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Unspeakable Rites: Cultural Reticence and the Cannibal Question

Social Research, Spring, 1999 by Claude Rawson

I hope it won't seem impolite, or as people say these days, inappropriate, in a conference on "Food: Nature and Culture," to address the question of cannibalism. This is hardly the first thing that most of us think of as food, even if we don't belong to the group of postcolonial thinkers who think cannibalism doesn't exist or never existed.(1) We don't, nowadays, eat each other very often. But let me remind you that special cases occur more or less every year, Jeffrey Dahmer being the best known recent example, though not usually, at least in Western cities, as a tribal practice. When Freud announced that, of the three great prohibited acts, of homicide, incest and cannibalism, the first two were widely practiced in our cities, but cannibalism had been completely eradicated, except as psychic detritus on the analyst's couch, he was himself caught up in a bit of Freudian resistance. I once quoted Freud's remarks in a seminar at Berkeley, adding that even in the Bay Area it probably didn't happen very often. My little joke, as it turned out, wasn't a joke. A student put up her hand and said that she worked in a lawyer's office, and yes, they had plenty of homicide and incest ... but cannibalism: "only once."

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I will come back to Freud. He was right to the extent that cannibalism obviously wasn't practiced very often by his patients or his readers, and human flesh isn't one of our staple foods. But it is a food which, in one way and another, has had a lot to do with "nature," and even more with "culture," and it has certainly functioned throughout history as a "marker of identity." I once saw a newspaper cartoon showing a missionary being boiled in a pot. Around him were the usual flock of natives, whose unspeakable rites around the fire have long been a staple of Western imagination. Near them stood some bottles of 1989 Chateau Lynch-Bages, left open to breathe at jungle temperature. The boiling missionary says: "Now I know these people are savages. They drink red wine with white meat." He was, we may feel, jumping to conclusions, and his taste in wine may have been simple, though I doubt if these bottles, or any bottles, would go well with that particular dish. If it is the case that we often define people, or cultures, by what they eat, and of course it is, then the cannibal example is not only the most extreme but also, historically, one of the most common and persistent ways of doing it, though the missionary in my story is not the most typical case.

From the time of the Greeks, and down to the present, societies have ascribed cannibalism, or, to use a more strictly accurate word, anthropophagy (the Greek word for man-eating), to other societies, for reasons which range from imperial exploitation to a host of more or less subtle agendas of self-justification or self-definition on the one hand, and defamation of the "other" on the other. The word "cannibal" is itself an illustration of the point. It is not, like "anthropophagy," a word that signals its own meaning etymologically, and which could not easily mean anything else. Instead, it is a geographical and ethnic term. It points a finger at a particular people, and it dates from 1492.

To be quite specific, we owe the word "cannibal" to Columbus.(2) It is a corruption of the term "Carib," the name of an Amerindian people from the Caribbean islands and northern South America, which also means "bold" or "fierce" in their language. Columbus' informants were purportedly a rival indigenous group, the Arawaks. The Arawaks told him the Caribs were man-eaters, enacting a standard scenario of tellers of cannibal tales, in which one tribe (whether itself anthropophagous or not) tends to impute cannibalism to its neighbors. On a wider historical canvas, conquerors and invaders traditionally impute it (whether accurately or not) to those they conquer or invade, or to the domestic mob, or to political enemies.

In one sense, then, "cannibalism" did not exist before 1492. It was invented, or, as postcolonial persons say, "constructed" by Columbus. This isn't to say that anthropophagy was unknown in the ancient world. It seems always to have existed, or to have been said to have existed, usually in "other" places. One postcolonial scenario, as I suggested, claims that it has always been imputed, but never actually carried out as a tribal practice, and that this imputation is a chronically recurrent lie, with an imperially motivated objective of ethnic defamation. That it was sometimes a lie and usually an intended defamation is demonstrable. That it was sometimes true is also demonstrable by the kind of evidence usually accepted for other historical events: reports and descriptions by witnesses and a variety of archival, anthropological, and journalistic sources. The wish to believe otherwise is partly the product of latter-day political preoccupations, but also reflects an older and more general pattern of denial, in the Freud-related as well as the more ordinary senses of the term, which attaches to the topic in intriguing ways.

Unspeakable Rites: Cultural Reticence and the Cannibal Question

Social Research, Spring, 1999 by Claude Rawson

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