The Origin Myth of a Myth: The 'Land without Evil' Revisited

The Apapocúva-Guarani legend of the Land Without Evil burst into Americanist literature in 1914, in a text published by German anthropologist Curt U. Nimuendajú. This text suggests a significant connection between a particular belief content and certain more general facts such as the Tupi-Guarani migrations, the ethnic factor, the messianic impulse, the prophetic religiosity, the exuberant rituality or the eschatological representations. All these ingredients would later be taken up, dosed and interpreted differently, by each of the ´Tupi-Guaraniologists´ who, alongside Alfred Métraux, used the theme as a guiding thread for their research (E. Schaden, P. Clastres, H. Clastres, B. Susnik, B. Meliá, etc.). Whether Apapocúva myth, Tupi-Guarani myth, Amerindian myth, cultural legend or explicit goal of the new political constitution of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, the very exegesis of the Land Without Evil is just one more variation subject to the mythopoetic process, and its very trajectory can therefore be analysed in the key of a mytho-logic.