within colonialist discourse is the assumption that the binary construction of civilization versus savagery and barbarism defines and constrains the world. While the definitions of civilization, savagery, and barbarism are variable, the European perception of cultural superiority was constant in the early modern Atlantic world. This was especially evident in commentary about norms of gender and sexuality. Europeans, most especially in the earliest years of contact, recorded Americans violating these norms with practices such as polygamy, serial monogamy, and promiscuity. Native communities often maintained political, social, and kinship networks that seemed at odds with European ways. Women’s participation in warfare and government, the ease of divorce, the prohibition of interclan marriage, and looser restrictions on women’s sexuality, among others, served as evidence of barbarism and thus inferiority.
Together the early European texts about the Americas, and the images they inspired, demonstrate the depth and complexity of discourses about cannibalism and encounter. What has been left out of much of the scholarly discourse on cannibalism to date is the role that gender played in labeling a group cannibalistic and in the consequences of this label. The cannibal was, and continues to be, simultaneously a racialized and gendered figure. In the period I discuss, ideas about both race and gender were not static. However, this did not preclude the existence of understandings of racialized and gendered difference. The distinction between what is race and what is racialized difference is slightly muddy; however, the key distinction in terms of this book is that, in general, European writers in the late fifteenth through the mid-eighteenth century did not directly equate skin color and other physical characteristics, which would later become descriptors of “race,” with inferiority.15 Rather Europeans understood the differences between themselves and the Indians they encountered in the Americas in ways that also took into account geographic, religious, cultural, and gendered elements. In other words, Europeans did not consider the variances in physical appearance between themselves and Indians to be the primary indicator of Indian inferiority. Rather European men justified their perception of their own superiority over Native peoples through a range of complex indicators, including but not limited to geography, religion, culture, and norms of gender and sexuality.16 Skin color did not serve as a straightforward heuristic that indicated savagery in this period; rather the determination of the savagery of a group of people relied on assumptions about proper human behavior and beliefs coupled with physiognomy.
The binary construct of civilization/savagery provides a clearer framework for understanding the ways Europeans articulated difference and otherness. The term savage encompassed a range of behaviors, beliefs, and assumptions about Others and was used by European writers to describe those behaviors, beliefs, and actions. However, both civilization and savagery were variable terms, and writers indicated that there existed degrees of each. For example, the seventeenth-century French writer Pierre D’Avity listed what he believed were the five indicators of brutishness: the inability (or refusal) to use reason, a savage diet, nakedness, poor quality of shelter, and a lack of government.17 Possessing these characteristics indicated that a particular group of people was suitable for conquest.
Race, as expressed through an understanding of physical and phenotypical characteristics that represented moral worth, social standing, and intellectual potential, would play a much more important role in the discourse of cannibalism in later centuries. By the nineteenth century the connection between emerging ideas of scientific racism and cannibalism was firmly established. In the period I discuss, gender was of greater importance to the discourse of cannibalism and was central in determining the effect that such discourse had on imperial power dynamics. Within the complex set of indicators of savagery and civilization, understandings of gender and gendered practices were fundamentally important for Europeans in establishing the place of a particular group within the hierarchy of human beings. Civilization itself was viewed primarily as a gradual process of cultural, social, religious, and intellectual developments. Therefore the so-called savage peoples of the Americas were seen as inferior and primordial and their understandings of sexuality and gender were viewed as equally atavistic and dangerous. For Europeans the figure of the cannibal hearkened back to an earlier era, a savage time that had been all but eliminated by the march of civilization. When these conquerors encountered “real live” cannibals, it was easy to see them as holdovers from the past.18 Furthermore not only were the conquerors truly men, but they had complex understandings of Native peoples as feminized and as failed men.
My decision to focus on the “discovery” of America in 1492 should not be taken as an acceptance of this date as the first European interaction in the “New World.”19 Nor should it be taken as an acceptance of the great historical division between premodern and early modern, as such divisions are always messy and fraught with assumptions. The shift from medieval to modern did not occur in a moment, and medieval ideas and traditions played an important role in the early modern world. The discovery of the Americas by Columbus did not, as is often repeated, spur an immediate rethinking of historical processes.20 Rather the “discoveries” made by Columbus set events in motion that would eventually radically reshape the histories of both Europe and the Americas. There is no specific year that clearly distinguishes the colonial from the nationalist period of North American history, as different parts of this vast landscape were colonized at different times and European imperialism did not end in one fell swoop; however, the end of the Seven Years War in 1763 provides a satisfying conclusion to this book.
The Treaty of Paris, which ended the Seven Years War, did not signal a complete end to European imperial expansion in the Americas. However, it did radically reshape the balance of power between France, Spain, and England in North America, greatly reducing the power of France and increasing that of England. Furthermore as the English became the dominant power on the eastern seaboard, groups of Indians, such as the Iroquois, were less able to play European groups against one another and carve out an influential space as middlemen, gatekeepers, and trading partners. Additionally, after the American Revolution, tales of cannibalism decreased rapidly in the eastern United States and were common only on the western frontiers. Thus the “triumph of civilization” in eastern North America meant that cannibalism ceased to be an important trope through which alterity was negotiated in that specific context. The firm establishment of imperial power in the Caribbean, Mexico, New France, and New England also led to the decline of writing about cannibalism. It seems that once the tangible threat of contact with savagery was eliminated, cannibalism was no longer an important topic of discussion in a particular region. Rather accusations of cannibalism lodged against Native peoples traveled along a moving imperial frontier. For example, in the nineteenth century accusations of cannibalism were much more often lodged against Africans as Europeans raced to carve up that continent for themselves.
The texts examined in this book come primarily from the late fifteenth to the eighteenth century as I compare and provide general findings about cannibalism and empire. In this vast swath of time, from “discovery” to the Seven Years War, Europeans writing of the New World witnessed and reported on the presence of cannibalism, enabling us to document the changes in these discourses over time.
Most academic scholarship on cannibalism has been written by anthropologists and literary theorists, although historians have not been completely silent. The works of such literary theorists as Tzvetan Todorov and Frank Lestringant have proven quite useful for their rich interpretations of the literature of conquest. Todorov’s The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other is a linguistic and semiotic analysis of the ways Europeans constructed Indigenous Americans as Other and an investigation of the effects of this imbalance of power. Although Todorov focuses primarily on the Spanish conquest of the New World, his ideas about Otherness resonate in other contexts as well. Frank Lestringant’s Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne is notable for its focus on how the idea of the cannibal impacted European thought. Lestringant documents the changes in European understandings of the figure of the cannibal over time in order to demonstrate its continued importance. Like Todorov, Lestringant primarily restricts his investigation to Central and South America. Furthermore he engages with the idea of the cannibal in the works of important French literature and philosophy.
Scholars
