Unspeakable Rites: Cultural Reticence and the Cannibal Question

Thus, in the Brazilian lands where the Tupinamba lived, famous for the revenge ritual in which they cooked and ate their enemies' bodies, French commentators in the 1550s noted a neighboring tribe, the Ouetaca, who ate their victims raw. They were a lower sort, comparable, in Protestant eyes, to Catholics who preened themselves on consuming the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharistic rite. Indeed, the insistence by the Roman Church on the doctrine of the "real presence" offered Protestants the polemical opportunity of describing Catholics as cannibals. At the time of the French Religious Wars (1562-1598), Protestants had a special feeling for the Indians of America, seeing them as fellow victims of the imperial Catholic powers. The great Huguenot ethnographer, Jean de Lery, who wrote with deep insight about the Tupinamba and became a role-model of Claude Levi-Strauss, made a point of contrasting their ritual not only with the exploitative voracities of conquering Catholic invaders, but with the raw-eating implications of the sacrament, both of them, in his view, much worse than honest man-eating. It is a fact of wider import that the great debate over the cannibal character of New World Indians, and its theological and political implications, coincided with a period of intensified preoccupation with Eucharistic doctrine; that the Eucharistic debate bounced back and forth across the Atlantic, interpenetrating with the Indian question; and that the hardening Roman Catholic insistence on the real presence, culminating at the Council of Trent in the 1550s and 1560s, posed challenges of anguished self-definition as well as providing Protestants with debating points.

In 1580, the great French essayist Michel de Montaigne published an essay "Of Cannibals," covertly but unmistakably influenced by the Protestant Lery. It was an account, and a defense, of the Tupinamba that has become a classic statement, and is sometimes credited as being the inaugural declaration of the idea of the noble savage. The essay was written during the bitter period of the Religious Wars, and Montaigne, who was a Catholic, and very cautious, kept a discreet silence over the Eucharist and its cannibal associations. But his theme, even more than the Protestant Lery's, is the superiority of the supposedly savage Amerindian over Montaigne's own cruel and bloodthirsty compatriots in the French civil wars. Unlike Juvenal (whom he quotes respectfully), he is concerned to praise a cannibal tribe by comparison with the fratricidal French. The Tupinamba earn Montaigne's approval because they eat their enemy, not their brothers, and because they do so from motives of vengeance and honor rather than naked hatred (or hunger), that is to say for ritual reasons rather than from passional need. They also eat him cooked rather than raw. But their decisive virtue for Montaigne (always horrified by the tortures and live burnings of European civil conflicts) lies less in the distinction of cooked versus raw than in the fact that the victim is cooked dead rather than roasted alive.(10)