Scholars in the humanities concur with arguments from the sciences regarding the cannibal. According to linguist Ellen B. Basso’s study of South American oral history, “The warriors in these stories stand out most vividly as men who tried to reconfigure certain basic values central to their particular designated roles. Their actions thus transcend the time of cannibalism and blood feuding, of desperate migrations in search of a place to live peacefully” (304). Historian Phillip P. Boucher complicates constructions of cannibalism when he asserts “The Island Caribs’ refusal to accept religious and political—but not economic—hegemonization certainly prolonged their existence as an autonomous people” (8). Boucher leaves the question regarding whether or not Caribs were cannibalistic unanswered. He first suggests, “their cannibalistic practices were limited to occasional consumption of prisoners of war and were thus a minor aspect of their culture” (6). But, according to Boucher’s research, they also may have “killed male captives in elaborate rituals, that they burned their captives’ flesh and carried the ashes in small calabashes around their necks, ate the fat on certain occasions, and finally, used human bones to make flutes” (7). Boucher concludes, however, that these stories, or those told by Caribs themselves, are irrelevant. Instead, “What is clear about the issue of cannibalism is that, starting with Columbus and the Spaniards, Europeans leveled grossly distorted charges of man-eating against potentially enslavable peoples who ferociously resisted incursions into their island homelands” (7).
Boucher’s conclusion regarding representations of Caribs and other indigenous people as cannibals broaches another strong area of research among anthropologists and scholars in the Western humanities: how the trope of cannibalism has been developed and used to exploit colonized people and their land. W. Arens broaches this trope in his 1979 work, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy. Visual culture scholars Barbara Creed and Jeannette Hoorn’s edited volume Body Trade: Captivity Cannibalism and Colonialism in the Pacific highlights cannibal narratives of the fantastic, asserting that anthropophagy, or ritual uses of cannibalism, typically was constructed to vilify indigenous people, dehumanizing them by associating them with cannibalism. As Creed and Hoorn assert, “this book uses the concept of ‘body trade’ as a means of re-reading traditionally racist, sexist and Eurocentric views about race relations in the Pacific from the time of early European contact to the present” (xiv). Creed and Hoorn’s study “bring[s] together the inter-related ways in which the indigenous body has been marked and exploited by colonial practices” (xiv).
Comparative literature scholar, Zita Nunes concurs in Cannibal Democracy: Race and Representation in the Literature of America, exploring “the metaphor of cannibalism as a mobile metaphor that inheres in attempts to conceptualize the relationship between race and democracy extending far beyond Brazil and that the original national focus was insufficient” (xvi). Told from the perspective of indigenous people, Jack D. Forbes’ Columbus and Other Cannibals connects the metaphor of cannibalism to the wetiko disease, “the disease of exploitation” (xix) illuminated in Ravenous. Forbes asserts, “It is my hope that enlarging upon the concept of the wetiko disease and discussing its origin, epidemiology, and characteristics that I can be of some help to [people] concerned about violence, about the environment, about decency, and about human authenticity” (xxi). After outlining a history of exploitation, of “cannibalism” of cultures and their people, Forbes proposes a good “sane” path that embraces interdependence. Catalin Avramescu’s An Intellectual History of Cannibalism examines this construction of cannibals in philosophical accounts.
Historians take a variety of approaches to the issue and history of cannibalism. Francis Barker and her colleagues declare in their edited volume, “Where in the past the figure of the cannibal has been used to construct differences that uphold racism, it now appears in projects that deconstruct them” (242). Other historians examine specific instances of colonizers’ use of the trope to subjugate and/or dehumanize indigenous people. [i] In his review of four late 1990s studies of cannibalism and genocide, ethnohistorian Dan Beaver updates these arguments, concluding,
Historically, the term cannibal often has expressed the unreflective hatred and distrust of one culture for another, leading some scholars to approach the term as a metaphor for the ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’…. the cannibal metaphor has extended in contemporary fiction to the ‘savage’ excesses of the American financial elite of the 1990s” (672).
As Jennifer Brown asserts, cannibal representations in literature film demonstrate that Westerners “are rapacious, cannibalistic aggressors” (14). These manifestations of the cannibal metaphor are broached both explicitly and implicitly in Ravenous, American Psycho, and Trouble Every Day.
[i] See the following examples: Darling, Andrew J. “Mass Inhumation and the Execution of Witches in the American Southwest.” American Anthropologist, New Series. 100. 3 (Sep., 1998): 732-752. Print. And Conklin, Beth A. “Consuming Images: Representations of Cannibalism on the Amazonian Frontier.” Anthropological Quarterly. 70.2 (Apr 1997): 68-78. Print.
