupi or Tupi-Guarani. The two groups do not interact in a systematic way on the Ita6ca Land—there is a different headman for each of the two separate cluster of households, and the daily activities, such as cooking and cleaning, and planting are not shared. Mbya houses are organized around the opy or prayer house, while the Nhandeva do not have an opy and their houses are scattered on the reservation. There are also various Nhandeva families living in plywood (or any other material they can find) shacks in marshy areas or on the margins of highways on the outskirts of different cities in the Baixada Santista. These families, as well as the 150 Nhandeva in Aldeinha, Itanhaem, are not recognized by FUNAI as "Indians," and do not receive any support from the government.

The Terra Indigena Guarani de Itaoca The Aldeia Itaoca (Itaoca Village), as the Terra Indigena Guarani de Itaoca is known in the area, was created in 1991 by a small group of Mbya who migrated north to Sao Paulo from the states of Parana and Santa Catarina, and a few Nhandeva families dispersed on the coast of Sao Paulo, looking for a place to live. In April 2000, the land was officially delimitada (its official boundaries identified) after a series of clashes between local landless peasants, drug dealers, and the Indians.8 The Aldeia Itaoca, however, is still not physically demarcated (no visual boundaries have been set up), and neither is it part of the city of Mongagua's "Plan of Urban and Touristic Development," designed by city officials in 1999. Because of this, the Guarani do not have access to any utilities (potable water, electricity, sanitation), and the city's dumpsite actually invades some of the territory and contaminates small streams that run into the land, posing severe health problems to the Indians. The small plot of land (533 hectares or approximately 1,304 acres) is surrounded by tourist summer houses, a banana farm, an evangelical church, a cemetery and the garbage dump—where tourists' household waste, hospital trash and industrial chemicals are routinely dumped. These are the sites to which Guarani children graduate when they become teenagers and adults: boys pick bananas at the farm and mow the priests' lawn, girls clean tourist Tupi-Guarani Apocalyptic Visions of Time and the Body

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houses, and adults excavate piles of garbage for food to eat and tin cans to sell. The cemetery—ironically called "Cemetery of Equality" (Cemite'rio da Igualdade) is the end of the road for the worldly existence of the children and young adults who were not able to achieve the marae'y quality of the Guarani body: life expectancy is less than 45 years for men and women alike at the Aldeia Ita6ca (Ferreira 1998b). Before being summoned to work, the Mbyd and Nhandeva children at Itaoca entertain themselves trying to make sense of the brutal reality within which they are born. Everyday life feels like war: the children have to fight for food, wood and water. The houses they live in are infested with rodents, flies and cockroaches, and it is not easy to hide bits of stale bread and crackers found in the dump from the equally starving animals. Drinking water is unavailable near the houses, and the water the kids use to try to relieve their dry, parched skin covered with scabies, mosquito and even cockroach bites is filthy. For breakfast, there is usually nothing to eat: the lucky ones have cafizinho, a shot of watery coffee loaded with sugar; eventually, when the families can pick up old bread from the local bakeries on Sundays, the kids suck on dry bread dipped in coffee. This is considered "good food" {comida bod). The adults expect the kids to help them collect scraps of food at the dump on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, when the trucks bring garbage from Mongagua and other nearby cities, and at street markets on Fridays and Sundays. When the adults have something to sell at the street markets, such as hearts of palm or orchids, the children are expected to find or beg for food and money. On different occasions, I witnessed Guarani children running back to Itaoca with empty bags, explaining to me that they were going back to try to set a trap for birds and other small animals such as armadillos, because "a gente nao gosta de comer comida do lixo" (we do not like to eat food from the garbage). While catching an armadillo in a trap, for instance, is rare, the kids often capture small birds, which they roast over miniature fires while pretending it is came de vaca (beef).

Most Guarani children thus refuse to follow their parents to the dump, and scavenge amidst piles of rotting rubbish, twisted metal pieces and broken glass. Those kids who cannot escape what most adults see as inevitable fate— because suffering is part of the ascetic lifestyle necessary to migrate to the Land-without-Evil—try to get the best out of the rest: sling shots and small bows and arrows are specially carved to fight off vultures and horses that also compete for food at the dumpsite. Once mining grounds are clear, the kids pull out special scavenging hooks to minimize the risk of sharp cuts and wounds. Most infected lesions the Guarani carry on their bodies are inflicted at the dump. Tetanus is a major cause of death for children and adults alike. 140

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Daniela and Diego da Silva show scavenging hooks they use at the dumpsite, 1999-

As if the grotesque scenery of the dumpster were not enough, the kids' favorite distractions in their home village reveal how tenuous their hold on survival is. In their play, the children mimic the solitude experienced at hospitals, burial rituals of loved ones, and the fanaticism of proselytizers. But histories of suffering are emblematic of something other than tragic and premature death (Farmer 1996:227). Amidst the tragedy, the children are proposing concrete and creative solutions to ameliorate the life of the people.

The Singer, the Cook and the Tin Can Gatherer To 'play singer is a favorite diversion for Diego, Daniela and Angelica da Silva, Guarani Nhandeva siblings who are nine, seven and three years old, respectively. The first time I watched the performance, in October 1998, Diego informed me he was imitating Chitaozinho, a popular country music singer in Brazil, while Daniela cooked and little Angelica gathered tin cans. The three children played on the muddy hillside next to their 12- by ninefoot shack, built out of scraps of wood, plastic, and old blankets and covered with palm tree leaves and asbestos tiles. Daniela used water from a stream that flowed a few feet away, visibly contaminated by the neighbors pigpen. It is the same water they drink when they are thirsty. It is the water supply that SueK, the kids' mother, relies on to cook, bathe the little ones and wash the family's clothes. Diego sang his first choice "I Gave Up Being a Cowboy for Her {Detxei de ser cowboy por eld), using a wooden microphone he himself carved out of Tupi-Guarani Apocalyptic Visions of Time and the Body

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"caixeta" {Tabebuia cassinoides)—light white wood used by the adults to carve small animals to sell to tourists on the beach. He especially liked the song, he explained, because his father had done the same thing: exchanged his "white life" {vida de branco) in the city for an "Indian life" (vida de indio) on the reservation with his Guarani mother. Meanwhile, Daniela prepared a feijoada, a typical Brazilian dish made out of black beans and pork, mixing leaves, sticks, dirt and water in a small aluminum pan, secured on top of three small rocks and a small fire. This is where Suely prepares the kidss daily meal with the scraps of food she brings in from the city's dumpsite. It was noon, however, and the children still had not eaten. Diego went on to say that "singers like good food, especially feijoada." Little Angelica, in turn, was neatly arranging bottle caps in a small plastic truck and driving it around—mimicking the Guarani's main economic activity as tin can gatherers at the dumpsite. Diego said Angelica "wanted to remain poor" {quer serpobre), and thus chose to pick cans to sell to the men at the dump: "she likes to go around naked and live in the garbage." Her brother, however, purposely went to school, claiming, "After I learn to read and write, I'll be a singer." Suely da Silva, the kids' mother, listened to the conversation as she hung some clothes on the barbed wire that separated her yard from the neighbors' pigpen. "Oh no, you are not," she exclaimed. "You will be damned just like your father, who does not even have a place to die" {vai ser danado que nem o pai, que nao tern nem onde cair morto). The boy lowered his head, and tried to pretend his mother had not embarrassed him by slaughtering his fantasy. Like all the other Guarani Nhandeva women who live at Itaoca, Suely, who is 36 years old, is a single mother. She now shares the shack with Aldair, a 27-year-old "white," or branco, as she refers to him. As an indigenous woman, the mother of seven, and illiterate, Suely, who is in fact the head of the household because Aldair is disabled, meets all the criteria to be considered in a situation of "extreme poverty," according to the 1991 Brazilian Census (Leme and Biderman 1997). Under these conditions, Suely and her children are most vulnerable to the consequences of malnutrition, hunger, and poor health: rising levels of morbidity and mortality, according to the Pan American and the World Health organizations (Harrison 1997:452). All of the Guarani Nhandeva households on the reservation are female-headed, giving women the major responsibilities to make ends meet out of virtually nothing. The family's highest monthly income—100 reais or the equivalent of 40 U.S. dollars in 2001— is only achieved in the summer, especially during Carnival, "when the tourists drink a lot of beer and make the dump fat," according to Suely's companion Aldair, whom the kids now call "father."

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Aldair had never mentioned to me he made a living out of the dump. For a whole year the man made me believe he ran errands for construction workers in a tourist neighborhood, buying them cigarettes and cachaga (sugar cane alcohol) at nearby stores and delivering it to them with his carroga, a wooden wagon pulled by his "most precious belonging," his horse Dourado or "golden"—perhaps an allusion to what he would rather be mining for. Aldair's youngest brother "became a millionaire," as he likes to put it, mining for gold for a few years in Mato Grosso. But this is something that Aldair regrets not being able to do. Untreated tuberculosis has crippled his lungs and legs, and he can only push himself on the ground with the help of his hands and elbows. Much like his companion and her kids, Aldair's teeth are taken over by cavities and his body is covered with scabs. Small mosquitoes fly around his eyes, infected with chronic conjunctivitis. None of them own clothes, other than the ragged outfits they carry on their bodies, nor do they have shoes. Because the family manipulates deteriorated food, pieces of glass and metal, and eventually chemical residues, Diego, Angelica, Daniela and their parents and other relatives at the Itaoca village are exposed to tetanus, typhoid fever, leptospirosis, scabies, gastro-intestinal diseases and tuberculosis (Ferreira 1999c). Both Aldair and Suely were disconcerted by the children's revealing performance, because they had never mentioned to me they searched for scraps of food at the dump. Suely started weeping and I followed her inside the house. We hugged, as she pointed to a few ripe tomatoes, three oranges and a few wheat buns in a plastic bag that Aldair, with the help of Diego, was able to scavenge at the garbage lot. Like his sisters, Diego suffers from the "stigmata" of slow starvation: weight loss and wasting, edema, changes in hair texture and skin pigmentation, and abrupt mood-changes (Scheper-Hughes 1992:183). The boy's stomach is swollen, he has very little hair and his skin is gray. In March 1998, Diego, Daniela and Angelica weighed 19, 14 and eight kilos, respectively, when they should be weighing at least 28, 22 and 14 kilos, according to the National Center for Health Statistics (Williams 1997:590595).

Like other Guarani children on the Itaoca reservation and in other coastal villages in the state of Sao Paulo, the kids' growth has been stunted by malnutrition. Some, like little Angelica and her first cousin Joacir, also show signs of mental retardation, a common consequence of severe hunger, according to recent research on physical growth and malnutrition among Brazilian indigenous peoples (Martins and Menezes 1994; Morais et al. 1990; Santos 1993). Angelica is the only one in the family to possess an immunization record, but most of her shots are long overdue. None of the children in the village have been immunized against tuberculosis, the greatest health problem in the area. Tupi-Guarani Apocalyptic Visions of Time and the Body

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And very few have birth certificates. This means some Guarani children have no civil rights, since lack of a birth certificate obstructs access to the rights and privileges a country offers to its citizens, including basic health and education. Although indigenous peoples in Brazil do not need documents to have their rights officially observed, most of the Guarani Nhandeva population in Sao Paulo, including Nhandeva families in Ita6ca, is not identified by FUNAl as "Indian." This is also true for the 150 Nhandeva in Aldeinha, Itanhae'm, as it is for the 1,000 Pankararu living in two shantytowns, Favela Real Parque and Favela Madalena, in the city of Sao Paulo, who do not appear in official state or federal records. Moreover, 13 Nhandeva families in Ita6ca have chosen to file land claims as non-Indian posseiros, or settlers, rather than demand their rights over the land as fndios; in this way, they can eventually receive financial compensation for inhabiting the reservation for ten or more years, when the area is finally officially demarcated. Because of this, and because there is hardly any official monitoring of indigenous birth and death rates in Sao Paulo by the Fundacao Nacional da Saiide (now responsible for Indian health), the high rates of infant mortality among the Guarani are not accounted for in the country's national statistics, used by the Brazilian government to show that extreme poverty is being eradicated (UNICEF 1999). Still bewildered by the children's revelation of life in the dump, Suely wiped her tears with the back of her hands and looked me in the eyes: "At least the dump is clean. Drugs are dangerous and you get in trouble. Here, everybody is clean." Suely was referring to the presence of white drug dealers at Itaoca, who hide in the woods and eventually grow marijuana in the area. I often heard shooting near the villagers' houses and the Guarani told me to avoid walking back to Mongagua at night (a three kilometer walk from the entrance of the reservation to the highway Padre Manoel da Nobrega, where street lights begin) "because the drug traffickers usually dump the people they kill on the road and it is dangerous." In fact, the local newspaper Tribuna de Santos often brought news of shootings and killings in the "poverty belt" around the Mongagud beach resort and other towns such as Peruibe and Itanhaem, farther south down the coast of the state of Sao Paulo. But when I asked Suely if she dreamed about the Land-without-Evil like Mbya men and women told me they did, she started crying again and replied:

No, there is no more hope. I guess we don't qualify anymore for that. That is something my father would talk about, the old people, but only for those who lived the pure life {vidapurd). But we are all damned, there is no way out. There is that saying that goes: "Whoever is born in the trash, dies in the trash" (Quern nasce no lixo, morre no lixo). So we will d right here. 144

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Diego, her nine-year-old son, joined the conversation and replied to the impertinent observation his mother had made earlier about his future plans: "No, mother, I will not be a tin can gatherer like my Dad. I will be a singer! And I will take you away from here!" Suely replied: "Nonsense! What an idea, a singer? Is that what you've been learning at school? God bless you! You will work on the banana farm, much better than on the dump, hear me. But with all these worms inside your head, you are not going anywhere! You will gather cans just like your Dad!" A few months later I walked into a small market in Mongagud looking for strong black tobacco that karai Henrique Firmino had asked me to buy. I met Suely at the register purchasing four liters of cachaca (sugar cane rum). The woman was disturbed when she saw me, grabbed the bottles and left right away. Later on that day when she saw me through the window of her shack going up the hill to her sister's house, she shouted: See, that's why we don't qualify for the Land-without-Evil anymore! We drink! Yes, Aldair and I are drunkards {bebados), we drink everyday! Come in and have a drink with us, so that you can understand! I did go into her house, where I spent two days listening to her, and her two sisters, Nazare and Dolores, who later joined us from their homes located next door on the sandy hills of Itaoca. Each of them recounted life histories filled with emotional and physical abuse, whether as domestic servants working for the rich in Mongagua and neighboring towns, or as the wives of white men who subjected them to domestic violence. As scholars working in other parts of the Americas have documented,9 these patterns of violence against women do not originate in the "cultural" or "psychological" traits of impoverished populations, but rather from a concatenation of social forces that conspire to promote extreme poverty and suffering among indigenous and other minority populations. These include a model of development focusing on export production, as well as rampant political corruption. At FUNAI, for example, between 1997 and 1999, at least 13 contracts established between the regional administration in Bauru, Sao Paulo and the Guarani in the Baixada Santista were never honored, although the money was spent10; these vital contracts were for the purchase and distribution of seeds, tools, and other important agricultural products. The hunger and scarcity which resulted, coupled with tremendous increases in the costs of living, brought about an escalating incidence of child mortality, drug abuse and violence, and a general deterioration in public health. I asked another Guarani Nhandeva woman, Iraci Fernandez, to tell me what she sees or feels like when she goes without eating for hours or days at a time. The woman replied: Tupi-Guarani Apocalyptic Visions of Time and the Body

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When I don't eat I see things, like a huge mountain of food.. ..So I pray I can get to the dump on time to meet the big trucks that bring the good food from the supermarket. Last month my sister made it there on time: she got three whole cans of evaporated milk, bread, beans, spaghetti, you name it! So you've got to eat good once in a while, otherwise you die without ever being able to fly that high. Iraci was referring to the hope the people who live off the dump hold on to, that they will be there when the cargo trucks from local supermarkets bring food with expired validation dates to the dump. But in Mongagua" this does not happen very often, since major supermarkets are located in neighboring and much larger cities of the Baixada, such as Santos and Sao Vicente, 30 to 35 kilometers north from the Itaoca reservation. One of the biggest dumps in the area is located in Sao Vicente, but during a few months in the summer, because of the high influx of tourists in the area, the companies also use the smaller Mongagua garbage lot. When UNICEF (1999) was surveying the situation of children looking for food in dumps in 1998, the companies also used the smaller Mongagua site, afraid of the negative publicity they would get if caught dumping goods that could have been donated to needy families before the expiration date. This keeps the Guarani's hopes up, and some families eventually travel to Sao Vicente during the summer, quando o lixo estd gordo (when the garbage is fat).11 This same striking analogy between safe/clean garbage and dangerous/ dirty drugs was drawn by another Guarani woman from the Itaoca Village, but from the Mbya group. Sonia also referred to her life on the dump, as I watched her cook some spaghetti her oldest son had been lucky enough to find in a heap of trash: I pray we can still make it to the Ywy Marae'y. At least the dumpyard is clean. I don't do drugs, I don't drink, and I don't have sex with white men. So I guess I still qualify for Ywy Marae'y. Unlike the Guarani Nhandeva households, which are in the hands of the women because the men have "disappeared"—they have either been killed by drug traffickers, in alcohol-related accidents or else are trapped in a web of eternal debt on sugar cane plantations and banana farms—the Guarani Mbya households, located on the other side of the Ita6ca reservation, are headed by Guarani men. As the Mbyd like to put it, "we don't mix," which means there are no marriages outside of the extended patrilineal families, and sex between a Guarani and a non-Guarani is strictly forbidden. These are "temptations" one should avoid in order to qualify for migration to the Land-without-Evil. According to karaf Henrique Firmino, the use of drugs and alcohol hampers the passage to an altered state of consciousness. An altered state of consciousness is a prerequisite to transcendence that can very effectively be ful146

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filled by fasting. While drugs are considered "dirty" because they hinder one's transcendental abilities, the dump is considered "clean" in spite of all the filth, since it embodies scarcity and thus provides for the state of hunger that is necessary for spiritual transcendence.

The Doctor, the Indian and the Ambulance Driver Unlike the Guarani Nhandeva on the southernmost part of the Ita6ca reservation, who only speak Portuguese, the Mbyd children communicate exclusively in Guarani. The Mbyd community maintains tight kinship ties, and solidarity among family members is strong. Young indigenous leaders such as Luiz Karaf, who became the headman of the Ita6ca Village in 1997, have just begun supporting community projects such as vegetable gardens and communal kitchens, with the food still coming from the dump, in most cases. But Luiz Karaf—whose last name is an indication of his status as a shaman and a prophet—plans to get everyone out of the dump because, as he says, "this kind of suffering cannot get us to Ywy Marae'y, only to the cemetery." The young leader belongs to a generation born in the 1970s and 1980s which began realizing, in its teens, that unless the conditions of life featured in the Land-without-Evil become a mundane reality, the Guarani world will be doomed to destruction. Back to the ambulance performance, presented in the opening of this article, which karaf Henrique Firmino and I watched from the family's kitchen. Mariano Tupa Mirim, an 18-year-old Guarani Mbya who works as a health agent on the reservation, sat by my side and helped translate some of the kids' idiomatic expressions into Portuguese. Stretched on a banana leaf out in the yard lay Joacir, who was then three years old and who weighed only ten kilos, rather than at least 14. Joacir was "very sick," according to "doctor" Angelina, hisfive-year-oldsister, who pretended to give the little one a shot. Joacir faked a faint cry. The "ambulance driver," eight-year-old Edson, ran around the opy—the ceremonial house, located right next to the kitchen, pulling the leaf on the dusty ground, while reproducing orally the disquieting sound of the vehicle's siren. Suddenly, Angelina transformed herself into the boy's mother, and sat on the banana leaf to accompany her son to the hospital. Edson, the driver, did not agree with her decision and tried pulling her off the ambulance and away from her son. The girl insisted, hugging little Joacir. At that moment Edson began throwing dirt on top of them. Angelina let go of her son and ran towards her grandparents' house, followed by Edson. Joacir wiped the dirt off of his face and dashed through the doorway of the opy himself. According to Mariano Tupa Mirim, their performance was only a nhe waga, in Guarani, or brincadeira, in Portuguese. That is, the kids were only "playing," nothing else. Tupi-Guarani Apocalyptic Visions of Time and the Body

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£s6 brincadeira, nhe waga. They are going to the hospital because the boy is sick. The ambulance usually comes to the reservation to pick up sick children and take them to the Mongagud Hospital. If the child is not too sick, the doctor gives him a shot and sends him back to the village. If the child is dying, he is hospitalized, that's all. The ambulance driver Edson, however, brought to light dramatic details of the children's role-playing venture when we talked about it that evening. The performance was not mere fantasy, but an enactment of how the kids interpret the constant pilgrimage from one hospital to another, since vacancies for the poor are rare. The boy said they often played ambulance, and that he would be a "real" (ete) ambulance driver himself when he was old enough, to make sure "all the Guarani get a ride." Angelina, clarified the boy, did not want her "son" Joacir to ride alone in the ambulance, because otherwise "she wouldn't know which hospital they took him to, and would go crazy {ficar louca)" Edson then explained why he threw dirt on Joacir: "If you go to the hospital, you die. If you don't go, you die, too. So I was burying him at the cemetery already." "And what were you singing?" I asked the boy. "I was singing Xekyvy'i." Mariano Tupa Mirin translated the words: Xekyvy'i Xekyvy'i Ereo rire Ejevy voija'a agud Ja'a mavy Joupive'i Para rovai jajerojy

My little brother, my little brother You have gone Come back soon So that we can go together Venerating God To the other side of the ocean.

The children performed under the impact of the recent death of their cousin Adilson da Silva, who was only 14 months old. He died of malnutrition and dehydration at the city hospital, three days after he was hospitalized. Like most of the 48 Guarani Mbyd children up to 12 years of age on the Itaoca reservation, when I last saw Adilson a few days before his death, the boy presented signs of severe malnutrition. He was underweight (less than six kilos instead of 11 or 12), had a protruding abdomen, dry, flaky skin, and the soft spot on his hairless head was sunken in—a dangerous sign of dehydration. We rushed him to the nearest Pronto Socorro (emergency unit) that same day, but all the physician on call ever did was give his mother a hydrating powdered solution (basically salt and sugar) to prepare at home, despite the fact that the water on the reservation is polluted.

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fldilson da Silva

Luiz karaipoints to the grave ofAdilson da Silva, at the Cemite'rio da Igualdade, 1999.

Much like Edson, Angelina and Joacir, Adilson was recovering from a myriad of diseases that plague the reservation during the rainy season: intermittent fever, vomiting, diarrhea, plus a variety of skin and intestinal parasites. These ailments are caused by hunger, proximity to the garbage dump, and lack of medical assistance. The incidence of these diseases is so high that the Guarani themselves do not identify the occurrences as "health problems." They are just 'part of life." When asked about someone's health or a certain child's sickness, the elders will invariably say tudo bem (all is well), unless the symptoms are so severe as to include high temperature followed by prostration, strong pain, breathing difficulties or seizures.11 Among the Guarani of the Itaoca and neighboring villages, most children are stunted they are 50 percent below the average weight and 30 percent below the optimum height for their age. Some, like Samuel Benites, a fiveyear-old boy who weighed only 18 pounds rather than the expected 40, also show signs of mental retardation: slow, unintelligible speech and lack of motor coordination. Samuels mother, Arlinda Gomes, who has nine kids and is a widow—her husband was run over on the interstate in 1998—hopes that, like many other children, her son can migrate to the Land-without-Evil very shortly: "I know he is sickly, and can't play with the other boys. But he will be fine in the Ywy Marae'y." The Guarani children's performance delineates a tragic reality. Angelina embraced her son" Joacir, who awaited transportation on the banana leaf, because she was afraid of the separation. She might not have seen him again.

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The girl knows parents are not allowed to accompany their kids in the ambulance. She is also aware, out of personal experience, of the invariable "treatment" that awaits them at local hospitals: a painful (600-milligram) shot of "Benzetacil," a powerful antibiotic13 that I myself saw being injected on alloi the 17 kids I drove to the Agenor de Campos Hospital in 1999. According to a local physician, Dr. Roge*rio Tabet, "Benzetacil is the best medication because the Indians' main problem is lack of hygiene." Never did I see Dr. Tabet perform the trial test that should precede the administration of the drug to prevent side effects, such as the collapse of circulatory function that can lead to respiratory and cardiac arrest, then death. Dr. Tabet did admit in 1999, however, that he did not visit the Itaoca Village because he was "afraid of being infected by the Indians." Last but not least, we need to consider the drama of the chronic lack of hospital vacancies represented in the children's performance. In real life, the kids are forced to wait alone in unfriendly corridors, hooked up to intravenous fluids, for a vacant hospital bed. Parents are not notified about the little ones' destinies, and there are at least four different hospitals the children can be taken to.14 Government officials from different organizations in the state of Sao Paulo blame one another for the anarchy of the health care system, and the tremendous amount of bureaucracy involved in the process obstructs communication with the Indians. The children suffer. Guarani health agents at Itaoca who should be, but are not paid by the Fundacao Nacional de Saude, spend precious time trying to locate the missing children so that relatives can visit. Sometimes the information comes in too late: a death notification and burial authorization at the Cemetery of Equality.

Travelers, Missionaries and Warriors Donations of second-hand clothes, toys and furniture from tourists and missionaries, as well as leftover bread from local bakeries and even cattle bones from nearby butcheries are common at Itaoca. The arrival of a truckload of lollipops and toys, brought in by Protestant missionaries of the Evangelist Church Assembly of God, caused major excitement among the Guarani children in March 1999. I witnessed the distribution of goods to the kids, who waited patiently in line and thanked the preachers for the candy with an automatic "God bless you" (Deus Ihe pague). Following the offering, the kids were told to sit in a circle and sing "Grateful Rain" {Chuvas degrafa), the opening anthem of the book Christian Harp. After singing, adults and children alike scattered throughout the village, carrying home the valued gifts. I remained seated in front of Zeferina and Antonio Fernandes' house, watching the couple's kids—Mizael, age seven, 150

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Florcntina,four,and Izacl, two—handle the candy and plastic toys along with their cousins Dirceu, 11 and Kitia, ten. Florcntina and Izael filled up three small trucks with candy and pushed them in circles around an extinguished bonfire, used by the children's grandmother to cook some beans. Florentina recited: "Tembi'u ma owae ma!" (food is coming!). As Izael noticed I was watching them, he brought me a lollipop. I asked him what they were doing, and the boy responded: "We're visiting our relatives." Other children joined in. Dirceu and Kitia, the oldest ones, sucked lollipops and hummed evangelical carols, while undressing plastic dolls. These are the cheapest dolls you can get at local supermarkets: three reals (U.S. $1.20) for six blonde-haired, blue-eyed flimsy dolls dressed in pink and white miniskirts and blouses. The nakedfigureswere placed on the ground, and the kids exchanged candy from one truck to another. Mizael came out of his grandfather's house smoking tobacco in a traditional pipe and singing in the Guarani language. The boy spit twice on the ground and began blowing smoke on the unclothed dolls. The children observed Mizael attentively and started humming the same tune. Two months earlier I had seen Guarani kids from the neighboring Aguape'u reservation proceed in a similar way, blowing smoke on improvised dolls—that time handmade out of old socks, shoelaces and other materials—at the Cemiterio da Igualdade. (One of the kids told me he was blowing smoke on Ilson, the graveyard digger, but I did not have the chance to carry on the conversation because of a funeral for another Guarani child being held at the spot.) At this point, Mizael's mother, Zeferina, stepped outside her doorway and reminded the kids it was time for the xondaro okaygud, the daily singing and dancing cerimony Guarani kids dedicate themselves to at the opy. Everyone wrapped the candy in their clothes and dashed up the hill towards the opy. Zeferina explained: They practice xondaro, which is part of the Guarani religion. It brings strength and health to them, and they learn about Nhande Rek6. But xondaro really is the name of a warrior. A long time ago we battled and killed our enemies. Today, the kids are learning other things related to xondaro, so they won't forget the culture. I asked Zeferina if many Guarani were interested in the missionaries' evangelical teachings, to which the woman replied: It means we respect other peoples' religions. We allow the missionaries to come here, sing and give us presents. But the Guarani religion is sacred, we will never let it go. The kids just adore xondaro. When they sing Christian tunes, they are just playing (nhe waga). Tupi-Guarani Apocalyptic Visions of Time and the Body

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Meanwhile, tribal leader Luiz Karaf invited me to watch the xondaro performance at the prayer house, where 15 children between two and 14 years of age danced and sang in Guarani for almost two hours; they were accompanied by the violin of Sflvio Karaf, the brother of Luiz Karaf and one of the villages youngest healers. They sang about Nhande Ru, the Guarani Creator; Nhande Reko, the Guarani way of life; and Ywy Marae'y, the Land-without-Evil, located rovai jajapura, across the ocean. Political themes have also been incorporated into the villagers' musical repertory, as expressed in the following song chanted by the children about the historical process of Guarani land exploitation by Portuguese colonizers. Here, as in other instances of their play, the children are producing a political commentary about their current living situation: Peme'e jevy peme'e jevy Oreyvy pera'a va'e kue Roiko'i hagua Pera'a va kue roiko'i hagud.

Give back, give back The land that you stole From us So that we can keep on living.

When xondaro was over, I asked the children who had been handling the candy and toys earlier to explain to me what they had been doing. Katia, the 12-year-old, said she had been "playing missonary" with the plastic dolls. Mizael informed me that he blew smoke onto the dolls to find out "what sacred place they came from" {mamo tetaguireju). The boy wanted to transform them into Guarani xondaro, warriors. Little Florentina remarked that she was "taking food to her relatives at the Pindoty Village," near the southern coastal town of Pariquera-acu, because "they are very hungry." In fact, like the Guarani at Ita6ca, the Pindoty villagers have also been surviving off garbage dumps.15 When asked about the importance of xondaro, Mizael clarified that "xondaro can help go to the other side of the ocean, where there is plenty of food." Later on that month, however, I saw Mizael and some other boys planting sweet potatoes on the hillside behind the boy's house. I was surprised because Zeferina, Mizael's mother, had told me not long ago that "the Guarani do not eat sweet potatoes because it is dirty food." "Why is it dirty?" I replied, and the woman answered: "The physician at the Pronto Socorro told me that Indian people need to eat strong food {comida forte), like bread, rice, beans and meat, and not dirty food {comida suja) like sweet potatoes, manioc and all those other filthy tubers {raizes nojentas)." Mizael wearily asked me if I liked sweet potatoes, and I replied that "my kids and I frequently eat yellow, orange and purple sweet potatoes, because they are tasty and very good for our health." Feeling reassured, Mizael smiled, looked straight into my eyes and said:

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I am so hungry, I cannot wait for Ywy marae'y I want to be a strong xondaro here, at Ita6ca. Mizael and other young leaders like Luiz Karaf reaffirm the hope that immortality can be reached without dying, challenging the widely held belief among early chroniclers and ethnographers of Tupi-Guarani societies, as well as present-day government officials and the general population, that Christianity stands behind Guarani "beliefs" in the Land-without-Evil (Clastres 1995:5). As Luiz puts it, The missionaries around here say death is the way to the paraiso (paradise). Do they want us to die? I can see my people dying because they are sick and have no food, so I tell them the world has changed, that we can't go without eating because we are weak, we are not marae'y (indestructible). And we can't wander around so much because we are not free like before. Unlike the older karaf of his village—his own father, Onorio de Souza, and shamans Candido Ramirez and Henrique Firmino, Luiz Karaf, a young prophet himself, calls for a rejection of an austere, painful, and dangerous nomadism in favor of the comforts of sedentary agricultural life. Can the phenomenon of nomadism originate within societies that no longer consider themselves free? Moreover, unlike the Christian perspective of death as the means of resurrection, Guarani religious rites are governed by the belief that man can reach kandire, that is, attain immortality without undergoing the ordeal of death (Cadogan 1950:50; Clastres 1995:79). "When the Guarani cjie," explained Luiz, "e ofim (it is the end)."

Land, Reciprocity and Nhande Reko Within the recently established arena of social studies of children, anthropologists in Brazil have started turning their gaze towards indigenous children's participation in the making and remaking of the world experienced. Crianga Indigena. Ensaios Antropoldgicos (Lopes da Silva and Nunes 2002)

represents the awakening of Brazilian ethnologists' concerns with children as agents of their own destinies. Xavante, Xikrin, Guarani, Macuxi, Assurini and other indigenous children who are currently trapped within the apparatus of the world system increasingly demand to be heard as they devise novel strategies that can provide them with ontological security. The children in southern, northern and central Brazil make very clear which dangers and risks they want to take and which ones they want to ignore as they genuinely participate in recreating their own culture and social environment.

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While childhood agency is not an invention of either modernity or globality, it is precisely because Guarani children live today in a situation of extreme inequality that decisions they make about their own destinies have the potential to promote social change. Their efforts at visionary liberation are not overwhelmed by the solid Mbyi, or rather loose Nhandeva constitutions of the Guarani family. Neither are their efforts at liberation significantly hindered by the highly authoritarian structures of FUNAI. First, studies on indigenous education in Brazil have shown that indigenous children in general have greater liberty and autonomy in their daily lives than non-Indian Brazilian children (Lopes da Silva, 1987; Lopes da Silva and Ferreira 2001, 2002; Melia 1979, 1989; Monte 1996). Second, because childhood agency is intrinsically tied to forms of social organization, particularly forms of political organization (Hart 1997; James and Prout 1997; Lopes da Silva and Nunes 2002), structural transformations in kinship systems16 and the current participation of Guarani young adults in indigenous movements in Brazil have greatly empowered children to demand that their voices be heard and their rights respected. Third, in spite of FUNAI's and other governmental agencies' highly authoritarian and paternalistic structures, the fact that the Guarani are not really considered "Indians," but mendigos, paradoxically grants them quite a bit of freedom. The situation of the Guarani and other indigenous children in Brazil is strikingly different from that of the modern child in "first world" countries, such as the U.S., Canada, England, France, Switzerland, among others, where children have become the focus of innumerable projects that purport to safeguard them from physical, sexual and moral danger (James et al. 1998:7). Unlike African American children in the United States, for instance, where increased autonomy is often hampered by increased surveillance (Chin 1999), Guarani children are faced with the paradox of being neglected by the state, but enjoying a greater degree of freedom because they are under less scrutiny and control. The perverse relationship established between the Brazilian state and its children is well captured in the videorecording Ilha das Flores or Island of Flowers (Goulart et al. 1990), a bitter film about Brazilian values, the food chain, and the human condition. Poor peasants who live in the Ilha das Flores, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, southern Brazil, are given the chance to scavenge for leftover food after the owner of the garbage dump feeds his pigs. As Goulart et al. put it, this vicious situation stems from the fact that "the poor have no owner, no money, and are free." For the Guarani children of Ita6ca, imagining and investing in the creation of a better world are powerful and meaningful actions that end up undermining, to a large extent, the legitimate authority of their parents to control them and the illegitimate authority of the Brazilian government to pro154

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tect them. "Illegitimate" because the Brazilian state has not followed up on its commitment to respect and promote the basic premises of the Convention on the Rights of the Child—the most widely accepted human rights instrument ever, protecting the rights of more than two billion children worldwide—of which Brazil is a signatory. While I agree that it is necessary to distinguish between the liberating or transformational potential that is imagined and in some way created by children's play episodes and the realties that bracket and even squelch that potential (Chin 1999), Guarani children do exercise their competence at making the world a better place for the reasons outlined above, as well as through their ability to learn from one another. In other words, autonomy and strong peer interaction among Guarani children account for the development of their competency in dealing with an increasingly risky and cruel world. The profound impact of this potential for social change can be clearly felt in the actions of young adults (aged 18 to 25) at Itaoca and especially in the Mbya community, represented by Luiz Karai, the current political leader, health agent and teacher; Silvio Karai, shaman's apprentice and musician; Mariano Tupa Mirim, health agent; and Basilio Silveira, the first secretary {primeiro secretdrio). Since 1998, when these young men took over the leadership of the village, replacing a Guarani elder who had a reputation for drinking and involvement with "white women," considerable changes have taken place at Itaoca. I was able to follow very closely the reasoning behind the activities of these young adults during mathematics and health workshops they attended between 1997 and 1999 that I organized through the Secretaria Estadual de Educacao do Estado de Sao Paulo (SEDUC). During the annual commemoration of the Dia do fndio, on April 19, 1999, rather than sponsoring the usual "Indian dance" at the central plaza in Mongagua, the Mbya community invited city officials to a "Guarani ceremony" at Itaoca. The highly political speech delivered by Luiz Karai and Basilio Silveira to their guests during the opening ritual of the event reveal the leaders' intent to inaugurate a new era for the Guarani people, based on the young generations' transformative energies: Good morning senhoras e senhores, you are here today to learn many things about the Guarani people, to learn the truth about us. Pay attention. First, we have chosen a Guarani name for our [Mbyi] village, and that is Teko Wya Pyau, which means Nova Esperanga (New Hope). As the new leaders of this village, we want to change many things in here. We want our children to grow healthy, we don't want them morrendo que nem moscas (dying off like flies), eating off the garbage dump. ... We were also kids yesterday and we refused to do that. We are not animals to eat trash, we are human beings. Tupi-Guarani Apocalyptic Visions of Time and the Body

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We know this is hard, to change things around here, so that is why we need you to learn the truth about us. We have the right to learn to read and write, to know our numbers and to speak Portuguese well, not because we want to be integrated into your society, but because we need to defend ourselves from the people who want to take our land away from us. How can we draw a map of our land if we don't know how to write, if we don't know your mathematics? How can we talk to the doctors in the city if we don't speak Portuguese? How can we write our own books with the true history about the Guarani? Yes, we are starting to plant our gardens, even if the land you gave us is full of sand. The children are happy, they are planting, too. We want our kids to grow healthy, so we need tools and seeds, because FUNAI doesn't give us anything. We don't want to end up in the hospital, that's why we are learning how to use your medicine for the diseases that you contaminated us with....So we are fighting hard {lutando duro) to change this world....Our biggest fight now is to demarcate the land, so that we can prevent all the invasions, and get this reservation included in your city plan. Most of the reservations in Sao Paulo are demarcated, so why aren't the reservations here in the south [of the state of Sao Paulo] demarcated? This is my question, and this is what we want you to think about: We need our land demarcated as soon as possible. During the following months, Luiz Karai and his "secretaries," as he likes to refer to his young assistants, met with government officials in the Baixada Santista, in Sao Paulo City, and in Bauru, where the FUNAI headquarters for the state of Sao Paulo are located. In April 2000, Itaoca was official delimited by the Ministry of Justice, almost six years after being initially "identified" as indigenous land. A year later, in April 2001, the children and young adults of Itaoca walked the dusty road that leads to the entrance of the reservation holding signs that read: "Queremos a demarcacao de Itaoca ja!" (We want the demarcation of Itaoca now!), while singing in Guarani the songs they practice in the opy. Of an estimated 60 Mbya who participated in the demonstration, at least 40 were 18 or younger, and the rest were young adults between the ages of 19 and 25.

Final Remarks In this piece I have attempted to show that Guarani children's performances are not mere "games" or "play" but entail, instead, a critique of human society. The kids' criticism also embodies what they consider to be desirable

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solutions to their most pressing problems. A reconsideration of Tupi-Guarani notions of time and the body are at stake because in this earthly world, the body is considered a perishable entity, prone to sicken and die. The capacity to endure hardships and suffering is desirable, however, because it is part of the transformation of the body into an inviolable and resistant (marae'y) entity, which cannot be destroyed. This is the ultimate quality that all things, material or symbolic, fully achieve at the Ywy Marae'y. Therefore, when Mizael states that he wants to become a Guarani warrior here in this mundane world, he is ultimately seeking the xondaro's endurance and ability to withstand abuse today, and not in the future. Moreover, when Mizael prophetically claims the transformation of protestant missionaries into Guarani xondaro, he seems to be trying to overturn the Guarani belief in the future destruction of the world, which seems too imminent in the face of such high rates of Guarani infant mortality and morbidity. The boy has been hospitalized many times, and according to his mother Zeferina, Mizael is afraid of dying. He wakes up in the middle of the night sweating and screaming: "Don't take me, don't take me!" I ask him who and where they are taking him, and he says: "they are taking me to the cemetery in the ambulance!" So I give him some chimarrao, reassuring him he will be xondaro, and he goes back to sleep. If the life-history of Nhande Ru Pan—a mythical figure who reached the Land-without-Evil without undergoing the ordeal of death—states that it is not possible to be both god and human simultaneously, but only successively (Cadogan 1959:59; Clastres 1995:77), Guarani children are telling us that the concurrent union of the human order and the divine world is not only possible, but highly desirable on this earthly world. Early, premature death can never be a prerequisite to immortality. In transforming the missionaries into xondaro, Mizael dared to behave as gods do. By doing so, the boy hoped the gods would acknowledge him and admit him and his kin among them. This apocalyptic vision of time and the body is central to the thought of the present-day Guarani (Clastres 1995:21), except that the cataclysms of the past have been magnified because this bad, mundane world has become more and more "imperfect." Avoiding cataclysms is now an extremely arduous task which requires other political and cultural strategies, because the Guarani have passed from one kind of necessity to another. Hoping to avoid cataclysms, the children have set themselves to criticize the present cultural order, bearing witness that "there is no cultural order that does not think of itself as a transcendent order" (Clastres 1995:21). Tupi-Guarani Apocalyptic Visions of Time and the Body

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This same perspective is also apparent in Diego's choice of being a singer, rather than a tin can gatherer like his father, or a banana harvester as his mother would have hoped. In his eight years of age, the boy can already envision that in order to break free from the perverse cycle of misery that perpetuates hunger and scarcity among the poorest of the poor, that is, in order to be transcendent, he needs to invest in innovative strategies that guarantee a more equitable access to material and symbolic capital. The reflections generated by Angelina and Joacir in their ambulance performance also attest to the importance of children's creative thinking in attempting to transcend the cultural order. They turn down the ambulance ride because they also hope that immortality can be reached without dying, and that if they want to make it to the place where the land provides fruit without being sowed, and where one does not die, they have to keep well and alive. Ultimately, the children are struggling to restore the foundations of the Guarani economy of reciprocity (Melia 1987), which guarantees the circulation of goods among the different Guarani communities, and can thus overturn the destruction of the people and of the world. This is what Florentina's generosity teaches us, when the little girl distributes her share of candy among the folks at the Pindoty Village who are also hungry. To the Guarani, having nothing to eat is more desirable than having nothing to offer. Karai Candido Ramirez expressed his frustration: I am almost quitting my work as a healer (paje) because I have nothing to offer anybody; nothing to offer you, nor him, nor her. How am I supposed to live the Nhande Reko this poor? The children cry of hunger, because they can't survive off green tea (chimarrao). We struggle but still can't make it. So I am passing on my duties to Henrique Firmino, who is younger and stronger than me. The truckload of candy sent by the children to the Pindoty Village is emblematic of their effort to renovate the Guarani cycle of reciprocity among the 18 different Guarani villages in the state of Sao Paulo, and thus offset the destruction of the world. Triggering the cycle of reciprocity requires, however, an initial offering (Levi-Strauss 1969), and the children propose that their elders accept the comforts of agriculture sedentary life as a means of guaranteeing the circulation of all kinds of goods, material or symbolic. However meager this exchange has been, with hardly any investment in agriculture, small and scant aspects of this circuit have outlasted the situation of absolute misery that the Guarani have faced in Sao Paulo. Angelo Silveiro, the tribal leader of the Pindoty Village in Pariquera-acu put it this way, in June 1998:

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Before moving to Pindoty, we collected leftover food {restos de comida) at the garbage dump in Canan&a, so that everybody would have a little something to eat. We shared our leftovers with our folks in the Rio Branco Village. Their situation is so bad! This is what the Guarani people are like: we share everything we have. New changes have brought new inflections to the discourse of the Ywy Marae'y: whereas in the past migrations were neither prompted nor accompanied by political or territorial claims (Cadogan 1959:50; Clastres 1995:70), today economy and prophecy have become inextricably tied together. Guarani reciprocity emerges here as a strategy that the children have tried to recreate in order to avoid a cataclysm. Their current reinterpretation of one of the fundamental aspects of Guarani religion—migration to the Land-withoutEvil—in terms of the present-day situation is informed by the circumstances of social exclusion and structural violence they experience on and around the Itaoca reservation. The straightforward way in which the kids portray the situation carries a great lesson of solidarity: even living under the predicament of absolute poverty, the Guarani practice reciprocity. Children show each other and their elders the importance of mutual help, by sharing the little they have with the famished neighbor, even if this means they might not have anything to eat the next day. Attention to the children's world suggests that even if Guarani adults apparently deny it, they are hungry and have been struggling to accept what the kids have all along been telling them: that they should improve life conditions in this domain of the cosmos if they ever want to qualify for life in the Ywy Marae'y. The children believe death and sickness do not qualify as essential conditions for migration onto a higher level of the cosmos. Guarani children have invested in the reinvention of the Guarani Nhande Reko by using elements of the past, it is true, but fashioned in terms of the present. The Guarani apocalypse becomes accessible here and now, rather than in an unapproachable overseas eternity. The children's critique of human society asserts the need for radical disruption and negation of one of the most fundamental principles of Guarani social life: that an austere, painful and dangerous nomadism should be a necessary transcendence to the Land-without-Evil. What the children are showing when they refuse to survive off garbage dumps, when they plant their own gardens, and transform missionaries into Guarani warriors is that the mythic paradise can coexist at the same time and place with this secular world order. The children's performances insinuate that the apparent tragic and melancholic Guarani conception of the world might very well be "a subtle mixture of hope and despair, passion and action, and its disavowing appearance conceals a powerful affirmative impetus: in the Tupi-Guarani Apocalyptic Visions of Time and the Body

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midst of their misery, men are gods" (Viveiros de Castro 1987:xxiv). This driving force would probably be the source of power conjured by Mizael as the boy tried to transform the evangelical missionaries into xondaro, the Guarani warriors. Doesn't Mizael anticipate that men can become their own gods? Finally, what do Guarani children teach anthropologists about childhood and about the human condition? I hope this piece has shown that seeing indigenous children as individuals whose autonomy should be safeguarded and fostered is an enormous step towards making the rhetoric concerning children's survival, protection, development and participation in making the world a better place a reality. The situation of Guarani children in Sao Paulo at the turn of the 21 st century evolves from a specific social, political and economic context which also includes moral positions from the broader Brazilian society about who "Indians" are and what they should be like. Even if childhood agency still is a highly contentious topic, the current worldview and achievements of Guarani children are, to a large extent, a product of their own social action and symbolic fashioning. Guarani cosmological foundations are refashioned in view of the kids' current Guarani worldview, in its modern configuration. Tupi-Guarani apocalypse as a futuristic outcome of Nhande Reko is reconfigured by the children's distinctive temporal rhythms, which turn the future into the present by acting upon the world in an attempt to recreate the abundance of the promised land—and ultimately, social justice. I end with a passage from a letter sent to me by Mariano Tupa Mirim, the health agent at the Itaoca Village, in July 1999. Mariano wrote in response to my queries about the situation of the children he cared daily for at Itaoca: The children are not going to school because we still have none. But they still play in the opy. They learn a lot with the shaman, what our ancient history was like: the children played, danced and worked. Then times started to change, and now we need to learn how to read, write, and live documented, because every day we need documents. Many children do not like to be taught in the white men's religion, because we Indians need to have our own culture. Because the [Guarani] law does not allow us to forget it or put the culture aside. The children think about this and disapprove. Since I arrived here-at Ita6ca, many missionaries have tried to teach the kids their religion, but no one has succeeded.

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Notes Acknowledgments. Grateful thanks are expressed to Aracy Lopes da Silva (in memoriam), Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Ivo Patarra, Helofsa de Almeida, Eduardo Parodi, Hector Qirko, Faye Harrison, Amir Arman, Josh Schendel and the JLAA editor and anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and critical reading of the manuscript. I'd also like to thank the Guarani communities in Sao Paulo for all their support. The research was carried out during a postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, funded by CNPq, the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientffico e Tecnol6gico (grant # 301499/96) from February 1997 to July 1998, and by FAPESP, the Fundacao de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado de Sao Paulo (grants # 98/09100-6, and 99/05689-9), from December 1998 to November 1999. This essay was originally presented at the 122nd Annual Meeting of the American Ethnological Society, March 23-25, 2000 in Tampa, Florida. It embodies material originally published in Portuguese in "Divina Abundancia: Fome, miseria e lixo entre os Guarani de Sao Paulo" in Crianca Indfgena. Ensaios Antropol6gicos. Aracy Lopes da Silva and Angela Nunes, eds. Sao Paulo: Global Editora/MARI-USP (Grupo de Educacao Indfgena da Universidade de Sao Paulo)/FAPESP, 2002. 1. All translations by author, unless otherwise noted. 2. Ministry of Health, Ordinary law {Medida Provisoria) # 1.911-8, Article 28-B, July 29, 1999. 3. Editor's note: The terms maraey and Mbaemegua, used in this article, are properly notated using a tilde over the letter 'e' preceeding the apostrophe in each case; due to typesetting limitations, the terms are printed here without the usual diacritical marks. 4. Like other functionalist scholars of his period, and those who preceded him in their Tupi studies (Baldus 1937; Fernandes 1951; Metraux 1948, 1979 [1928]; Unkel 1914, for example), Schaden believes that the function of infant creativity and innovation is to maintain and perpetuate the Guarani social order. 5. The only exception in which Guarani children and teenagers appear in the literature as having some control over their own destiny is the tragic role played by the Guarani Kaiowa in their choice of committing suicide. Whether it be in the choice of how they want to die (by hanging or ingestion of pesticide), or in the reflections they produce about this form of violence, the children appear, in the writings of J. C. Meihy (1991, 1994) as agents of their own destiny. They choose when, where and how they want to die. The impossibility of living the Nhande Rek6 on diminutive reservations and shanty towns of the Brazilian South makes death emerge as "an appeal for life" (Meihy Tupi-Guarani Apocalyptic Visions of Time and the Body

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1994:251). The Guarani Mbya* and Nhandeva of the southern coast of Sao Paulo, however, do not voluntarily seek death as a solution to their current afflictions, since there are no recent (1995-2000) suicides in the communities (Ferreira 1999d). Meihy (1994) does not believe, however, that the Kaiowi are anticipating early migration to the Land-without-Evil by committing suicide. He says that by using a cultural "belief" to justify a perverse outcome of the intense social suffering the Kaiowa face on the reservations, we (anthropologists) are engaging in another kind of "essentialism" that keeps us from understanding the transformations of the Guarani religious order. 6. "Divine abundance" was the expression used in the classic reports of Ulrico Schmidt and Alvar N. Cabeza de Vaca to describe the plenteousness of agricultural products found in Guarani land at the time of the first contacts between the natives and the Spanish conquerors in Paraguay (Melia 1987:2). 7. In Ecuador, where 40 percent of the country's children are malnourished, kids ages ten to 14 have been campaigning on the streets for better schools, new community services, paved roads and more parks in crime-infested areas. Children in Rwanda began volunteering for Solidarity Camps in 1996, where they made bricks for returning refugees—more than one million of them—to rebuild homes devastated by sectarian violence. In Zambia, where more than 360,000 children have lost at least one parent to AIDS, kids in the Anti-AIDS Club of Chibolya began traveling to slums and rural villages two years ago to perform skits about protected sex. The Children's Movement for Peace in Colombia was launched in 1995 by preteens, such as Juan Elias Uribe, who at age 13 lobbied the mayor of his war-ravaged hometown of Aguachica to let the children vote on the country's 35-year-old guerrilla war referendum. One of the biggest successes of these young activists has been to draw attention to the United Child, the most widely ratified treaty on human rights in history. But not everyone welcomes the kids'efforts. The biggest problem for "Children's Governments"—and the reason some fell apart—has been opposition from adults. Some community leaders actually put pressure on parents because they feel their authority is being eroded. The only countries that have not yet ratified are Somalia and the United States, where the leadership of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee sees many U.N. conventions as a threat to U.S. sovereignty (Wright 2000). 8. On April 4, 2000, the Terra Indigena Guarani de Itaoca was delimitada by the Minister of Justice, Portaria 292 (ISA 2001:772). The area still needs to be physically and administratively demarcated to meet the final requirements of the demarcation process. 9. See Scheper-Hughes (1992) on northeastern Brazil, Harrison (1997) on the Caribbean, Farmer (1996) on Haiti, and Ferreira (1998a, 1999a) on northwestern United States.

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10. The Procuradoria Gcral do Estado dc Sao Paulo (PGESP) is currently investigating widespread corruption at FUNAI in Sao Paulo (Deborah Stucchi, technical assistant, PGESP, personal communication, 10/15/1999). 11. UNICEF (1999) estimates there are 50,000 children in Brazil gathering scraps of food and tin cans at large cities' dumpsites. The report does not mention indigenous populations, however. 12. On the day Adilson died, another two Guarani children, Graciano Silveira and Florentina Gabriel, who were also malnourished and infested with parasites, waited quietly in the lounge of the Pronto Socorro Agenor de Campos, in Mongagui, for a vacancy in one of the coastal hospitals. One-year old Graciano, who had pneumonia, lay prostrated in his mother's arms, while four-year-old Florentina was covered with scabies, a contagious skin disease caused by parasitic mites, and had three visible tumors on her head. Starvation in early childhood can stop or slow down physical growth and the development of brain cells. 13. Benzetacil is produced by White House, a multinational pharmaceutical company. The active ingredient in Benzetacil is ampicillin, a semisynthetic penicillin effective against certain bacteria. It was originally used to combat widespread syphilis epidemics among socioeconomically disadvantaged populations in the U.S. (African Americans, Native Americans and Latinos), and has, since the 1960s and 1970s, become the preferred medication used in Brazilian governmental and missionary health care centers for treating most infectious diseases among the poor. It is widely used on indigenous reservations in Brazil. 14. Local hospitals the Guarani children are taken to in the Baixada Santista include the following: Hospital Municipal de Mongagua, Santa Casa de Praia Grande, Santa Casa de Santos, and Hospital de Cubatao. 15. In 1998, a group of 48 Guarani Mbya who had been camping near the Cananeia beach resort, in the southernmost part of the state of Sao Paulo, were transferred by the National Indian Foundation to a small reservation near the neighboring city of Pariquera-acu. The land was donated to the Indians by a German supporter of the Brazilian organized Indian movement. The mayor of Pariquera-acu, however, only agreed to have the Guarani within his jurisdiction "if they stopped collecting leftover vegetables at the city's streetmarket, and scraps of food at the local dumpsite." The mayor never explained, however, how he expected the Guarani to support themselves in the short-run on a small piece of land which consisted basically of a steep hillside slope near the seashore, with sandy and thus infertile soil, and no game. The Guarani do not eat fish from the ocean. 16. A change from patrilocal to matrilocal residence among the Nhandeva of Itaoca, for instance. Tupi-Guarani Apocalyptic Visions of Time and the Body

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