Guaraní

Guarani is not one people but a closely related family of peoples spread across Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia and Uruguay, sharing a language, a religious vocabulary and a concept of the good life called nhande reko or teko, the way of being. Self-designations differ by group. Before contact many groups called themselves simply ava or aba, meaning person or human being. The Mbya of the Atlantic Forest describe themselves as nhandeva ekuery, roughly all those who are us. The Kaiowa of Mato Grosso do Sul call themselves Pai Tavytera. The Guarani of the Bolivian and Argentine Chaco are properly called Ava Guarani; the older term Chiriguano, still common in colonial and museum literature, is an exonym they generally reject and should be recorded only as a name to avoid. Population figures are genuinely contested because censuses in five countries count differently and some count language rather than identity. Reported figures include 135,232 in Argentina (2022 census), 103,712 in Bolivia (2024), around 85,000 in Brazil (2017 estimate, likely low against the 2022 IBGE census) and 73,607 in Paraguay (2024), with a commonly cited overall estimate of around 400,000. The language belongs to the Tupi-Guarani family. Central to Guarani self-understanding is the search for yvy marane'y, the land without evil, a religious and territorial idea that has driven long migrations and that continues to frame how communities speak about land today.

The historic Guarani range covers the basin between the Parana and lower Paraguay rivers, the Misiones province of Argentina, southern and southeastern Brazil once reaching the coast as far as Rio de Janeiro, parts of Uruguay, and the Bolivian and Argentine Chaco along the Pilcomayo and Parapeti rivers. Three broad ecologies are involved. The Mbya are people of the Atlantic Forest and its coastal escarpments, dependent on standing forest for the palms, hardwoods and game their subsistence and ritual life require. The Kaiowa territory in Mato Grosso do Sul was forest and forest-edge country now almost entirely converted to soy, maize and sugarcane. The Ava Guarani and Izoceno of Bolivia live in the dry Chaco and Andean foothills, a landscape of thorn scrub, seasonal rivers and long dry winters. The Guarani organising unit of territory is the tekoa, or tekoha in Kaiowa usage, the place where the way of being can be lived, requiring forest, water and distance from outsiders. Named demarcated or recognised territories include Tenonde Pora and Jaragua in the state of Sao Paulo, Ribeirao Silveira and Bracui on the coast, Panambizinho, Dourados and Nhande Ru Marangatu in Mato Grosso do Sul, and in Bolivia the Isoso area of Santa Cruz department, where the Izoceno organisation co-manages the Kaa-Iya del Gran Chaco national park. Rains fall broadly from October to March. In the Chaco the dry season is severe and water access shapes settlement.

Guarani belongs to the Tupi-Guarani branch of the Tupian family and is one of the very few Indigenous American languages with a large non-Indigenous speaker base. Paraguayan Guarani is co-official with Spanish in Paraguay, where an estimated ninety per cent of the population spoke it as of 2012, usually in the mixed register known as jopara; it is also one of Bolivia's recognised official languages. The Indigenous varieties are distinct from this national standard. The main dialects are Mbya, Ava or Nhandeva, Kaiowa or Pai, and Eastern Bolivian Guarani, itself divided into Ava, Simba and Izoceno speech. Transmission among the Mbya remains strong: children commonly arrive at school as monolinguals and many elders remain so, with fluent Portuguese concentrated among younger leaders who deal with the state. Alongside everyday speech the Mbya maintain a ritual register they call ayvu pora, beautiful words, used in the prayer house and in naming. Writing is comparatively well developed. Bilingual and intercultural schools operate in Guarani villages in Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia, and Guarani-authored teaching materials, dictionaries and literature exist in several dialects. The vulnerabilities are uneven: national Paraguayan Guarani flourishes while some Brazilian Nhandeva communities have shifted heavily to Portuguese under displacement, so the language is best described as robust overall but locally endangered where land loss has broken up villages.

Agriculture is the structuring activity and maize is its centre. The Mbya cultivate avaxi ete, true maize, a set of old landraces distinguished from commercial hybrids and reserved for ritual as well as food; the Kaiowa distinguish avati morotin, white maize used in ceremony, from yellow maize grown to sell. Alongside maize come manioc, sweet potato, beans, squash, peanuts, watermelon and bananas. Reported plot sizes are small, around half a hectare to three hectares among the Mbya and one and a half to six among the Kaiowa. Named foods and drinks include mbojape, a maize bread baked in ashes or embers; kagui or kaguijy, a maize drink made in quantity for collective work and festivals, fermented for some occasions and sweet for others; and ka'a, yerba mate, drunk hot as mate or cold as terere, a plant the Guarani domesticated and whose name and preparation passed into the national cultures of Paraguay, Argentina and southern Brazil. Honey, called ei, is gathered and has ceremonial weight. Hunting and fishing continue where forest and rivers survive but have declined sharply with fragmentation. Labour is divided by gender without rigidity: men clear and burn the plots, women dominate planting, harvest and processing, and both work in family groups. Cash comes from craft sales, small surplus crops, state benefits and, in Mato Grosso do Sul, wage labour cutting sugarcane and working in ethanol plants, work repeatedly documented as exploitative and a driver of family breakdown.

Guarani material art is dominated by worked plant fibre, wood and, in the Chaco, cotton cloth. Mbya basketry, called ajaka, is made from split taquara bamboo and forest vines, worked in twill so that the weave itself produces geometric registers; darker tones come from imbe vine and lighter yellows and reds from plant dyes applied to the strips. Basket designs are not decoration alone and are discussed by Mbya makers in relation to the journey and the way of being. The other signature Mbya form is small carved animals, cut from soft caxeta wood and finished with heated metal to burn in eyes, feathers and fur; jaguars, tapirs, coatis, armadillos and birds from the narratives are the usual subjects, and these carvings are now the most visible Guarani product in Brazilian cities. Feather ornament, seed and glass beadwork, bows and rattles are also made. In the Bolivian Chaco the outstanding tradition is Izoceno weaving, described below, exhibited and sold through the Artecampo museum and shop in Santa Cruz de la Sierra. The masks of the Arete Guasu festival, carved and painted and of Chane origin, are the major Chaco sculptural form. Contemporary Guarani artists and collectives work in film, photography and music, and Guarani craft has entered gallery contexts, including a 2025 exhibition in Porto Alegre pairing Mbya work with contemporary jewellery. Named individual artists are less consistently published than in some other Amazonian cases, which contributors should correct.

The central issue is land. In Brazil the Kaiowa and Nhandeva of Mato Grosso do Sul live in the country's most violent land conflict, confined for decades to small reserves while their tekoha were converted to farmland, and since the 1980s conducting retomadas, reoccupations of ancestral ground that are frequently attacked. Marcal de Souza Tupa-i was assassinated in 1983 and the leader Marcos Veron was killed in 2003; killings, evictions and one of the highest recorded suicide rates in the country have been reported year after year by the Indigenist Missionary Council and by Kaiowa organisations themselves. Aty Guasu, the great assembly, is the principal Kaiowa and Guarani political body. On the coast, the Mbya lands of Tenonde Pora and Jaragua were declared in the 2010s after long campaigns, and remain contested; the marco temporal or cut-off date thesis, rejected by the Supreme Court in 2023 but re-enacted by Congress as law and still in dispute, threatens many Guarani claims. In Bolivia the Assembly of the Guarani People represents Ava communities, and the Capitania of Isoso co-manages a national park; the Bolivian Guarani also operate their own community justice alongside ordinary law. Debt servitude of Guarani families on Chaco estates in the Alto Parapeti was documented by international bodies in 2008 and 2009 and prompted state land redistribution. In Argentina, Guarani communities in Misiones and the north continue to contest illegal logging and administrative neglect, in some cases through their own forest patrols.

The strongest documented Guarani textile tradition is that of the Izoceno of the Bolivian Chaco, whose weaving is called sumbi. It is worked in native cotton in its naturally white and naturally brown forms and, since the colonial period, also in sheep wool. Historically the craft was restricted to women of important families. Warp-faced bands and cloths carry narrow geometric registers, and finished pieces include bags, belts, blankets and hammocks. The tradition was in decline until it was revalued through the weavers' association Sumbi Regua and the Artecampo museum and shop in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, which exhibits and markets the work; the Izoceno are descendants of the Arawak-speaking Chane absorbed by the Guarani, and the weaving is generally traced to that Chane inheritance rather than to a Guarani one. Among the Mbya and Kaiowa the picture is different and thinner. Cotton was spun and used for cords, slings, hammocks and ritual thread, but no continuous loom-weaving tradition on the Izoceno scale is documented for the forest Guarani, and today the visible women's fibre and bead work is basketry and necklaces rather than cloth. Clothing in most Guarani villages is bought, with distinctive dress reserved for ritual and for public political appearances. This is an area where the published record is uneven and where community contributors are likely to have far more to add than the literature contains.

The Guarani are one of the great ceramic traditions of lowland South America, though today it survives more in archaeology and museums than in daily practice. The archaeological Tupiguarani tradition, defined by Brazilian researchers in 1969, covers pottery associated with the spread of Tupi and Guarani speakers over roughly the last two thousand five hundred years and across an enormous area of Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina and Uruguay. Its forms have Guarani names still used in the literature. The yapepo is a deep cooking pot with a rounded base, usually wider at the belly than at the mouth and finished on the outside with corrugation, the pinched and pressed coil marks left deliberately visible. The cambuchi is a large shouldered jar, made in miniature, medium and very large sizes, used to store water and maize drink and, in the large sizes, as a funerary urn for secondary burial. Smaller bowls, recorded as nhaeta or nhaembe, are the vessels most often painted: red and black geometric fields, bands and meanders over a white or cream slip. Firing was open, in bonfire or pit. Comparison of excavated pottery with sixteenth century European chroniclers' descriptions shows the repertoire was stable over a very long period. In contemporary Mbya and Kaiowa villages daily pottery has largely given way to metal and enamel ware, and living potters are few; some schools and cultural projects have taken up ceramics as revival, but a continuous production tradition is not documented.

Guarani ritual music is instrumentally distinctive and well documented. The mbaraka in Mbya usage is a small guitar-like plucked instrument of five strings, adopted from colonial models and fully absorbed into ceremonial practice; the related mbaraka mirin is a gourd or plaited rattle filled with seeds. The takuapu is a bamboo tube about a metre long, held vertically in the middle and struck against the ground to give a deep pulse; it is played by women and lays down the fundamental rhythm. The rawe or rave is a three-string fiddle of the rabeca type. Other instruments include the angu'apu, a drum made from a hollowed trunk, popygua wooden clappers, mimby flutes both in panpipe form, mimby reta, and duct form, mimby marae'y, and rain sticks. Guarani narrative gives the mbaraka and the takuapu to the sun and the moon, which is why they carry sacred weight; the mbaraka is characteristically played by men and by the religious specialist, the takuapu by women. Singing is collective, led in the prayer house and answered by the group, and choirs of children and adults are a normal part of village life. Recorded and released Guarani music exists commercially, including the 2021 album of the Aldeia Yynn Moroti Whera village choir, and Mbya rap and hip hop have emerged from the Sao Paulo villages as a deliberate strategy for reaching young people and outsiders. Transmission is through the prayer house, the school and family practice.

The centre of Mbya and Kaiowa religious life is the opy, the prayer house, where the community gathers at night for singing, dancing and the smoking of the ritual pipe, the petygua, under the direction of a karai or nhanderu and a kunha karai, male and female religious specialists whose authority rests on their capacity to receive and transmit words. The best documented public ceremony is the nhemongarai, held when the new maize ripens, in which the crops of the year are blessed and children receive their true names, understood as revealed to the specialist rather than chosen. Among the Kaiowa the equivalent maize ceremony is called avati kyry. Both are annual, both concentrate the village, and both link the agricultural cycle directly to personal identity. In the Chaco the great festival is the Arete Guasu, the big feast or true time, celebrated by Ava Guarani and Chane communities in Bolivia, Argentina and Paraguay. Originally tied to the maize harvest, it was pushed by colonial calendars into carnival week, and it runs for roughly three days of continuous flute and drum music, dancing and maize chicha. Its distinctive element is the masks, generically called ana ana, of Chane origin, worn by dancers who represent the dead returning to dance with the living. Games structure the days, among them jagua jagua and toro toro, in which masked figures enact confrontation and escape, and kuchi kuchi, in which participants cover themselves in mud to general delight. The festival is simultaneously harvest thanksgiving, memorial for ancestors and public assertion of Guarani presence.

Healing among the Guarani is inseparable from the prayer house. The karai and kunha karai treat illness with song, breath, tobacco smoke from the petygua and the invocation of names, and they are also the people who hold the most systematic knowledge of pohan nhana, medicinal plants. That knowledge is acquired over years of apprenticeship and dream instruction rather than taught openly, and communities have increasingly asserted it as collective intellectual property rather than public information. Documented healing uses cover a wide range of forest and garden plants; ka'a, yerba mate, and tobacco, petyn, are the two best known culturally, both used far beyond therapy. In Brazil, Guarani communities are served by the Special Indigenous Health Secretariat through district health authorities covering the south coast, the interior and Mato Grosso do Sul, staffed partly by Guarani community health agents, and intercultural health programmes have made varying room for traditional specialists. Health outcomes are poor where land is scarce: malnutrition among Kaiowa children and the suicide crisis in Mato Grosso do Sul are both consistently linked by researchers and by the communities to confinement and dispossession rather than to any cultural cause. The clearest biopiracy case involving Guarani knowledge concerns ka'a he'e, the sweet leaf Stevia rebaudiana, long used by the Guarani of Paraguay and Brazil and now the basis of a global sweetener industry built on patents held by foreign companies, with no benefit sharing; the case was documented in detail in a 2015 investigation by Swiss and Paraguayan civil society organisations and remains unresolved.

Early colonial accounts describe the Guarani living in large communal houses, called maloca or oca in Portuguese sources, each sheltering several related families under a leader, arranged around an open plaza. That form has largely disappeared, but its logic survives in the layout of the tekoa: dispersed family dwellings, extended-family clusters, and one collective building that anchors the settlement. Among the Mbya that building is the opy or opy guasu, the prayer house. It is characteristically low and long, built with a frame of poles, walls of split bamboo, palm or earth, and a heavy thatch of palm leaf reaching close to the ground; there is a single low doorway, conventionally facing east toward the sunrise, and the interior is kept dark, with a fire and the ritual instruments in place. Family houses, oo, were traditionally of the same materials, single-roomed, with a hearth and hammocks or low platforms. In the Chaco, Ava Guarani houses are built with wattle and earth walls, hipped thatch roofs and a swept patio, grouped around a communal space. Change has been rapid. Sawn timber, brick and cement block, corrugated zinc roofing and government housing programmes have replaced most domestic building in Brazilian and Paraguayan villages, and zinc roofs are widely disliked for the heat they trap. Communities have generally chosen to keep building the opy in the old way and with the old materials even when the houses around it are modern, treating it as the element that cannot be substituted.