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Brazilian Anthropophagy: Myth and Literature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
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1. The fact that Brazil, land of parrots and coffee, is also, by antonomasia, that of cannibals, is a commonplace that we find in the writings of foreigners and natives from the early years of the conquest up until our era of advanced civilization, at the level of anthropological reality (we should like to say anthropophagic) and at that of metaphor. As though, forgetful of the general accusation of anthropophagy launched by the first explorers against the various indigenous peoples of America, beginning with the Caribs/Cannibals of Columbus, the colonizing and evangelizing Old World wanted to transfer to Vera Cruz and its inhabitants the exclusive rights to these “savage customs of a people without justice and law” that the first Western ethnographer, Herodotus, had attributed, in the Eurasia of his time, to the peoples of the Far North, at the other side of the extensive desert lying beyond the land of the Scythians—those who were called the Androphagi. And as if, of all the peoples and communities accused, in various latitudes and epochs of history, of having anthropophagic practices, the Brazilians were the only ones to not just defend themselves against the infamous accusation but to flaunt it as a symbol of their autonomy and originality when confronted with the menace of religious and cultural colonization.
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- Copyright © 1988 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
1 According to the interpretation attributed to Columbus (the authentic and interpolated texts, reconstructed or falsified, of the latter express, as we know, all sorts of nationalism). The onomastic pair caribes-caníbales indicated the Caribs of the Lesser Antilles as "bad savages" man-eaters, opposed to the "good savages", of the Greater Antilles, the rediscovered Eden of the Almirante of the Catholic kings in his first contact with the lands of the New World. See on this subject Manuel Alvar, "Arahuacos y carybes," preface to Columbus's Diario del Descubrimiento, 2 vols., Gran Canaria, Ediciones del Cabildo Insular, 1976, I, pp. 47-51.
2 Herodotus, Histories, IV, 106.
3 Geographical maps of prehistoric and "primitive" cannibalism are found in practically all classical and modern books on the subject. Among the modern studies (for the most part, scientifically meager generic works but endowed with up-to-date bibliography) see Christian Röthlingshöfer-Spiel, Menschen essen Menschen, Munich 1972; Christian Spiel, Uomo mangia uomo, Milan, Mondadori, 1974; Marvin Harris, Cannibals and Kings. The Origins of Cultures, New York 1977. Among popularized works should also be noted The Man-Eating Myth, Anthropology and Anthropophagy by William E. Arens, New York, Oxford University Press 1979.
4 Expressly quoting Nansen (in Northern Mists, II, pp. 223-230) which brings up the possibility that the Irish Hy Breasail has a rapport with the denomination of Brazil, the author of Hobbitt and Lord of the Rings remarks "It is a tendency [that of rationalization] which seems to have come into fashion as soon as the great voyages began to show the world as too small to contain men and elfs at the same time. In fact, as soon as the magic land of Hy Breasail to the west was reduced to simply Brazil, the land of the red wood" (J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, London, 1955). Nevertheless, for centuries the Italian words berci, verzino as the French word brésil served to designate the wood used as a colorant that was imported from the Orient until the end of the 15th century and which, found in the New World by the first discoverers later became one of the major attractions of the American territory. One should note, furthermore, that the name of an island Brazil (Braci, brazi) occurs in many maps of the Atlantic Ocean starting from the 14th century.
5 Because of the type of discourse we intend to make we will here give preference to the psychoanalytical level with the classic Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud.
6 Put into doubt by the anthropologists, the belief according to which we descend from anthropophagi subsists at the poetic level of the myth. An ancient phenomenon, situated in a diachronic series and in a perspective confident in the values of civilization and human progress, cannibalism only survives in the "savage" behavior of today's men who still have the "ancient claws, the ancient teeth and in their hearts the ancient ferocity of the cannibals" (Giovanni Pascoli, L'Era Nuova, 1899).
7 See Ewald Volhard, Kannibalismus, Stuttgart, Strecker and Schröder, 1939.
8 Anton Pigafetta, Erste Reise um die Welt durch Ferdinand Magellan, Beiträge zur Völker- und Länderkunde, Leipzig, Ed. Forster and Spengel, IV, 1844.
9 Arens' work, quoted in Note 3, because of its provocative thesis (cannibalism is a myth of the anthropologists) and somewhat hasty way of its demonstration has been subjected to severe criticism, that for example of P.G. Rivière in Man, 15 March 1980, pp. 203-205 and that of R.E. Downs in American Ethnologist, Vol. 7, No. 4, Nov. 1980, pp. 785-786.
10 Hans Staden: The True Story of His Captivity, 1557, (Trans. Malcolm Letts), New York, McBride, 1929.
11 Leonardo Coen, La Repubblica, Rome, August 19, 1981, pp. 1 and 5.
12 L. Stegagno Picchio, Binary Opposition In Literature: The Example of Brazil, Diogenes, 99, 1977, pp. 3-25.
13 Concerning Brazil, the work of Sergio Buarque de Holanda, Visão do Paraíso. Os motivos edénicos no descobrimento e colonização do Brasil is a classic. See the second edition, São Paulo, Companhia Editora Nacional, 1977 ("Brasiliana", no. 333). On Edenic motifs applied to the American continent on the whole see Charles L. Sanford, The Quest for Paradise. European and American Moral Imagination, Urbana, Illinois, 1961.
14 The book of S. Buarque de Holanda (op. cit. I-IV) contains curious quotations and pertinent extracts from Latin and Italian texts of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
15 Montaigne, Essais, annotated by Albert Thibaudet, Paris, Gallimard, Bibl. de la Pléiade, Vol. 14, in the 1950 edition, ch. XXXI, "Des Cannibales," pp. 239-253.
16 Translated from op. cit., p. 239. In 1550 on the occasion of the solemn entry into Rouen of Henry II, the inhabitants of the city had organized grandiose spectacles. The most remarkable, that took place in a field on the banks of the Seine transformed into a Brazilian jungle, succeeded with fifty authentic Brazilian Indians and 250 inhabitants of Rouen disguised and painted as "savages" from Brazil to recreate in an extraordinary manner the Edenic atmosphere. Cf. F. Dennis, Une fête brésilienne célébrée à Rouen en 1550, Paris, 1850; J.-M. Massa, "Le Monde Luso-Brésilien dans la joyeuse entrée de Rouen" in J. Jacquot and E. Komogsen (eds.) Les Fêtes de la renaissance, Vol. III, Paris 1975, pp. 105-116; William C. Sturtevant, "First Visual Images of Native America" in Fredi Chiappelli (ed.) First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, Berkeley, Calif., 1976.
17 Montaigne, Essais, op. cit., p. 242 (transl.).
18 I. Luis de Camões, "Aquela cativa".
19 Op. cit., p. 239 (transl.).
20 Ibid., pp. 242-243 (transl.).
21 Ibid. p. 247 (transl.).
22 Ibid. p. 248 (transl.).
23 Bibl. ref. to note 9.
24 The first French edition in the collection of Ternaux Compans (Sabin no. 90059) Voyages, relations et mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de la découverte de l'Amérique seems to be that of Paris, 1837.
25 Since anthropophagy is a general fact, anthropophagic mythology exists in all peoples. Greek mythology, full of light, also has its dark sides, with Chronos eating his own children. But we are not alluding to this when we speak of the collective unconsiousness of peoples. The texts quoted here are in fact only a first detailed approach to a theme to which we will return.
26 Fernão Cardim, Tratados da terra e gente do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, J. Leiter Cia, 1925; Gabriel Soares de Sousa, Tratado Descritivo do Brasil em 1587, "Brasiliana", Vol. 117, São Paulo, Editora Nacional, Univ. São Paulo 1971. For a comparison of the different chroniclers see António Alberto de Andrade, O Auto Notarial de Valentim Fernandes (1503) e o seu significado como fonte histórica, in Arquivos do Centro cultural Portugués, Paris, Gulbenkian, V, 1972, pp. 521-535.
27 Testimony coming from other cultural areas of American Indians confirm that the feet were the preferred morsels of the anthropophagic meal. See Philippe Aubert de Gaspé, Les Anciens canadiens (1833) An integral text conforming to the 1864 edition, Montreal, French-Canadian Library, 1975.
28 Hans Staden, op. cit.,
29 This painting, formerly in the cathedral of Viseu, is today in the museum of Grão Vasco in the same city. Several reproductions were made on the occasion of its exposition in the Grand Palais, Paris, Sept. 17, 1976-Jan. 3, 1977. See the catalogue by Hugh Honour, L'Amérique vue par l'Europe, p. 10, Paris, Sécrétariat d'Etat à la culture, Ed. des Musées nationaux, 1976.
30 André Thevet, Les singularitez de la France Antartique, autrement nommée Amérique, Paris, 1557; Jean de Léry, Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre de Brésil autrement dite Amérique, La Rochelle 1578.
31 The first name is Macunáima. Mário de Andrade transformed it into Macunaima by changing the place of the accent.
32 We will complete the summary and selective bibliography given up to this point by Alfred Métraux, A religião dos tupinambás, second ed. São Paulo, Comp. Ed. Nacional. Ed. Univ. S. Paulo, 1979.
33 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le Cru et le Cuit, Mythologiques 1, Paris, 1964. According to the ingenious distinction made by the author between the boiled meat offered to the nearest of kin and the roasted meat offered to foreign guests, these devilish Indians had the custom of boiling their victims in the practices of endocannibalism and roasting them in those of exocannibalism.
34 Sigmund Freud, Totem et Tabou.
35 Ibid.,
36 Ibid.,
37 José de Alencar, in L. Stegagno Picchio, La letteratura brasiliana, Florence, Milan, Sansoni-Accademia, 1972, pp. 184-185.
38 Haroldo de Campos "Da razão antropofágica: a Europa sob o signo da devoração" in Colóquio/Letras, no. 62, July 1981, Lisbon, pp. 10-25.
39 For the bibliography, see Francis Picabia. Catalogue de l'exposition des Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Jan. 23, March 1976.
40 Id. p. 91.
41 See the re-edition of Revista de Antropofagia, 1st and 2nd Dentições 1928-1929. Introduction by Augusto de Campos, São Paulo, Ed. Abril, Metal Leve, 1975.
42 Giulio Cogni, preface to Ewald Volhard, It. trans. pp. 11-12.
43 W.E. Arens, The Man-Eating Myth, op. cit.,
44 Montaigne, Essais, p. 253 (transl.).
45 Ibid p. 252 (transl.).
46 Ibid p. 247 (transl.).