Hans Staden and the Cultural Politics of Cannibalism
2000; Duke University Press; Volume: 80; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/00182168-80-4-721
ISSN1527-1900
Autores Tópico(s)Geographies of human-animal interactions
ResumoHans Staden's Warhaftige historia und beschreibung eyner landtschafft der wilden, nacketen, grimmigen menschfresser leuthen in der Newenwelt America gelege is a fundamental text in the history of the discovery of Brazil.1 In fact, it is the earliest account we have of the Tupi Indians from an eyewitness who was captive among them for over nine months, and a key reference in the resurgent debate on cannibalism and its discourses—a debate that partly has its origins in the speculations of Michel de Montaigne, who also conversed with Tupi people who were brought as living exhibits to France. Despite this intellectual genealogy, there has not been an English-language edition since 1929, and no translation into modern German since 1942. Neither has there been a critical introduction that brings ethnographic experience of ritual anthropophagy to the task of interpretation, using other anthropological research on anthropophagic discourse, or literary criticism of the cannibal trope. I am currently collaborating with Michael Harbsmeier (University of Roskilde, Denmark) to make good these deficiencies, through the production of a new critical edition of Staden's 1557 work that will feature a new translation from the sixteenth-century German, close annotation of the text itself and discussion of the circumstances of its production, its ethnological significance, and subsequent intellectual importance, with particular emphasis on current debate concerning cannibalism.The purpose of this paper is to outline an approach to some of these critical questions, especially the issue of the cultural politics of cannibalism. As a cultural category, cannibalism has always incorporated ethnological judgments of others, albeit usually negative in character, and so regardless of how, when, or by whom it was created, the ethnological record has an empirical as well as a logical connection with cannibalism. This was clearly argued by Arens,2 and I do not wish to rehearse or become enmeshed in his controversies at this time. However, part of the current importance of a text like Staden's is precisely the way in which it fits into current debates on knowing or interpreting others distant in both cultural space and historical time. The text itself is not uniquely important among the class of colonial documents more generally, but the appearance of the cannibal sign in its earliest and most intense form through Staden's text, impart particular relevance to a renewed engagement with the Warhaftige historia. Recent anthropological publications, especially Sick Societies (1992), War Before Civilization (1996), The Anthropology of Cannibalism (1999), and Man Corn (1999) have all thrust into wider cultural debate renewed images of violent, primitive savagery as the all-too-inevitable condition of humans.3 One might also reference here our related cultural obsessions with cannibal serial killers,4 as well as ethnic violence in the tribal zones5 of the modern world-system, particularly where they are expressed through unspeakable forms of mutilation and dismemberment. However, various recent ethnographic and historical studies clearly show that more is at play than a collapse into savagery in this resurgence of "traditional" forms of violence.6 In short, the time is right to reexamine that initial cannibal encounter along the Brazilian shore.The text of the Warhaftige historia originally comprised 165 folios and 56 woodcuts, and there is only one edition in which those woodcuts appear, that is, the first published in Marburg on Shrove Tuesday in 1557, by Andres Kolben at the sign of the Clover Leaf. A second edition also appeared in that year, in Frankfurt, but the original woodcuts—probably done under Staden's direct supervision since his figure regularly appears in the scenes—were replaced by utterly irrelevant pictures of Turkey and the Levant.7 The Marburg woodcuts are a vastly underappreciated aspect of the text—possibly because they only appeared in the first edition and because they were evidently a source of inspiration for the reworking of the Staden material for presentation by Théodore de Bry in his collection of voyages.8 Since this work was also issued in Frankfurt we might assume that it simply supplanted the original Staden material, both because of the better reproductive quality of the de Bry graphics, and because of their greater accessibility as part of a widely disseminated collection in numerous editions.In the intervening years between the first edition of the Warhaftige historia in 1557 and the inclusion of a Latin translation of the text in de Bry's 1592 collection, two further editions appeared in 1558 and 1567, respectively. In addition to the de Bry edition, there were two more Latin translations in 1605 and 1630, in which year there was also the first Dutch edition. A fourth edition of the original German appeared in folio, again in Frankfurt, in 1593. There were an additional ten editions, in German, Dutch, and French by the end of the nineteenth century. The first English-language translation was made by Albert Tootal for the Hakluyt Society under the editorship of Richard Burton, who was the British consul to Brazil in the early 1870s. There have been a number of facsimile editions since then, but only one other English translation made by Malcolm Letts.9Although French- and Portuguese-language sources have dominated the representation of Tupi cannibalism, Staden's text is indispensable to anybody interested in the study of sixteenth-century Brazil. There are good reasons for this interpretative emphasis on French and Portuguese materials, including the breadth of commentary through time, the overtly ethnological ambitions of their authors who were relatively educated and literate, their accessibility, and the fact that they were the product of a set of political, military, and economic relationships more enduring than personal encounter. Nonetheless, Staden's highly personal account was born of a very distinct and intense experience that lasted just over nine months and in this sense was the more properly ethnographic, understood as a dialogic and sustained encounter, than the priestly ethnologies, understood as principally synthetic and second-hand. However, Staden's text is not without the imprimatur of ethnological, if not liturgical, approval for the account of his captivity itself is preceded by an introduction by Johannes Dryander.10 The endorsement is given by Dryander since he had known Staden's father for "upwards of 50 years" and as the proverb says, "The apple tastes of the tree. It is to be expected, therefore, that the son of so worthy a man should resemble his father in virtue and piety."11However, it is more than a simple endorsement for Dryander also says that he was asked by Staden "to revise12 it and where necessary correct it." The introduction thus deals with a number of matters, principally the probity of Staden's testimony, the cultural and epistemological status of eyewitness accounts of the strange lands (largely by analogy to the way in which astronomical knowledge is established contra theology), Staden's motives for publishing his account as pious rather than vainglorious, the power of prayer and trust in God to produce deliverance and redemption, and the duty of those so redeemed to communicate this to their fellows. Dryander notes that Staden was verbally interrogated in his presence by Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, to whom Staden also dedicates the book. Staden himself chooses to quote Psalm 107,13 further underlining the profoundly religious approach with which he mediated and represented that experience.Dryander also presumably oversaw the production of part 2 of the actual text which is essentially an ethnological appendix to the "direct" testimony of Staden himself which comprises part 1. The intellectual context and purpose of that ethnological exercise will be a most pertinent aspect of our proposed commentary, but it is the testimony of Staden himself which I wish to concentrate on here.Little else is known of Hans Staden aside from the story of his captivity in Brazil. In 1547 he was in Lisbon, where there was a German commercial colony, in hope of finding employment as a ship's gunner. He set sail in June of that year on a ship transporting convicts, which had orders to attack any French interlopers off the Brazilian coast. He reached Pernambuco in January 1548 (see chaps. 1–5 in Staden's account), and then returned to Portugal in October 1548, but sailed again in March 1549 on a Spanish vessel that was part of a new expedition to Rio de la Plata. Unfavorable weather broke up the fleet, which was partially reunited at the Portuguese colony of São Vicente (Santos). Here the Portuguese were allied with the Tupinikin, which meant that the Tupinambá to the north were hostile to their settlement, the Tupinambá in turn being allied with the French. Staden was persuaded to stay in Portuguese service for a further two years, acting as a gunner in a new Portuguese fort to the east of São Vincente on the island of São Amaro, opposite the existing fort of Brikioka. It was during this period that he was captured by the Tupinambá and the bulk of his text describes the events leading up to this episode and his subsequent captivity.While out hunting in the vicinity of the fort, Staden was surprised by a party of Tupinambá warriors. Stripped naked and beaten, Staden was immediately carried off by his captors (see figure 1) towards their settlement of Uwattibi (Ubatúba). Given his treatment and the words of his captors, it was apparent (though perhaps only with hindsight) that he was destined for sacrifice—kawewi pepicke—as a prisoner of war. However, his two years of service in the fort had given him opportunity to learn the Tupi language and this was to serve him well. As Staden candidly tells us, "At this time I knew less of their customs than I knew later, and I thought to myself: now they are preparing to kill me."14Staden at least had the wit to understand that if the Tupi mistook him for a Portuguese they would certainly kill him, so he began an interminable struggle to play off the fact that he was a German and thus be exempted from the cycle of political revenge between Portuguese and Tupinambá. To that end, and not withstanding his positive identification by a Tupinambá captured in a Portuguese and Tupinikin raid and enslaved to the Portuguese at Brikioka,15 he attempted to persuade a French trader who was living four miles from Uwattibi to vouch for the fact that he was not Portuguese.Staden was abandoned to his fate.17 He was duly prepared to be ritually killed, but a timely attack of toothache, which his captors tried to remedy by a forcible dental extraction, led him to refuse food and he grew correspondingly thin, although they "threatened that if I do not eat and grow fat again they would kill me before the appointed day."18 Questioned as to the disposition of the Portuguese, Staden suggested that it was the Tupinikin who were planning to attack his captors. When this prediction came true, not only was Staden's status as a possible prophet-shaman established, but he also reluctantly joined them in defending Uwattibi against the Tupinikin attack (see figure 2). Following this prophetic event, Staden went on to suggest, when asked one night why he looked at the moon so intently, that the moon was angry with the Tupinambá (see figure 3). This proved, whether by luck or judgement, to be a most culturally effective observation since it produced both curiosity and alarm among his captors.19 When his captors themselves subsequently fell sick,20 this became a further opportunity for Staden to perform as a shamanic-healer and to suggest that he had interceded with his god to relieve them of the sickness that afflicted them (see figure 4). Staden tells us, "I went to and fro laying my hands on their heads as they desired me to do, but God did not suffer it and they began to die."21 This, nonetheless, ultimately proved to be a politically-effective and culturally-affective action; in particular, the recovery of the chieftains Jeppipo Wasu, Vratinge Wasu, and Kenrimakui, despite the deaths of other members of their families, meant that "there was no more talk of eating me. But they guarded me closely and would not suffer me to go about unattended."22 Staden thus had ample opportunity and the linguistic abilities to understand and record what occurred around him and it is this aspect of his text that speaks most strongly to his subsequent commentators. It is notable that both contemporary and subsequent sources may add to and amplify, but do not contradict or undermine, his account of the Tupinambá.The peculiar new status of Staden also meant the Frenchman, Karwattuware, was now prepared to say that Staden was indeed a German and was different from the Portuguese. But despite the offer of trade goods the Tupinambá were not about to give up their strange but powerful, new prophet-healer. Staden recounts how he observed the cannibalism of other captives and the frustrating attempts he made to escape with various visiting ships (see figure 5). He also joined them on raids against enemy villages (see figure 6) and observed and commented upon the practice of war and the cannibalism of captives, including Portuguese (see figure 7). Finally, however, Staden was able to parlay his way aboard a French ship, although he nearly died of a serious gunshot wound when they encountered a Portuguese vessel off the Brazilian coast. He finally arrived in Honfleur, France, on 20 February 1555.The narrative tension at the heart of Staden's text is how his experience of the cannibal Tupi, which was far more extensive and "ethnographic" than that of either Léry and Thevet, threatens to continuously overwhelm the religious and ethnological testament that he, and his ghostly interlocutor Dryander, wish to make. Thus Staden's captivity among the Tupi is used to produce a homily of redemption and faith in which Tupi cannibalism is but one of the many tests and redemptive proofs of faith the text offers. The threat of bodily and spiritual dissolution through the visceral certainty of customary cannibalism is not the only test that Staden's god inflicts upon him, and other physical dangers—shipwreck, disease (both epidemic and dental), gunfire, and the perfidy of the French—also loom large as moments in which evidence of Staden's god become manifest.However, his experience undermines this didactic purpose since the vivid nature of Staden's experiences while captive among the Tupi, that is Staden's engagement with actual cannibals, at all points threatens to escape the straitjacket of Christian testimonial and ethnological distancing into which he and Dryander try to encase it. In this light the text may also be understood as part of Staden's "ritual of return," which allows both him and us to give meaning, purpose and to derive cultural illumination from the otherwise "incomprehensible" experience of being captive among the Tupi.23 But before considering the nature of that experience, as it bears on questions of Tupi ethnology, and how the resulting text has been used by subsequent commentators, it is necessary to situate the Warhaftige historia in relation to the other more copious and better known accounts of the sixteenth-century Tupi.Frank Lestringant has recently analyzed the intellectual genealogy of the cannibal and in particular the texts that derive from the Brazilian shore in the six teenth century.24 He has rightly emphasized the way in which the cannibal was a colonial mirror of not just violence but also spirituality. Lestringant sees a progressive degradation of the image and iconicity of cannibals from the initial encounters with the Tupi, propagandized by Michel de Montaigne, to the nineteenth century show ground "Kaffirs" observed by Gustave Flaubert.25 Although Lestringant has much of importance to say on the French sources, especially Jean de Léry (1578) and André Thevet (1558), his overall notion of a progressive degradation actually seems to be belied by the Warhaftige historia— which he does not consider at all—since for Staden, as we have seen, the cannibal sign is at best ambiguous. For Staden, the intellectual connection between Tupi cannibalism and Christian thought is not one of threatening homology, as for Léry, Montaigne, or Thevet, but of analogy with other tests of faith. In this sense the humanity of the Tupi world emerges in Staden's text through comparison with the treacherous French, and his identification with other intended sacrificees, or with the just revenge that is visited upon them26—that is despite, not because of, the practice of cannibalism.For Lestringant, the subsequent degradation in European writings of the humanity of cannibals on the Brazilian shore is paralleled by an increasing inability to make sense of the anthropophagic act as it evolves from sacrificial ritual into merely a response to the poverty of material circumstances or exigencies of survival—a hunger cannibalism de-fleshed of its cultural meanings.27 However Lestringant himself also plays directly into the cultural politics of cannibalism at the present time, calling William Arens a "sensation-hungry journalist" (with no acknowledgment of the irony here) rather than an "exact historian," for his "denial" of cannibalism.28 At the risk of also being "consumed" by this controversy, one should at least note that Arens didn't deny the historical possibility of cannibalism but rather criticized the kind of evidence that has often been advanced to suggest its occurrence. His examination of that evidence itself is not always so reliable, and Lestringant29 in turn is somewhat credulous in his acceptance of the archaeological evidence of Anasazi cannibalism —and of course the very indeterminacy as to what constitutes cannibalism, that is what is to count as anthropophagic, is often the real dispute here.30 However, the easy elision of any evidence of mutilation and dismemberment with a demonstration of cannibalism does mean that Lestringant is ethnologically ill-equipped to recognize possibly significant aspects of the texts he discusses. For example, in his discussion of Thevet's tale of the Tabajare Indian, who after having traveled to France and being baptized was hacked to pieces by enemies on his return to Brazil, Lestringant notes that, "For once, they did not eat their victim," as if want of opportunity or inclination held them back even as the victim was "butchered" as if for consumption.31 But as Darling recently has shown with regard to the peoples of the southwestern United States, including the Anasazi, this may well be misinterpretation of the purposes for which human bodies might be dismembered and de-fleshed, since "witches" and "sorcerers" might be so treated in order to ensure their metaphysical, as well as physical, death; in this case, cannibalism is not appropriate.32Despite this lack of ethnological sensitivity, Lestringant has the powerful and important ambition to retrieve the "proud and cruel eloquence" of the cannibal from beneath the weight of commentary of the last two decades (and the intervening centuries).33 This emphasis on the conjunction of orality and oratory in the cannibal act is certainly consonant with other recent anthropological interpretations,34 and more generally this intellectual program also recovers the cannibal as an anticolonialist sign, much in the manner of the Brazilian antropofagia movement,35 as a mark of liberty in the face of colonial oppression. This was also the use of Karipuna (Caräibe) cannibalism in the Caribbean36 during a later epoch of French colonialism in the seventeenth century.37 In tandem with this emancipatory use of the cannibal sign a paradoxical discourse of cannibalism as "unbearable constraint" also emerged,38 as a mark of an economic and political tyranny that eats up its victims. Cannibalism thus becomes allegorized, particularly by Montaigne and Léry, as slavery, feudalism, usury, and conquest. However, Isabel Combés,39 has offered a forceful argument for resisting this generalization, lest we lose the particularity of Tupian cultural praxis, formulated contra René Girard,40 who sees here only a exemplum of the universal notion of the scapegoat.Lestringant41 also discusses the centrality of the religious debate as to the meaning and form of the Christian Eucharist in the French sources, and it is this aspect that is the starting point for Montaigne's consideration."42 For Montaigne, both Tupi and Christian rules of cannibalism are communal, related to the worship of the dead and done in the hope of benefit to the group. But the key question for the differentiation of Catholic and Protestant liturgy then becomes whether this is a literal homology present in the moment of transubstantiation or an analogy of spiritual nourishment that replenishes and feeds faith indefinitely. For Montaigne, as a Catholic, the assimilation of the Tupi practice to the Christian belief is an obstacle to the humanistic embrace of the Tupi. Notably it is a question that does not arise at all for Staden. However, Montaigne fails finally to condemn the Tupi precisely because of the parallels in symbolic practice that Léry explicitly elaborates.Without the possible religious significance of the parallels between Tupian and Christian Eucharist, the subsequent fate of the cannibal is to be superfluous and so anachronistic, fit only for eradication, as with that "exterminating angel" Robinson Crusoe.43 And so the cannibals come to be seen as responding to their bio-ecological conditions not their culture, or, in the act of erasure that Lestringant44 rightly resists, the materiality of their acts are supplanted by the evanescence of a cultural discourse which "shifts the noise of teeth and lips towards the domain of language.45 Nonetheless, Lestringant provides a perceptive and careful commentary on the major French sources relating to the Tupi of the Brazil shore in the sixteenth century. It is therefore all the more necessary that the Warhaftige historia of Hans Staden be situated within this commentary for the counterpoint it provides to the French sources, and since this is something Lestringant himself notably failed to do.André Thevet, in his earliest46 work on Brazil, Les singularitez de la France Antarctique,47 delineated a geography of man-eating that located the uncultured "cannibals" to the north towards the Amazon river, and the ritualized "anthropophages" in the orbit of French experience. Thus the former are characterized as cruel eaters of human flesh as a matter of diet, the latter as exponents of certain rituals of revenge. Not surprisingly this cannibal cosmography also conforms to the patterns of French trading and military alliances in the region.48 But it is the matter of direct experience which needs special note here since Thevet, although often lauded as the "first ethnographer" of the Tupi, in fact composed his account, or had others do so, from a multiplicity of second-hand sources.49 Thevet notes the progress of the cannibal rite in great detail and seems unable to resist an analogy with the preparation of roasting pig in French peasant culinary traditions.50However elaborate this ritual becomes in Thevet's subsequent account in the Cosmographie51 and a manuscript work Histoire de … deux voyages,52 it is clear that vengeance is the hermeneutic key to understanding the meaning of the cannibal act, such that description of the careful distribution of the victims body parts and the embedding of the ritual in myth, becomes central to these later works. However, this ritual and spiritual inflation of the cannibal act to ongoing tragic theater, as beautifully elaborated by Combès,53 may to some extent be predicated on the "narrative dyslexia" of unsorted evidence noted by Lestringant.54Montaigne,55 in turn, merges this geography but restricts the notion of the cannibal to the Tamoio, as constructed by Thevet 20 years earlier and as contemporaneously read by Léry. Montaigne's method is to conjoin the sensationalism of cannibalism with an unexpected eulogy, mimicking another work of the period on the savageries and civilities of the Ottoman Turks.56 As Lestringant57 wryly notes, this particularization of the cannibal, unlike with Thevet, allows Montaigne to actually conceal the extent of his analytical and descriptive borrowing from Thevet through Léry, and directly from Léry himself. Unfortunately, Lestringant is utterly silent on how Staden's account, and particularly its visual materials, may also have had a significant impact on French accounts, or at the very least a direct bearing on their interpretation.Since Léry, unlike Thevet and Montaigne, may have a stronger claim to a form of ethnographic engagement with the Tupi, rather than a more distant philosophical or ethnological interest, his work offers the most relevant counterpoint to the account of Staden. Thus it is important to note that he was only 21 years old when he went to Brazil. He was there, though not in the huts of the Tupinambás, from 1556 to 1558. Léry's account of this youthful adventure, Histoire d'un voyage,58 was written some 20 years later, after he had become a pastor in the church in Geneva, and he was stimulated to do so not by the original encounter but by the events of later life. In this sense, Léry unlike Staden writes with hindsight and youthful memory. He claimed not to have read Staden's work until 1586 and mentions it only in the editions of 1600 and 1611.59 Léry's borrowing from Thevet, despite their theological differences, is more easily demonstrable. In fact, Léry actually adds very little new ethnographic evidence but nonetheless vastly enriches the interpretation and symbolic exploitation of that material.60 In his writing, the cannibal becomes a universal symbolic and tropic key; the central motivation of vengeance is made systematic through an examination of various aspects of Tupi culture and he clearly allegorizes the act of eating. In this new framework of semiophagy the carnal and spiritual are expressed through the opposition of the raw and cooked. The northerly (or merely distant) bad cannibals, given specificity through the ethnological example of the Ouetacas, practice a cannibalism that shows no exercise of culinary, and so spiritual, art. However, a devolved cannibalism is also threateningly present inside as well as outside Tupi social space through the presence and enthusiastic participation of women in cannibal ritual. As a pastor Léry was also a witch-hunter of some enthusiasm in Europe,61 so that the imagery of life-sucking hecuba and witch cannibalism of the innocent, play easily into his representation of Tupian ritual, as they do strikingly in de Bry's illustrations of the same (see figures 9 and 10). This misogyny is given further inflection in Léry's own biography since he encountered survival cannibalism during the siege of Sancerre,62 just before turning to write the Histoire d'un voyage. A family was caught preparing to eat their dead child, a scene to which Léry was eyewitness. In his account, originally composed virtually on the spot, the ethical scene is broken down into the criminal and diabolical with the old woman of the house bearing the full weight of Léry's witch-centered view of female corruption. Indeed the trauma of this event, for so Léry represents it, is plausibly directly connected to his literary return to the Brazil shore of his youth.63 Here Tupi cannibalism, as a rite of men, controlled and shaped by their desires, becomes acceptable in a way that the female seduction of masculinity and youth was not in Sancerre.For Léry, cannibalism can also symbolize cruelty, usury, and a lack of charity and, as the meaning of the cannibal sign universalizes, so debate over the Eucharist bloats Léry's account of the Tupi materials to the point that even Villegagnon, leader of the French colony of Rio de Janeiro during Léry's time there, is identified on account of his Catholic views as a soi-disant Ouetaca.64 So if the Tupian cannibal rite recapitulates at all points the Christian Eucharist, to prevent his readers turning away in ethnocentric disgust, Léry goes on to detail the unspeakable cruelties of European tyrants—including Dracula, by way of Vlad the Impaler. In this way Jean de Léry de-territorializes the cannibal who thus freed from the Brazil shore still roams the European and American imaginary.The presence of the cannibal in the anthropological imaginary has been addressed principally by William Arens65 and I have referred above to some of the controversies that work has engendered. It is clear that, whatever the methodological and theoretical benefits of his arguments that enjoin us to a careful and sophisticated approach to source materials, he clearly erred in his own application of those principles to the reading of the literature of cannibalism in South America.66 This does not mean that the use of the textual materials relating to the early period of colonial encounter is unproblematic,67 but it does suggest that we cannot dismiss Arens's wider point that anthropology as a cultural expression is no less apt to mythologize its object than any other academic or professional discipline. Arens's examination of the cannibal is as an exemplary case of this process but anthropology's approaches to gender, race or warfare also have often been highly prejudicial to the human subjects of those musings. So much is evident from the case of the Yanomami of Brazil and Venezuela whose representation by anthropologists as "fierce" may have served also to legitimate and justify military and criminal actions against them.68The argument made here is that Staden's text, although seemingly minor compared to the copious ethnological productions
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