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Hans Staden's Captive Soul: Identity, Imperialism, and Rumors of Cannibalism in Sixteenth-Century Brazil
H. E. MARTEL
Northern Arizona University
| As early modern empires competed for economic, spiritual, and imperial control of the Atlantic world, Europeans brought violence upon the natives and feared retaliation for their trespasses. Of the violence they imagined facing, cannibals embodied the ritualized vengeance and physical incorporation that threatened and beckoned them far away from home when they sometimes found themselves dependent, rather than conquering, guests of Native Americans. As a result, the reality or rumor of cultural cannibalism enlivened the travel narratives of sixteenth-century explorers such as Hans Staden, who was stranded in Brazil for over ten months. Real or not, the cannibal took a charismatic and leading role in the theater of imperial violence and was used by all sides in the conflict. In addition to representing the politics of early modern imperialism, the coercion to which cannibals subjected their victims as they violently and forcefully condemned them to incorporation into a new culture and body politic was a powerful metaphor for the extreme lack of free will in the experience of identity and cultural affinity for sixteenth-century Christians torn apart by Reformation controversies. As the vessel of the soul, each individual body became a center on which to lay siege, in cannibal feast or Christian battle. |
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Controversy over the historical practice of cannibalism by Native Americans has occasionally flared up in academia since William Arens's 1979 Man-Eating Myth questioned the evidence on cultural anthropophagy and turned the ethnographic gaze upon the Western obsession with cannibals. Among the questionable evidence, Arens challenged the veracity of Hans Staden's 1557 narrative of captivity with the cannibalistic Tupinamba of Brazil. Pointing to linguistic barriers and a notable lapse in time between Staden's adventures and the recording of his tale, Arens argued that this account offers historians access to the West, rather than to the Tupinamba.1 Other scholars, frustrated in their desire to recover lost cultures in these European texts—among them real cannibals—have been zealous in defending the cannibal against this "crazed revisionism." In his 1997 Cannibals, Frank Lestringant called Arens a "sensation-hungry journalist" and indicted such scholarship for its "misrepresentations of the Other."2 The most commonly cited repudiation of Arens's argument, Donald W.Forsyth's 1985 "Three Cheers for Hans Staden: The Case for Brazilian Cannibalism" used Staden's narrative to respond point by point to Arens's sometimes sloppy critique.3 However, other than these European travel narratives, which are fraught with imperial motivations and the undeniable Western obsession with cannibals, no evidence hard enough to convince either side of this debate is likely to appear. The reality of the practice of cannibalism on the part of the Tupinamba remains open. |
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Scholars have been able to provide useful and convincing analyses of the myth of cannibalism and its uses for early modern imperialism. In fact, Lestringant's Cannibals was more successful in reflecting upon the history of the cannibal in French culture than he was at enacting a "retrieval" of real cannibals.4 As Lestringant argues, cannibalism usually "represents something other than itself," as in Michel de Montaigne's 1580 essay "On Cannibals," in which he compared cultural cannibalism to the treatment of French subjects in the current regime and found cannibalism preferable.5 While he does not address Hans Staden's narrative, Lestringant does analyze descriptions of Tupinamba cannibalism by its two other main authors—Catholic André Thevet and Calvinist Jean de Léry. In these chapters, Lestringant draws connections between the authors' interest in Tupinamba cannibalism and the ideological animosity over religious identity and Christian values that characterized the worst conflicts of the Reformation. |
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