Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Hans Staden, Neil L. Whitehead, and the Cultural Politics of Scholarly Publishing

2001; Duke University Press; Volume: 81; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-81-3-4-745

1527-1900

Michaela Schmölz-Häberlein, Mark Häberlein,

Religion and Society Interactions

In the HAHR’s recent special issue on colonial Brazil, Neil L. Whitehead refers to Hans Staden’s account of his captivity among the Tupi Indians in the middle of the sixteenth century as “a fundamental text in the history and discovery of Brazil.”1 According to Whitehead, “Staden’s text . . . should . . . be considered as critical to our understanding of the cannibal rituals of the Tupi” (p. 742). While he also argues that “part of the current importance of a text like Staden’s is . . . the way in which it fits into current debates on knowing or interpreting others distant in both cultural space and historical time” (p. 722), we are not concerned here with Staden’s relevance for “the cultural politics of cannibalism today” (p. 750). Instead, we merely wish to point out what we see as serious scholarly deficits and factual errors in this article. More particularly, we take issue with Whitehead’s claims for the veracity of Staden’s account.In our view, the article lacks a critical interpretive dimension and essentially fails to offer its own reading of Staden’s text. Where Whitehead argues for the ethnographic quality of Staden’s book, he mostly relies on other scholars (pp. 743– 46). He does not even inform his readers well about the author and his work. While he notes that “[l]ittle else is known of Hans Staden aside from the story of his captivity in Brazil,” he does not care to mention what is known—his origins in the Hessian town of Homberg, the limited evidence on his family background and education, and the surviving fragments of his biography after 1557.2 In dealing with a sixteenth-century German text, he consistently ignores virtually all the relevant scholarly literature in German, particularly the work of historian Annerose Menninger and literary scholar Wolfgang Neuber.3 Whitehead also notes the importance of the more than 50 illustrations in the first German edition, arguing that “[t]he Marburg woodcuts are a vastly underappreciated aspect of the text” (p. 723). While 15 of the woodcuts are reproduced in the article, the author does not engage in a sustained interpretation of them. We might also note that the woodcuts have quite often been reproduced in other scholarly works and exhibition catalogues,4 and even the juxtaposition of the Staden woodcuts with Theodore de Bry’s copper prints can be found in standard textbooks.5Moreover, factual errors abound in this article. Thus the author identifies Staden’s True History as “the earliest account we have of the Tupi Indians from an eyewitness who was captive among them for over nine months” (p. 721). In fact, Staden’s account may be the first (and only) captivity narrative from sixteenth-century Brazil, but it is apparently not the earliest eyewitness account of the Tupi Indians. As Annerose Menninger has shown, these were written by the Jesuit Manoel da Nóbrega or other missionaries in his group and printed at Coimbra in 1551, at least two years before Staden’s alleged captivity and six years before the publication of his True History.6 While Whitehead claims that there has been “no translation into modern German since 1942,” two German translations of Staden were published after 1941 (not 1942)—one in 1964 and another in 1982.7Likewise, Whitehead’s account of the publication history of Staden’s book (p. 723) is inadequate, as a comparison with the authoritative bibliography European Americana reveals. Whereas Whitehead claims that the book “originally comprised 165 folios,” it actually came out in quarto format and the bibliographers counted 178 pages. Whereas Whitehead identifies two 1557 editions, there are four entries for that year in the European Americana. On the other hand, there is no bibliographical reference to a 1567 edition that Whitehead cites. The first Dutch edition did not come out in 1630, but was printed by the famous Antwerp publisher Christophe Plantin as early as 1558; subsequent sixteenth-century Dutch editions appeared in Antwerp in 1563 and in Amsterdam in 1595. According to Whitehead, the first Latin version was printed in 1592, while “two more Latin translations” appeared in 1605 and 1630. The European Americana indicates, however, that the 1605 Latin edition was merely a reprint of the 1592 version. Finally, Whitehead states that, apart from the versions which he mentions, “[t]here were an additional ten editions, in German, Dutch, and French by the end of the nineteenth century.” By contrast, the published volumes of European Americana list 15 Dutch editions for the years 1625–75 and 1701–36 alone.8 The enduring popularity of Staden’s book on the Dutch market may be related to the Dutch trade and colonization enterprises in seventeenth-century Brazil and Suriname.The most troubling aspect of this article, however, is Whitehead’s persistent, but unsubstantiated, claim for the authenticity of Staden’s account. The author believes that “Staden’s highly personal account was born of a very distinct and intense experience that lasted just over nine months” (p. 724), celebrates the “proto-ethnographic tale of Staden’s direct, personal, and extended engagement with the Tupi” (p. 743) and argues for the “exceptionally ethnographic quality of Staden’s text” (p. 747). Annerose Menninger recently came to a very different conclusion, and it is significant—a matter of “cultural politics” in our view—that Whitehead’s essay does not contain a single reference to her work.9Menninger’s point of departure is the success of Staden’s book on the sixteenth-century literary market. Of the three German eyewitness accounts of South America published separately in book form, Nikolaus Federmann’s work on the conquest of Venezuela flopped, while Ulrich Schmidl’s narrative did better and only Staden’s tale became a best-seller. The secret of Staden’s success, Menninger argues, was that he treated his readers to extensive encounters with cannibalistic practices. Menninger’s analysis of the market for Americana in sixteenth-century Germany reveals that works in which cannibalism figures prominently dominated the market. Viewed in this context, Staden’s book offered precisely what German readers of works on America were expecting.Moreover, Menninger finds that an anonymous 1509 pamphlet based on the travel narrative of Amerigo Vespucci, and reprinted as part of a larger compilation in 1534, has a number of striking structural and thematic parallels with Staden’s book. Like Staden’s work, the pamphlet was divided into a personal narrative (on the death and consumption of a young sailor by Brazilian Indians) and an ethnographic report. With few exceptions—the burial of the dead, the lighting of fire, the making of salt and an alcoholic beverage, the naming of new-born children—Staden’s report on the Tupi Indians takes up every single topic addressed in the 1509 pamphlet. Brief observations in the Vespucci text reappear in similar brevity in the Staden book.10The parallels extend to the narrative parts of the two works. Both contain passages on an island only inhabited by birds, on the shipwreck of sailors allegedly punished by God for their merciless deeds, on a missionary attempt, on a combat followed by the capture of Indians, and on a skirmish at sea. Staden’s account of his failed attempt to cure a sick Indian, who was eventually killed, roasted, and eaten by his fellow “savages,” can be traced to the travel narrative of Ludovico de Varthema, published in German in 1515 and included in the same 1534 compilation as the Vespucci text, which reported the killing and consumption of mortally ill people on the island of Java. Other sources of inspiration may have been Hans Schiltberger’s account of his Turkish captivity, published at least four times between 1548 and 1554, and the already mentioned report of the Jesuit Nóbrega. Nóbrega’s renderings of the treatment of captives, of the Tupis’ shaman cult, of their knowledge of the great biblical flood, and of their habit to sleep in hammocks by a burning fire can all be found in the Staden text as well.11These observations lead Menninger to the conclusion that Staden’s book was not the direct, authentic personal eyewitness account that Whitehead believes it to be. Instead, it is a skillfully composed tale in which cannibalism is the main narrative device that leads the hero from one exciting adventure to the next. In the process of writing the narrative and ethnographic parts, Staden appears to have been hunting around for ideas in other exotic works of information and adventure, and by striving to surpass all prior works on cannibalism in graphic detail and dramatic intensity, he sucessfully aimed for a wide readership on a literary market already “hungry” for tales of wild, grim, naked, man-eating savages. Staden apparently financed the printing of the work and the making of the woodcuts himself, thereby taking a calculated commercial risk. The book not only turned out to be a best-seller, it was conceived as a best-seller to begin with.12Finally, Menninger scrutinizes the role of Staden’s collaborator and presumable ghostwriter, the Marburg anatomy professor Johannes Dryander (1500–60). Dryander published a number of anatomical and surgical works for which he earned the dubious reputation of a large-scale plagiarist; he was on the editorial team of Sebastian Münster’s cosmography; and he had his own introduction to cosmography printed in 1543, which referred to the “Anthropophagi . . . crudelißimi” of Brazil. Staden’s striking references to illnesses and cures—including the purging of a sick Indian at the “median artery” (Median ader)—are very unusual for a relatively unlearned man and strongly suggest Dryander’s influence. In fact, the surgical operation allegedly performed by Staden in Brazil is described in detail in one of Dryander’s medical works!13The Marburg professor’s foreword endowed the tale of a half-educated Hessian soldier, gunner, and gunpowder maker with authority; this was a relatively common method to establish the veracity of a text.14 Moreover, Dryander recounted that Staden had been allowed to relate his adventures to land-grave Philip of Hesse, to whom Staden dedicated the book. Philip of Hesse, a leader of the Protestant princely opposition against Emperor Charles V, had been imprisoned in the Netherlands for five years after his involvement in the War of the Schmalkaldic League, and the religious steadfastness and trust in divine providence of Staden’s first-person narrative would have appealed to a Protestant prince, who may well have constructed his own captivity in similar terms.15 And Staden’s comments on the treachery of the French would also have rung a familiar note with the landgrave, whose hopes for French assistance to the German Protestant princes had been shattered when King Francis I made his peace with Charles V at Crépy in 1544.16 We may even speculate that Staden’s appearance in Lisbon in 1547 and the defeat of the Schmalkaldic League in that very year were not coincidental. Many Hessian soldiers left the Holy Roman Empire after the defeat of Philip’s troops, and the soldier and gunner Hans Staden may well have marched under the landgrave’s banner in the War of the Schmalkaldic League.17 In any case, his popular book on a devoutly religious hero amidst man-eating savages and treacherous French-men also constituted a very effective Protestant propaganda piece.18What are the consequences of Menninger’s painstaking analysis, which we have summarized here just briefly? Menninger does not deny the existence of anthropophagic practices among the Tupi Indians, and she does not go so far as to claim that Staden invented his trip to Brazil (for which no independent testimony exists). However, her identification of the sources for most of the major themes in Staden’s account and her analysis of the contemporary literary market in Germany cast serious doubts on the veracity of this “proto-ethnographic tale of Staden’s direct, personal, and extended engagement with the Tupi.” The mixture of fact and fiction in Staden’s (and Dryander’s) work is certainly difficult, perhaps impossible to disentangle and leaves considerable room for future debate. What we criticize is that Whitehead, by simply ignoring the work of Menninger, engages in a questionable form of “cultural politics.” In sum, he attempts to establish an interpretive authority based on a superficial reading of the text and several erroneous statements of fact.