Events

Tuesday, January 29, 2008, 12-2 pm

Brazil began its lurching moves toward independence in 1808, following the arrival in Rio de Janeiro of a Portuguese crown in flight from Napoleon’s invasion of Iberia. One of the crown’s first acts in the tropics revealed the important link between state consolidation and the actions of autonomous, seminomadic Indians accused of cannibalism. Determined to incorporate a vast forested territory that separated the three major nodes of colonial settlement—Bahia, Minas Gerais, and Rio de Janeiro—the crown declared war on the Botocudo Indians, the Butocudo Indians, the primary native occupants of these eastern forests. In today's presentation, Professor Hal Langfur considers how authorities reacted, convinced that the Indians they sought to colonize ate their humans. While it is tempting to think that the charge of cannibalism was always a tactic used to rationalize the most blatant forms of state-sponsored violence and ethnic subjugation, the historical reality was more complex. Cannibalism did serve to legitimize the Crown's declaration of war. Simultaneously, however, it bolstered the insistence of some officials that patient, peaceful methods of incorporation rather than eradication should orient the state. In the face of this discrepancy, Professor Langfur will explore the struggle over the meaning of cannibalism in an effort to better understand the imperatives of Brazilian territorial and state consolidation during this critical period.

Hal Langfur teaches the history of Brazil, colonial Latin America, and the early modern Atlantic world at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750 – 1830 (Stanford University Press, 2006) and editor of Native Brazil: Beyond the Cannibal and the Convert, 1500 – 1889 (University of New Mexico Press, forthcoming). Today’s presentation derives from his new book project, provisionally titled Adrift on an Inland Sea: The Subversion of Colonial Power in the Brazilian Wilderness.

A light lunch will be provided to those who register online at http://webapp.mcis.utoronto.ca/EventDetails.aspx?eventid=4730 by 9AM on Friday, January 25, 2008.