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Hispanic American Historical Review 80.4 (2000) 721-751



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Hans Staden and the Cultural Politics of Cannibalism

Neil L. Whitehead

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Foundations

Hans 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, [End Page 721] 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 zones 5 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. [End Page 722]

The Text

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 1 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 Th&eacute...

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