Tupinambá people
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"In his famous essay "Of Cannibals" (1580), Michel de Montaigne—himself a Catholic—reported that the Tupinambá people of Brazil ceremoniously eat the bodies of their dead enemies as a matter of honour. However, he reminded his readers that Europeans behave even more barbarously when they burn each other alive for disagreeing about religion (he implies): "One calls 'barbarism' whatever he is not accustomed to." --Sholem Stein |
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The Tupinambá were one of the various Tupi ethnic groups that inhabited present-day Brazil before the conquest of the region by Portuguese colonial settlers. The Tupinambás lived in São Luis do Maranhão. Their language survives today in the form of Nheengatu. Several works by Michel de Montaigne and Jean de Léry among others indicated that the Tupinambá tribe practised cannibalism.
The Tupinamba in Western Travel literature
The usages and habits of the Tupinambás were abundantly described in the Cosmographie universelle (1572) of André Thevet, in Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil (1578), by Jean de Léry and Hans Staden's True Story and Description of a Country of Wild, Naked, Grim, Man-eating People in the New World. Thevet and Lery were an inspiration for Montaigne's famous essay Des Cannibales, and influenced the creation of the myth of the "noble savage" during the Enlightenment.