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Hans Staden’s True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil

2010; Duke University Press; Volume: 90; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2009-095

1527-1900

Eve M. Duffy, Alida C. Metcalf,

Food, Nutrition, and Cultural Practices

At long last an English edition of Hans Staden’s account of his captivity among the Tupi-nambá of mid-sixteenth-century Brazil is available for scholars, teachers, and students. Long shrouded in controversy following William Arens’s attack on Staden in The Man-Eating Myth (Oxford, 1979), Staden’s tale has languished in limbo with historians uncertain how to address accounts of cannibalism. This book, with an extensive introduction written by anthropologist Neil Whitehead and a new English text translated from the German by historian Michael Harbsmeier, is an attractive, accessible, and reliable resource for teaching and research.In his long and quite dense introduction, Whitehead explores various issues that arise from Staden’s text, such as eyewitness accounts of cannibalism, anthropological perspectives on cannibalism, the trope of cannibalism in colonial and postcolonial expression, the violence of colonialism, cultural performance, and captivity narratives. Whitehead maintains that Staden’s account stands out among others of the sixteenth century because his nine months spent living among the Tupinambá make it “far more extensive and ‘ethnographic’ than that of other contemporary commentators” (p. xxi). Whitehead contrasts Staden’s reporting with the writings of Amerigo Vespucci; Jesuits Manoel da Nóbrega and José de Anchieta; the French observers André Thevet and Jean de Léry, as well as Michel de Montaigne; and the descriptions of Portuguese colonial observers Gabriel Soares de Sousa and Pero Magalhães de Gandavo. Without exception, Whitehead maintains that Staden’s account is richer, for it portrays “the political and social calculation surrounding the anthropophagic ritual performance” (p. xlv). Because Staden was not a priest or missionary and did not simply “visit” villages, his account projects “a vivid, personal testimony” that is “unique and valuable in the annals of Tupinology” (p. li). Staden’s narrative, which includes himself as a participant in the drama as well as his description of events, is, according to Whitehead, much closer to the essence of modern anthropological writing that seeks to provide “contingent context to ethnological judgment” (p. xxvi).Whitehead and Harbsmeier use the first Marburg edition of 1557 — which consists of two books, the first an account of Staden’s captivity and the second an ethnography of the Tupinambá — and include the original woodcuts and map. Harbsmeier’s translation into English is the third; preceded by Albert Tootal (with annotations by Richard Burton), published by the Hakluyt Society in 1874 (a few chapters of which appear in Peter C. Mancall’s anthology Travel Narratives from the Age of Discovery [Oxford, 2006]), and Malcolm Letts, 1928. Letts has long been the most consulted English version, and there are significant differences in this new edition. Harbsmeier is careful to stress the text’s spoken qualities, especially visible in his rendering of the poem at the end of the first book, which Letts had deemed “doggerel verses.” Letts’s translation has a somewhat stilted quality to it; Letts also felt compelled to edit out the more gruesome depictions of cannibalism. In contrast, Harbsmeier returns some of the urgency and immediacy to Staden’s tale with simple and direct language, and by removing the polish from Lett’s version brings the translation closer to the starkness of the original. Letts opens book one with: “I Hans Staden of Homberg in Hesse proposed, if God willed, to see the Indies, and with this intention I traveled from Bremen to Holland . . . ,” while Harbsmeier renders it as “I, Hans Staden of Homberg in Hesse decided to go and see India, if God so pleased. With this intent, I traveled from Bremen to Holland” (p. 21). Staden’s original German is short, punctuated with stops, and almost lyrical. A more direct translation from the original the passage would read “I, Hans Staden from Homberg in Hesse, decided, if God were willing, to see India, so I sailed from Bremen to Holland.”It is one tragedy of colonialism that its victims can never be fully restored or returned but must use the terms of the colonial conqueror to fashion a sense of self. Staden’s book was produced by a European who could return and who created a tale of redemption and salvation for an audience eager to hear of tales of savagery beyond the sea. For this reason many students of Latin American history will dislike Staden, mistrust his words, and find his sermonizing insincere and his woodcuts altogether too sensationalized. Yet, it is worth remembering that Staden did not represent the interests of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial projects; in fact he was but a temporary, hired mercenary. Because of the rapid diffusion of printing and the emergence of new reading audiences in sixteenth-century Europe, it happened that his True History quickly spread beyond Hesse. Reading Staden today reveals not only the detailed description of the Tupinambá but the complex and competing loyalties of those who were go-betweens in the Atlantic World.