Imagining Cannibals: European Encounters with Native Brazilian Women

In his “Introduction” to Imagining Religion, Jonathan Z. Smith contends that second-order reflection on religion—imagining religion per se—is a relatively recent human endeavor.1 It is one, of course, that has engaged our group of essayists—indeed, as our life’s work and preoccupation. It is also the issue at stake in this essay: how human behaviors and groups are distinguished and labeled. Smith goes on to warn scholars of religion—writers and readers of this collection of essays, for example—against our fascination with the exotic, noting that our studies might be well served by attention to the “ordinary” in religious life. In support of his admonition, he quotes the Scottish moral and political philosopher Francis Hutcheson, whose literary criticism includes a comment that collides with the very subject of the present essay.2 In An Inquiry into the Original of Beauty and Virtue, Hutcheson decried the “monstrous taste” of those “readers and writers” of early modern travelogues who, rather than enjoying the more salutary evidence of the shared virtues of natural affection and stately honor, instead sated their appetites for the “wondrous barbarity of the