A recepção de Terra sem mal: profetismo tupi-guarani (1975), de Hélène Clastres, na etnologia indígena brasileira.

Abstract

In 2025, The land-without-evil: tupi-guarani prophetism (1975), essay on a religious-migratory complex written by the French ethnologist Hélène Clastres, completes 50 years since its first publication in France. When the book crossed the Atlantic, – whether through its translation in 1978 or in the baggage of Brazilian intellectuals and anthropologists who had graduated from French universities – the national indigenous ethnology was undergoing significant transformations. H. Clastres’s essay quickly entered this context as an important contribution, renewing Tupi-Guarani studies through a refreshed analytical perspective. By cataloguing the materials available in the Biblioteca Digital Curt Nimuendajú published in the firth 15 years after The land-without-evil (1975-1990), one can glimpse the essay’s reception within the Brazilian ethnology. It is concluded that, despite the reservations, Brazilian anthropologists were able to take advantage of the ethnological hypotheses contained in the book, something quite different from what occurred in Paraguay, a country where the Frech anthropologist had one of her ethnographic experiences with indigenous peoples, but which received harsh criticism.