The Häberleins and the Political Culture of Scholarship

It is a necessary scholarly duty to inform the readers of HAHR of the inaccurate nature of the Häberlein’s misdirected, and rather petulant, “critique” of my discussion in “Hans Staden and the Cultural Politics of Cannibalism,” published in HAHR 80 (2000), not least since the political culture of their scholarship is clearly quite parochial. They may well be familiar with “German-language literature on European perceptions of the New World,” but apparently not with the extensive anthropological, literary, or historical materials on Brazil, the Tupi, or even Hans Staden. Thus it is notable that they do not wish to actually engage with the main discussion in the article on the cultural politics of cannibalism. Instead, having no actual substantive argument to make themselves, they feel the need to publicize the work of a German scholar, Annerose Menninger, not because it offers new, original, or compelling information but rather only because I happen not to mention it. Thus the only argument they actually do make, that I have ignored such scholarship, is quite simply misplaced since it was never the purpose of this article to discuss all the secondary literature. After all, Brazilian scholars—had the political culture of their scholarship been as unsophisticated as that of the Häberleins—would have no less reason to show pique at having been “overlooked” in this avowedly introductory article. As is made perfectly clear, the point of the article is to introduce some of this secondary literature and some of the issues that will preoccupy the projected edition that I am preparing with Michael Harbsmeier. The original paper was written for a symposium of the American Historical Association on Brazil (hence the citation of Fouquet’s 1942 São Paulo edition of Staden!), and I deliberately chose to exclusively discuss the French-language sources both to complement the contribution of Tom Conley on Thevet, which was also published in HAHR’s special issue on Brazil, and because this work has had a huge influence within anthropology. For these reasons, and since both symposium papers and journal articles can only address so much, I quite openly and deliberately limited discussion of many matters and chose to focus, for exemplary purposes, on the French scholarship, an outline sketch of the contents of the text and its numerous editions, and to add some commentary on how anthropologists, so far, have used Staden.The “scholarly deficits” that the Häberleins try to manufacture largely stem from their initial misreading of my article and are simply not relevant to the stated aims. Nonetheless, I shall deal with these in the order in which they are raised. Hans Staden’s biography is not a central concern of the article, but rather the use of the text attributed to him. Thus the work of Frank Lestringant, with which I have stated disagreements, is as important in understanding the cultural politics of cannibalism as the text of Staden itself, and that is partly what makes Staden’s text still relevant today. Their sloppy reading of my article thus leads them into copious error in their haste to find fault with a project that they have misunderstood and which presumably they feel is the preserve of German-language scholarship alone.So, for example, despite the fact that it is widely known that the first eyewitness accounts of the Tupi, like Nóbrega’s, come before the account of Staden, the Häberleins utterly miss the point.1 The importance of Staden as an eyewitness was the fact of his lengthy captivity, not his chronological priority. As to the matter of German transcriptions of the original text, Karl Fou-quet’s 1941 (1942, São Paulo) edition, is the basis for the subsequent translations mentioned and the differences between these will be the subject of commentary. The Häberleins are also upset by the brief indications given of the publication history of the text. I can only say that I thought to spare the readers of the HAHR this rather tedious catalogue by merely giving some sense of the huge production of texts deriving from Staden’s account—though few of them are as complete as the Häberleins imply. Their bibliomania means that they have obviously only read a list of the editions of Staden since they would have readily realized, had they actually bothered to consult a first edition, that the text by Staden is indeed only 165 folios; bibliographers also count the introductory materials and title papers. Obviously our new edition of the text itself will give this kind of information in full, as well as a “sustained interpretation” of the illustrative material. I would have thought it obvious that I was merely using the opportunity to make some of that material more readily available and to offer a preliminary discussion of the nature of those visualizations, highlighting especially the contrast between the original versions and those popularized by de Bry. Many other scholars, including Wolfgang Reinhard, may well have “juxtaposed” the sets of images, but they make no substantive issue of that exercise, as we intend to do.The Häberleins then continue their complaint with the suggestion that I prefer to discuss Lestringant’s work rather than the work of Annerose Menninger, on the assumption that I do not wish to deal with issues concerning the “veracity” of Staden’s text. Again, the very parochial limits of the Häberleins’ reading suggests that they are unaware that this matter is hardly a new one in the literature on Staden.2 So, in order to pad out this little critique, the Häberleins raise the old canard: “Did Hans Staden really exist or go there?” The short answer, and obviously the presumption of the article, is “yes.” The long answer, by way of Menninger (and others) is also “yes,” but clearly with far more specific argumentation.The suggestion that Staden wrote for a literary market avid for “cannibal tales” is obvious and has been made any number of times, but this in itself only establishes the likelihood that certain literary motifs, and not others such as childbirth or cosmology, are given full expression. In this way, the prior existence of accounts that may have thematically and structurally anticipated Staden’s text are to be expected. Indeed, I also refer to the way in which Staden’s text itself becomes a model for other captivity literatures. Perhaps the Häberleins should consult a few contemporary ethnographies, in which they will also find a quite uniform set of topics under which discussions of Indians are organized, in order to get a better grip on the literary aspects of ethnological description. In other words, the Häberleins need to think a little harder about the differences between intertextuality and plagiarism, and read beyond the narrow circuit of materials they quote. As ever, the problem with trying to see Staden’s text either as a novel or an ethnography is that the two genres can overlap. As with some currently notorious examples, just because an ethnography is a best-seller it doesn’t mean it was all made up; however, it is a truism that the desire to sell books can certainly heavily influence the topics discussed.Nevertheless, none of these considerations about unraveling intertextuality3 deal with the rather more important question of why, if Staden’s text was simply a best-seller, is there original and accurate information about the six teenth century Tupi? Moreover, the Häberleins fail utterly to confront the main issue in the matter of Dryander’s ghostwriting: Why does his introduction not mention the issue of cannibalism at all, if this was meant to be a cynical attempt to corner the literary market of the time? If they could get away from their intellectual obsession with Menninger, they might take the time to read more of the relevant literature.4 Unfortunately, Menninger is done a great disservice by the partisan use to which the Häberleins try and put her scholarship. As they say, “Menninger does not deny the existence of anthropophagic rituals . . . [nor] that Staden invented his trip to Brazil,” but the Häberleins want to use this as a reason to cast doubt on the very authenticity of Staden’s text that Menninger, in this way, establishes. The veracity of any text, how it was written and constructed is quite another mater, but then the Häberleins really must keep their target in focus rather than thrash around in their own morass of “superficial reading,” and “erroneous statements of fact.”

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