The Tupi people inhabited 3/4 of all of Brazil's coast when the
Portuguese first arrived there. In 1500, their population was estimated at 1 million people, nearly equal to the population of Portugal at the time. They were divided into
tribes, each tribe numbering from 300 to 2,000 people. Some examples of these tribes are:
Tupiniquim,
Tupinambá,
Potiguara,
Tabajara,
Caeté,
Tamoios, and
Temiminó. The Tupi were adept
agriculturalists; they grew
cassava,
maize,
sweet potatoes,
beans,
peanuts,
tobacco,
squash,
cotton, and many others. There was not a unified Tupi identity despite the fact that they spoke a common language.
European colonization Upon discovering the existence of the Tupi people, Portuguese settlers assumed that they lacked any sort of religion, a belief that began the process of assimilating the Tupi to Christianity. The settlers began erecting villages for the Tupi, known as aldeias, with the intention of more disciplined religious conversion and institutionalization of European customs. The Portuguese settlers also considered the Tupi useful as laborers for cultivating and shipping exports and eventually enslaved the Tupi. In turn, fatal Afro-Eurasian diseases spread on the plantations at which the Tupi worked. This combination of factors nearly led to their complete annihilation, with the exception of a few isolated communities. The remnants of these tribes are today confined to
indigenous territories or acculturated to some degree into the dominant society. However, the main cult among the Tupi who inhabited the coast of Brazil in the 16th century was not that of Tupi, but that of .
Tupã, the thunder, was not actually a god, but rather a manifestation of the god Nhanderuvuçu. Precisely because Tupã did not have his own rite, the Catholic priests who sought to spread Christianity among the Indians chose Tupã as a symbol for the
Christian God, in order to facilitate the understanding of Christianity by the Indians, grafting Christian principles onto the figure of Tupã. At the same time, they associated Jurupari with the
Christian devil, in order to discourage his worship among the Tupi Indians.
Cannibalism According to primary source accounts by primarily European writers, the Tupi were divided into several tribes that constantly warred with each other. During these wars, the Tupi frequently tried to capture their enemies to kill later in
cannibalistic rituals. The
warriors captured from other Tupi tribes were eaten because the Tupi believed that this allowed them to absorb and digest the captured warriors' strength; thus, in fear of absorbing weakness, they chose only to sacrifice warriors perceived to be strong and brave. For the Tupi warriors, even when prisoners, it was a great honor to die valiantly during battle or to display courage during the festivities leading to the sacrifice. The Tupi have also been documented to eat the remains of dead relatives as a form of honoring them. The practice of cannibalism among the Tupi was made famous in Europe by
Hans Staden, a German soldier, mariner, and mercenary, traveling to Brazil to seek a fortune, who was captured by the Tupi in 1552. In his account published in 1557, he tells that the Tupi carried him to their village where they declared that they would devour him at their next festivity. There, he allegedly won the friendship of a powerful chief, whom he cured of a disease, and his life was spared. Cannibalistic rituals among Tupi and other tribes in Brazil decreased steadily after European contact and religious intervention. When
Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish
conquistador, arrived in
Santa Catarina in 1541, for instance, he attempted to ban cannibalistic practices in the name of
the King of Spain. Because our understanding of Tupi cannibalism relies mostly on the primary source accounts of European writers, some academics have disputed the very existence of cannibalism among the Tupi people. William Arens seeks to discredit Staden's and other writers' accounts of cannibalism in his book
The Man-Eating Myth, where he claims that when concerning the Tupinambá, "rather than dealing with an instance of serial documentation of cannibalism, we are more likely confronting only one source of dubious testimony which has been incorporated almost verbatim into the written reports of others claiming to be eyewitnesses". Most Brazilian scholars, however, attest to the cultural centrality of cannibalism in Tupian culture. Anthropologist
Darcy Ribeiro who had deeply studied the historical accounts about the Tupi, reported that the
Ka'apor people of the Tupi-Guaraní linguistic and cultural family confirmed that their ancestors had practiced anthropophagical rituals similar to the ones described in the 16th century. Other Brazilian scholars have criticized Arens for what they perceived as
historical negationism, and for ignoring important sources (
Jesuit letters) and historical and anthropological studies (
Viveiros de Castro,
Florestan Fernandes, Estevão Pinto, Hélène Clastres), many of them dealing directly with indigenous peoples, that point to the direction of anthropophagy being well established as a social and cultural practice. Arens has been criticized particularly for, in attempting to discredit the association of the Tupi with savagery, failing to recognize that the Europeans had not comprehended the cultural significance of traditional practices such as cannibalism.
Race-mixing and Cunhadismo in Paris in 1613, in
Claude d'Abbeville,
Histoire de la mission. Many indigenous peoples were important for the formation of the Brazilian people, but the main group was the Tupi. When the Portuguese explorers arrived in Brazil in the 16th century, the Tupi were the first indigenous group to have contact with them. Soon, a process of mixing between Portuguese settlers and indigenous women started. The Portuguese colonists rarely brought women, making the native women the "breeding matrix of the Brazilian people". Tupi surnames do exist, but they do not imply any real Tupi ancestry; rather they were adopted as a manner to display Brazilian nationalism. The
Tupinambá tribe is fictitiously portrayed in
Nelson Pereira dos Santos' satirical 1971 film
How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (
Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francês). Its name is also adapted by science:
Tupinambis is a genus of
tegus, arguably the best-known lizards of Brazil. The large offshore
Tupi oil field discovered off the coast of Brazil in 2006 was named in honor of the Tupi people. The
Guarani are a different native group that inhabits southern Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and northern Argentina and speaks the distinct
Guarani languages, but these are in the same
language family as Tupi. ==Legacy==