“Handsome Death”: The Taking, Veneration, and Consumption of Human Remains in the Insular Caribbean and Greater Amazonia

Abstract

Against death, the Tupinamba adopted the best defense: attack. Making a virtue of necessity and a necessity of virtue, they transformed the natural given of death into a social necessity and a personal virtue: warfare vengeance was a method of instituting society. Indeed, vengeance was not made necessary because men die and need to be rescued from the flux of time; rather, it was necessary to die in order that there could be vengeance—and to die, preferably, in enemy hands. This is what Anchieta [a Portuguese missionary] called the “handsome death” …; the stomach of one’s adversary was the “bed of honor.”