At long last an English edition of Hans Staden’s account of his captivity among the Tupi-nambá of mid-sixteenth-century Brazil is available for scholars, teachers, and students. Long shrouded in controversy following William Arens’s attack on Staden in The Man-Eating Myth (Oxford, 1979), Staden’s tale has languished in limbo with historians uncertain how to address accounts of cannibalism. This book, with an extensive introduction written by anthropologist Neil Whitehead and a new English text translated from the German by historian Michael Harbsmeier, is an attractive, accessible, and reliable resource for teaching and research.
In his long and quite dense introduction, Whitehead explores various issues that arise from Staden’s text, such as eyewitness accounts of cannibalism, anthropological perspectives on cannibalism, the trope of cannibalism in colonial and postcolonial expression, the violence of colonialism, cultural performance, and captivity narratives. Whitehead maintains that Staden’s account stands out among others of the sixteenth century because...
