Corpos estranhos em terras distantes:

o monstruoso nos relatos de viagens

Abstract

At the dawn of the sixteenth century, a letter departs from the newly named coast of Vera Cruz, heading for the Portuguese throne. In it, Pero Vaz de Caminha describes details of the landscape and the bodies that inhabited it: bodies that aroused his enchantment, but whose nudity and silence in the face of European language rendered them savages. A few decades later, Hans Staden recounts his journey through indigenous territory, presenting the image of the cannibal to the European world as a testament to truth. Drawing on these voices, this work interrogates the ways in which the idea of the monster was woven into travel accounts, spanning time and geography. It seeks to understand how the grotesque body—a legacy of ancient conceptions—reappears in different eras, sustaining visions of otherness that still resonate in our modern world.