a cannibal is a person who consumes the body of another human being. But how much of another person does one have to consume to be a cannibal? Does the accidental ingestion of bodily fluids, for example, make one a cannibal? Does it have to be an intentional act to constitute anthropophagy? Or, put another way, does the consumer have to willfully and knowingly consume human body parts to be a cannibal? Does the doctrine of transubstantiation make Roman Catholics cannibals? Is there a difference between consuming the bodies of those who have died and killing people in order to consume them? We could keep asking these kinds of questions ad nauseam, but ultimately what matters for my purposes is that all of the acts of man-eating discussed herein are linked with savagery.
Determining whether or not groups of people actually practiced anthropophagy is difficult and comes laden with thousands of years of inherited prejudices and inequities. To label a population cannibalistic has always been a strategy of defamation. Indeed even asking the question presupposes that one human consuming another has significance well beyond the fulfillment of nutritional needs, for one does not ask a question whose answer is meaningless. Thus the determination of anthropophagy reveals something about both the questioner and the object of inquiry. Modern-day descendants of purported cannibals in history often take umbrage at the characterization of their ancestors. This is quite understandable given the faulty and prejudicial historical records that scholars have relied on to make such determinations. In the particular case of historic accounts of Amerindian cannibalism, almost all records, with very few exceptions, were written by peoples bent on conquest, conversion, elimination, and/or control over those that they regarded as man-eaters. Yet denying the existence of the practice of cannibalism is itself a reinscription of European and Western-centric values. Furthermore both modern scholarship on cannibalism and the sources on which it relies have certain features in common, including “a schema of analyzing culture that does not easily admit the existence of a phenomenon that is Other without explaining that phenomenon as a totalized alterity or without totally explaining it away.”10 In other words, it is quite difficult to acknowledge the existence of cannibalism without passing judgment on the people who might have practiced it. How can we objectively acknowledge and interrogate a practice that is so wrought with preconceptions and obfuscation? There are no easy answers to this question, and we must tread carefully, paying close attention to our own prejudices and those of our sources. As this book focuses on discourse, most of the time it does not matter if an accusation of cannibalism is true; it matters more that the accusation had consequences and that it reflected the mentalité of the writer and his or her culture. This can feel rather unsatisfying as most people have an innate desire to know.
The act of man-eating (excluding corpse medicine) in medieval and early modern western European society was always associated with savagery and Otherness. Culturally sanctioned cannibalism threatened to destroy the basic foundations of Christian society, for if humans ate other humans, then they could not be easily separated from animals. The taboo against man-eating was in fact one of the key markers of civilization. For European writers, the failure to recognize the boundaries between human and animal, and the refusal to value the lives of humans above all other creatures, was an indicator of savagery and primitiveness. Civilization created order out of chaos, and the presence of cannibalism served as a reminder of the barbarity from which all humans supposedly emerged. Even more than other subjects dealt with in European sources, descriptions of cannibalism were particularly prone to exaggeration and projection.11
Whither Cannibalism?
European writings about cannibalism can help us to understand the development of racism, patriarchy, and heterosexism in colonial and postcolonial contexts. An analysis of cannibalism is certainly not the only way the connections between gender and empire can be examined, yet the prominence of descriptions of cannibalism in European discourse demonstrates its importance. European men—and almost all of the pertinent writers were male—were captivated by the acts of cannibalism that they claimed to have discovered among the peoples of the Americas, and because of this they wrote about them often. Their descriptions reveal both a fascination with and revulsion for anthropophagous acts. The specific relationship between the discourse of cannibalism and the gendered nature of imperial power changed depending on the geographic, temporal, and imperial context. Due to the sheer volume of Western writings about cannibalism, savagery, and empire during the past five hundred years, this book cannot hope to cover every discussion in every moment. Instead I have chosen to focus on four distinct times and places in order to open up a conversation about the relationship between cannibalism, gender, sexuality, and race within the confines of empire and to establish a model through which we can better understand the nature of imperial expansion in North America.
Most scholarship that has discussed cannibalism, whether as an actual occurrence or as a discursive construction, has tended to focus exclusively on Latin America, and Brazil in particular. To date only modest consideration has been given to the study of cannibalism in North America. The extant sources dealing with cannibalism in North America are primarily concentrated in the following regions: the eastern seaboard of what is now the United States, southeastern Canada, the Great Lakes region, the American Southwest, Florida, the Caribbean, the Yucatán peninsula, and the Valley of Mexico.
In Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, Anne McClintock writes, “The representation of male national power depends on the prior construction of gender difference.”12 In this way the nationalist masculine power of the nineteenth century and beyond depended on an earlier articulation of gender and power. Thus an examination of gender in the early modern world is essential for understanding the foundations of modernity. Following this assertion, Insatiable Appetites develops a theory of gender and empire through an exploration of the origins of masculine imperial power. In order to understand the institutions of patriarchy and racism in colonial or postcolonial situations, it is necessary to first interrogate the origins of such ideas. From where did the notion of gender difference that McClintock insists is a necessary precedent for masculine national power come? By examining the discourse of cannibalism in the conquest period of Atlantic North American history, the role that cannibalism played in the formation of European ideas about gender difference, sexual mores, and racial hierarchies is made clearer. As Ann Laura Stoler argues, we must place “questions of homo- and heterosexual arrangements and identities not as the seedy underbelly of imperial history . . . but as charged sites of its tensions.”13 Thus the fundamental anxieties on which imperial power rests are illuminated through an interrogation of the ways gender and sexual norms came to be within the confines of empire in North America. Implicit within ideas about barbarism in the early modern world was the inability of barbarians to conform to the established norms of gendered power and sexual practices. Cannibalism, then, existed alongside the perception of other inappropriate cultural practices in the writings of European men. The formation of masculine and, later, racist imperial power insisted on the perceived presence of cannibalism. In the early centuries of conquest, cannibalism above all else determined savagery, and savagery established one’s place within the hierarchy on which civilization and imperialism rested.
An important aspect of the colonial project was the insistence of the colonizers on control of the bodies of the colonized. The body itself was a fundamental site on which imperial power was negotiated and enforced. Sexuality was one essential realm through which control was maintained; the threat of pollution through miscegenation was a common fear expressed by colonizers. The body became a permeable border through which an early form of biopower was enacted.14 But while bodies were sites for the enforcement of imperial control, they were also sites for subversion. In the history of the Americas, the body was a contested space. Imperial power was enacted on the body, even while the body remained a space for resisting this power. The functions of the body had to be controlled and regulated in order for civilization to prosper. Thus the threat of uncontrollable bodies loomed large in the minds of early writers. The act of cannibalism signified an inability to control the body, where its victims were violated through penetration, ingestion, and incorporation. Cannibalism represented bodies out of control—bodies that functioned outside of the regulatory norms of Western Christendom. Because of this the fear of cannibalism was also a fear of alternative notions of embodiment.
Implicit
