Hans Staden, the other’s other

Abstract

Based on the significance of the narratives of European travelers of the 16th century for the historical studies of Brazilian literature, this article deals with the problem of the peculiar encounter between Hans Staden, the German mercenary who guarded the entrance to the Bay of São Vicente and his captors, the Tupinambá Indians. Preliminarily pointing to the presence, in Brazilian literary constructs of the 19th and 20th centuries, of the anthropophagic "Other", as confirmed in the adventurer's testimony, the work aims to understand the reasons for the recurrence of such an image. In the light of a proposition by Michel de Certeau, regarding the role of the person of whom one speaks in a certain culture - but who has no voice in it - as well as the unprecedented self-perception, which, according to Tzvetan Todorov, is achieved when the Other is met, a reflection is made about Staden's dialogue with that Other and the understanding that he achieves of his diverse reality. Using the method called Todorov "typology of relations with others”, an epistemological analysis is then carried out, which compares the figures of the narrator with that of the narrated, in such a text. This article concludes by demonstrating that Hans Staden: The True History Of His Captivity, 1557, exposes, on the one hand, the high degree of knowledge of the Other achieved by the German man-at-arms, and on the other hand, his total ineptitude to translate the Tupinambá culture in terms of the European, and vice-versa, despite establishing itself as a founding ethnographic study.

DOI:https://doi.org/10.56238/alookdevelopv1-130