Cannibalism

While anthropophagy, the eating of humans by other humans, has been a sign of difference between ethnic groups since earliest recorded history (for example, when the fifth-century bce historian Herodotus employs the concept to distinguish between Greeks and barbarians), the term cannibalism was coined through the contact between Europe and the Americas. Upon landing in the Caribbean islands in 1492, Christopher Columbus wrote of friendly natives who claimed that their neighbors, the Caribs, consumed human flesh, and soon thereafter, the word cannibal, derived from the name of this people, became common usage. Over the course of the early colonial period, explorers and conquerors continued to hear rumors of cannibals. The 1516 disappearance of the Solís expedition is attributed to an anthropophagic River Plate tribe. The Aztecs of Mexico performed human sacrifices on prisoners of war and may have eaten parts of their victims. The Tupinambá and other tribes of Brazil engaged in ritual cannibalism consisting of assimilating their enemies into tribal life, then killing and eating them in order to symbolically absorb their strength. In the sixteenth century, the shipwrecked German sailor Hans Staden and the French Protestant missionary Jean de Léry lived among anthropophagic tribes of coastal Brazil and upon their return to Europe recorded their experiences. Both Léry and his countryman Michel de Montaigne arrived at the conclusion that European civilization was morally inferior to anthropophagic Amerindians.

The anthropologist William Arens inspired controversy by contending in his 1979 The Man-Eating Myth that there are virtually no verified eyewitness accounts of indigenous cannibalism. Instead of focusing on cannibalism as a gastronomic reality, Arens emphasizes the existence of a powerful cultural discourse marking the distinction between "civilized" Europeans and "savage" natives. As Arens observes, in the early years of the conquest, the Spanish monarch Queen Isabella sought to protect her new subjects who accepted Christianity by mandating that only cannibals, sodomites, and idolaters could be enslaved, and as a result these labels were liberally applied to peoples whom the Spaniards wished to conquer. Thus, throughout the colonial period cannibalism continued to be invoked by the conquerors in order to justify the imperial enterprise.

In the postcolonial period, the term cannibal has often been resignified by Latin American creative writers and cultural critics, who embrace it as a positive sign of their difference from colonial and neocolonial centers. In 1928, the Brazilian modernist Oswald de Andrade published his "Manifesto antropófago," which asserts that the former colonies must consume, digest, and transform metropolitan influences in order to generate cultural products that reflect their own hybrid national identity. In this way, Andrade employs an image formerly used to disparage colonized peoples and appropriates it as a symbol of empowerment. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries various Latin American novelists and filmmakers have drawn upon the ambiguous image of anthropophagy in their artistic production. Some salient literary and cinematographic examples are Mário de Andrade's Macunaíma (Brazil, 1928), Nelson Pereira dos Santos's Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francês (How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman, Brazil, 1971), and Carlos Balmaceda's Manual del caníbal (Argentina, 2005).

These artistic endeavors have inspired a number of scholars to meditate on the significance of cannibalism both as a literal act and as a cultural metaphor for Latin American identity. In particular in the years surrounding the quincentenary of the European discovery of the Americas, there was a surge of creative and critical interest in interrogating the connection between cannibalism and colonialism, and its continued significance in postcolonial Latin America.

See alsoAnthropology .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arens, William. The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Barker, Francis, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iverson, eds. Cannibalism and the Colonial World. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Boucher, Philip P. Cannibal Encounters. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Brown, Paula, and Donald Tuzin, eds. The Ethnography of Cannibalism. Washington, D.C.: Society for Psychological Anthropology, 1983.

Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters. London and New York: Routledge, 1986.

Kilgour, Maggie. From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Lestringant, Frank. Cannibals. Translated by Rosemary Morris. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997.

Madureira, Luís. Cannibal Modernities: Postcoloniality and the Avant-Garde in Caribbean and Brazilian Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005.

Root, Deborah. Cannibal Culture. Boulder, CO: West-view, 1998.

Sanday, Peggy Reeves. Divine Hunger. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

                                     Kimberle S. LÓpez