The Haberleins and the Political Culture of Scholarship

It is a necessary scholarly duty to inform the readers of HAHR of the inaccurate nature of the Häberlein's misdirected, and rather petulant, "critique" of my discussion in "Hans Staden and the Cultural Politics of Cannibalism," published in HAHR80 (2000), not least since the political culture of their scholarship is clearly quite parochial. They may well be familiar with "German- language literature on European perceptions of the New World," but apparently not with the extensive anthropological, literary, or historical materials on Brazil, the Tupi, or even Hans Staden. Thus it is notable that they do not wish to actually engage with the main discussion in the article on the cultural politics of cannibalism. Instead, having no actual substantive argument to make themselves, they feel the need to publicize the work of a German scholar, Annerose Menninger, not because it offers new, original, or compelling information but rather only because I happen not to mention it. Thus the only argument they actually do make, that I have ignored such scholarship, is quite simply misplaced since it was never the purpose of this article to discuss all the secondary literature. After all, Brazilian scholars--had the political culture of their scholarship been as unsophisticated as that of the Häberleins--would have no less reason to show pique at having been "overlooked" in this avowedly introductory article. As is made perfectly clear, the point of the article is to introduce some of this secondary literature and some of the issues that will preoccupy the projected edition that I am preparing with Michael Harbsmeier. The original paper was written for a symposium of the American Historical Association on Brazil (hence the citation of Fouquet's 1942 São Paulo edition of Staden!), and I deliberately chose to exclusively discuss the French-language sources both to complement the contribution of Tom Conley on Thevet, which was also published in HAHR's special issue on Brazil, and because this work has had a huge influence within anthropology. For these reasons, and since both symposium papers and journal articles can only address so much, I quite openly and deliberately limited discussion of many matters and chose to focus, for exemplary purposes, on the French scholarship, an outline sketch of the contents of the text and its numerous editions, and to add some commentary on how anthropologists, so far, have used Staden.

The "scholarly deficits" that the Häberleins try to manufacture largely stem from their initial misreading of my article and are simply not relevant to the stated aims. Nonetheless, I shall deal with these in the order in which they are raised. Hans Staden's biography is not a central concern of the article, but rather the use of the text attributed to him. Thus the work of Frank Lestringant, with which I have stated disagreements, is as important in understanding the cultural politics of cannibalism as the text of Staden itself, and that is partly what makes Staden's text still relevant today. Their sloppy reading of my article thus leads them into copious error in their haste to find fault with a project that they have misunderstood and which presumably they feel is the preserve of German-language scholarship alone.

So, for example, despite the fact that it is widely known that the first eyewitness accounts of the Tupi, like Nóbrega's, come before the account of Staden, the Häberleins utterly miss the point. ¹ The importance of Staden as an eyewitness was the fact of his lengthy captivity, not his chronological priority. As to the matter of German transcriptions of the original text, Karl Fouquet's 1941 (1942, São Paulo) edition, is the basis for the subsequent translations mentioned and the differences between these will be the subject of commentary. The Häberleins are also upset by the brief indications given of the publication history of the text. I...