Jean de Léry; ou, l'invention du sauvage - Essai sur l''Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Bresil' (review)

Jean de Léry's Histoire was born of his experience as a young member of an early Calvinist settlement in the bay of modern-day Rio de Janeiro. Exiled from France on the eve of the religious wars, and exiled from his own party of settlers as theological disputes crossed the Atlantic, Léry was forced to live in 1556–57 among the indigenous Tupinamba. Léry documented all that he learned, only to lose his manuscript. He later rewrote his Histoire, so vexed was he by Catholic representations of the Tupi as quintinesentially savage. The work was finally published in 1578. In Jean de Léry; ou, l'invention du sauvage, Lestringant revises and extends his critical reading of the Histoire, presenting it as an epilogue to Claude Lévi-Strauss's best-known ethnography, Tristes tropiques. There Lévi-Strauss re-enacted the original sixteenth-century voyage, carrying his edition of Léry's Histoire as the original 'anthoropologist's breviary'. In each epic voyage, the project to preserve the disappearing culture and language of the Other through representation becomes a hallmark of post-colonial anthropology as characterized by an heightened awareness of the fragility of language and, by extension, culture. By contrast Michel de Certeau's treatment of Léry's Histoire in his 'Ethno-graphie: l'oralité ou l'espace de l'autre: Léry' made the sixteenth-century narrative into the property of the literary critic. Léry's cultural relativism provokes a rich debate, and in this offering, Lestringant, the foremost Léry scholar of his generation, provides his most detailed publication history yet of the Histoire, reflects on the creation of the 'Bon Savage' born of a transported (and particularly misplaced) courtly discourse of pastoralism together with a nimble cultural relativism within Montaigne's famous essay 'Des cannibales', and the lasting significance of Léry's cartographic assertions, as his intransigent empiricism together with his long-standing rivalry with the royal cosmographer, André Thevet, lead him to undermine the accepted spatial construction of the short-lived French colony of Brazil. Léry's empiricism was central in the many disputes with Thevet, whose own treatment of the Tupinamba was based on interviews conducted in the port of Rouen with fellow Frenchmen and occasional Tupi captives. For Lestringant, the representation of the Tupi is intimately tied to competing European discourses.

Carried through Léry's original text are emerging anthropological tropes of first encounters with the Other, and Lestringant's project is to demonstrate how these signs are at times reciprocally shared in Léry's interaction with his Tupi hosts, creating a reflexive alternative history. However, Lestringant resists the temptation to idealize Léry's representations, as he highlights the austere reproaches Léry levels at the Tupi custom of ritual cannibalism in warfare together with their manner of caring for the ill, and mourning the dead. Léry's Calvinism creates the ultimate disjuncture with the more reflexive tendencies of the text, as the Tupi are seen as predestined to languish in hell or, at the very least, in purgatory. The greatest irony then is of the prolific Catholic accounts of the Tupi and their customs which, while scathing and frequently salacious, at least offer a form of salvation through the possibility of conversion within a Christian doctrine.