Hans Staden's True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil (review)

Hans Staden's True History (1557) relates the story of German mercenary Hans Staden's two trips to the New World (1547, 1550) and his captivity among the Tupinambá Indians of Brazil. During his last trip, the Spanish vessel in which he was traveling had to make a stop in Paranaguá Bay near Curitiba, where he was persuaded by the Portuguese to leave the Spanish and work as a gunner in a Portuguese fort. He did so until the end of 1553, when he was captured by a group of Tupinambá warriors who thought he was Portuguese. Given the system of alliances between European traders and indigenous groups during the first part of the sixteenth century, this "misunderstanding" set Staden up to be sacrificially killed and eaten by his captors, who considered him an enemy; hence his constant attempts to convince his captors that he was a friend of the French, who were allies of the Tupinambá in Brazil. According to Staden, during his captivity, he witnessed several sacrifices and cannibal feasts and he lived in constant fear of being next in line. It was his convincing performance as a clairvoyant shaman that ultimately spared him from sacrifice. Staden was finally rescued by French traders and returned to Europe, where he wrote his popular and widely published ethnographic account, which included a preface by the anatomist Johannes Eichmann (Dryander), a professor at the Universität Marburg. Indeed, a number of scholars believe that Professor Dryander wrote the text based on an oral account by Staden. Accompanied by 55 woodcut engravings, the story created a narrative of redemption in which Staden declared over and over again that God had saved him. The erstwhile mercenary thus became a witness of the Lord and an effective instrument of propaganda for the Lutheran faith.

The Warhaftige Historia consists of two distinct parts: the first narrates Staden's struggles to avoid his dreadful fate; the second describes his captor's customs, among which sacrificial cannibalism figure most prominently for the early ethnographer.

This is not simply another European text about the origins of colonial modernity conveniently packed for academic consumption in the US. Rather, Whitehead and Harbsmeier present an important edition of a fundamental symbolic and historical part of the Latin American archive. An indispensable text for the study of early colonialism in the Americas, it is also a key document for the study of Latin American and Brazilian cultural history, and a crucial ethnographic text on the Tupinambá Indians.

Staden's account has been read and reread, translated, studied, and rewritten for more than a century since it was first translated into Portuguese in 1892 (not in 1900 as stated in the Introduction). The genealogy of studies and appropriations of this colonial text is richly varied and includes the adaptation of the text as a children's book by anti-modernist writer Monteiro Lobato (1927); the converse appropriation of it by the modernist artistic and literary movement Antropofagia (1928, 1929); the neo-Indianist and populist rereading by the Estado Novo regime during the 1940s; the carnavalized and irreverent film version of the Cinema Novo movement (Nelson Pereira dos Santos 1971); the neo-nationalist and postmodern commemoration given by the 24th Bienal de São Paulo (1998); and a lackluster production of the story as a forgettable and tedious movie (1999). In their introduction, Whitehead and Harbsmeier provide the sixteenth century cultural, religious, and historical contexts of the Warhaftige Historia as well as a judicious interdisciplinary analysis of Staden's ethnographic account. This book not only responds to the growing academic interest in Brazilian cultural and historical archives (an interest that is sparked in part by the economic, political, and cultural position of Brazil in today's global geopolitics); it also satisfies the pressing demand for an...