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Hispanic American Historical Review 81.3-4 (2001) 745-751



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

Michaela Schmölz-Häberlein and Mark Häberlein


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 [End Page 745] 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. 5

Moreover, 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. 7 [End Page 746]

Likewise, 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...

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