Consuming Cannibals: Léry, Montaigne, and Communal Identities in Sixteenth-Century France
1999; Volume: 12; Issue: 23-24 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/ntc.1999.0033
ISSN1940-9079
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Studies in Latin America
ResumoCONSUMING CANNIBALS: LÉRY, MONTAIGNE, AND COMMUNAL IDENTITIES IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE _______________CARMEN NOCENTELLI-TRUET_______________ Stanford University The entry for 23 November 1492 in Columbus's Journal marks the first appearance of the word "cannibal" in European discourse. On this date, Columbus and his crew approached an island inhabited by a people known as "Caníbales" who had "only one eye and the face of a dog." Of these, the log reports, the native guides "showed great fear, and when they saw that this course was being taken, they were speechless because those people ate them and because they are very warlike." Elaborating from Columbus's account , Peter Martyr depicted the Caribs as ravenous wolves living off human flesh, and described their custom of impregnating women prisoners to ensure its constant supply. For his part, Francisco López de Gomara —whose Historia general de las Indias was a fundamental source on the New World for many Europeans, including Jean de Léry and Michel de Montaigne— concluded his account of Carib life with a panegyric on the "civilizing" effect of European colonization. "It is the praise and glory of our kings and men of Spain to have made the Indians accept one God, one faith, and one baptism ," he wrote, "and to have rid them of idolatry, human sacrifice, the eating of human flesh, sodomy, and other great sins, which our good Lord greatly abhors and punishes." While the cumulative weight of such indictments placed the Caribs at the bottom rung of human society, a more complicated fate was reserved to the Tupinambás of Brazil, an anthropophagous group that had achieved early notoriety after the publication of Amerigo Vespucci's letters. Vespucci had not portrayed this indigenous people in a very favorable way; his famous letter to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de Medici, for instance, emphasized native nudity, polygamic customs, and cannibalistic practices. Durand de ViIlegagnon , who led a French colonial expedition to what would become Rio de Janeiro in 1556, left an even more negative appraisal of Tupi life, wondering if his group had not landed among beasts possessed of human form. And Franciscan friar and royal cosmographer André Thevet, who had briefly joined Villegagnon in Brazil, likened the Tupinambás to "ravenous lions" ("lions ravissans") who made human flesh their ordinary fare. This©1999 NUEVO TEXTO CRITICO Vol. XII No. 23/24, Enero a Diciembre 1999 94CARMEN NOCENTELLI-TRUET stereotypical view of cannibals as monstrous beings indulging in deviant behaviors was counterbalanced in France by a relatively positive portrayal of native Brazilian mores. In his "Discours contre Fortune," the poet Pierre Ronsard depicted the Tupis as a "golden age" people who could only be corrupted by contact with the Europeans, while Jean de Léry took a rather sympathetic view of their way of life in the Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil, hailed by Claude Lévi-Strauss as "a masterpiece of anthropological literature," and widely known today as a valuable ethnographic account of Native American Ufe and customs. For his part, Michel de Montaigne provided an influential account of primitive virtue in America in his 1580 essay "Des cannibales," traditionally seen as an impartial , factual account of New World cultures. Although revisionists have recently challenged this reading of "Des cannibales," many scholars still congratulate Montaigne on his freedom from ethnocentric prejudice, and his "appreciation of non-European ways of realizing human potential." To evaluate the works of Léry and Montaigne simply on the basis of their relative proximity to a contemporary sensibility to otherness, however, means to disregard the specific discursive context in which both the Histoire d'un voyage and "Des cannibales" were produced. It is my contention in this essay that the terms of Lér/s and Montaigne's representations of Brazilian culture are rooted less in some kind of proto-anthropological sensibility than in a deep preoccupation with contemporary French politics. I want to suggest , in particular, that the popularity of the Tupinambás in sixteenth-century France was the result of a fetishization of cannibalism that turned the CONSUMING CANNIBALS________________________________________________95 material practice of consuming human flesh into a trope that was deployed to grapple with...
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