Hans Staden, Neil L. Whitehead, and the Cultural Politics of Scholarly Publishing

In the HAHR’s recent special issue on colonial Brazil, Neil L. Whitehead refers to Hans Staden’s account of his captivity among the Tupi Indians in the middle of the sixteenth century as “a fundamental text in the history and discovery of Brazil.”¹ According to Whitehead, “Staden’s text . . . should . . . be considered as critical to our understanding of the cannibal rituals of the Tupi” (p. 742). While he also argues that “part of the current importance of a text like Staden’s is . . . the way in which it fits into current debates on knowing or interpreting others distant in both cultural space and historical time” (p. 722), we are not concerned here with Staden’s relevance for “the cultural politics of cannibalism today” (p. 750). Instead, we merely wish to point out what we see as serious scholarly deficits and factual errors in...