Search Results

This chapter discusses the change in the orientation of Maori anthropophagy and the shift in the orientation of British cannibalism from a generalized fantasy to a tradition of seafaring anthropophagy. With the opening up of the world due to the voyages of discovery, starvation and shipwrecks became a regular phenomenon. Hence, in the culture of seafarers, the medieval fantasy of cannibalism became a modern reality. For the Maoris, the opening of their world brought about by the intrusion of voyages of discovery changed their rituals of human sacrifice to a more pronounced anthropophagy. Moreover, this change resulted in an expanded consubstantial community. In some instances, commoners and women were allowed to partake of human flesh, thus violating the traditional tapu on which the sacrificial anthropophagy rested. At the same time, this change also created a powerful motivation for those previously excluded to partake in the consubstantial meal. This motivation, expansion, and subsequent pejoration of the sacrifice was encouraged by the Europeans killed in the ambush because the traditional rules of the Maori did not apply to them, or could be suspended, ignored, or reformulated. Topics included in the chapter are Maori cannibalism and alternative views of Polynesian anthropophagy.

Early Stoic political philosophy is misrepresented in the sources—as recommending such practices as anthropophagy and incest—mostly because of the large role that the Sceptics had in transmitting the theory (the Sceptics' role in this was first shown to be important by Schofield, 1991). Sextus Empiricus cites the scandalous Stoic views when discussing the question whether there is an art of life. He contrasts them with ‘normal life’, and through the opposition between theory and appearances calls into question whether there is an art of life, an issue which is of central importance to the Sceptical project and is discussed repeatedly. The Stoic theses thus gain a disproportionate eminence within the overall sparse evidence on early Stoic philosophy. The chapter closes with a discussion of the ‘disturbing theses’ (the infamous ideas ascribed to the Stoics) which tries to assess them as what they most likely are: examples that the Stoics put forward when explaining the revisionary implications of their theory of value and appropriate action, rather than general recommendations, rules, or an account of life in a city of sages.

This concluding chapter discusses a few issues that might have not been clear in the preceding chapters. It begins with the assumption that Polynesia comprises a large cultural area showing remarkable similarities in language and culture. As far as anthropophagy is concerned, most contemporary ethnographers would deny that it is related to human sacrifice or ritual cannibalism. But the irony is that, like the lay public, scholars have, from the very beginning, believed that the Maori, Fijians, and Marquesans belonged to a group of man-eaters living in cannibal islands. This is not something, new because it has been said of several non-Western societies. It is therefore not a surprise that colonial sacrificial anthropophagy tended to lead into the man-eating myth. However, in many of the societies discussed, there were no corpses involved, but, rather, symbolic substitutes for the act of sacrificial anthropophagy. The chapter also discusses the hanging of skulls in shrines in Hawai'i and Tahiti that were postulated as the heads of sacrificial victims. However, unlike the common notion that these were sacrificial victims, the chapter concludes that these victims may be the result of rituals of sacrifice or battles. It also deals with the problems that arise in respect of cannibal talk. Such issues that might pave the way for disagreement on cannibal talk are myth, discourse on human sacrifices, and the two forms of cannibal talk: the dialogues of varying levels of complexity between people talking about cannibalism and generally misunderstanding the Other's discourse, and cannibal narratives which are deconstructed in order to show that these discourses are “empty.”

This chapter focuses on the second trajectory of heads. It traces the fate of heads alongside the immediate history of the fragile practice known as “Maori cannibalism.” The chapter aims to illustrate the shifting forms of anthropophagy after the period of Cook's voyages, when Maori were catapulted into the history of Europe as well as the broader history of capitalism and an emerging modernity. This history of Europe contains a discourse about Maori culture that has smothered the Maoris' own history, even when that history is re-presented by historians, ethnographers, and antiquarians of the mid-nineteenth century and after. And sadly, it seems that some Maori have taken over and selectively introjected European colonial notions, in this case cannibalism, to proudly reinterpret it as a “traditional” and an admirable Maori custom. This is called “self-primitivazation,” a process that happens in periods of unequal power relations whereby the native adopts the image projected onto him by the colonial Other, sometimes parodically, and sometimes with seriousness. Discussions in this chapter include: the musket wars and Maori consciousness; cannibalism and the idea of “discursive space”; and the monster within: Captain Stewart, Te Rauparaha, and the “New Man.”

This chapter focuses on nineteenth-century Fiji. It discusses its anthropophagy, its cannibalism, and its political developments in the early nineteenth century. The first section of the chapter discusses the metaphysics of savagism. The second section discusses Fijian cannibalism, focusing on eye-witnesses of anthropophagy-cannibalism. It looks at John Jackson and William Endicott, who described cannibal feasts so persuasively that their accounts were regarded as “unimpeachable testimony” of the truth of Fijian cannibalism. In this section, the narratives of the two writers are ridded of their “unimpeachable” nature and regarded as fictional narratives based on the tradition of yarning of ships and islands. The third section of the chapter investigates whether Henry Fowler confirmed he was the author of the Danvers Courier, which was believed to have been written by Endicott. The fourth section focuses on the cannibal narratives of John Jackson. It discusses his books, Jack, the Cannibal Killer and Cannibal Jack. The fifth section of the chapter tackles yarning and narrative fiction in John Jackson's adventures. It discusses the beginnings of adventure stories whose imaginary locale is an idyllic island in the South Seas where Englishmen thwart cannibalism and savagery and exemplify in their own lives Evangelical morality and the “message of the empire.”

This chapter discusses the practice of gegu or “slicing a piece of flesh from one’s thigh,” which was a ritualized practice of using one’s own flesh to make healing medicine for sick parents, or elders in the family. Contrary to the prescriptive notions that to be filial means not to harm one’s body received from parents, people regularly engaged in body slicing precisely for filial reasons. Scholars generally consider this filial act a “Confucian” practice. This chapter argues that o reduce this practice to a Confucian imperative is to rob it of other cultural discourses such as medicine, anthropophagy, and self-sacrifice. Filial slicing was bound up in a web of associations, and people consumed human flesh for many reasons: famine, political intrigues, hatred, medicinal purposes, or even out of the cult of immortality. Filial slicing must be appreciated from this broader perspective.

This chapter is not concerned with the recoveries of the repressed to expose cannibalism and the near obsession the mass culture during the twentieth century. This chapter rather looks at James Joyce's tales and images of cannibalism within the cultural preoccupation of the literal and figurative anthropophagy. Cannibalism and the illustrations that represent such a concept were already pervasive in the late nineteenth century. And like many children, James Joyce was introduced to anthropophagy in the form of folklore and fairytales which are a genre invested in cannibalism. This chapter looks at the subtext of cannibalism present in Joyce's literature and works, from his Dubliners to hisFinnegans Wake wherein Joyce's psychic origins of his conception of art and artist can be examined and traced.

This chapter investigates the cultural techniques that constitute the shared meal as a ritual of community founding (for which the Last Supper provides the model for Christian-occidental culture). The Last Supper generates signs on the metonymic axis of sharing and partitioning by creating the community as a symbolon, whereas on the metaphoric axis of substitution the host stands in for humans and/or god, and the man-god stands in for the sacrificed animal. The question of how culture is rooted in acts of communal eating thus always points to the question of how the materiality of food intake can be transcended. But if—following Hegel—sharing the meal is not a conventional sign but a symbol in the real, then the symbol that creates community has to be filtered from the material circulation of the food by technical means that produce first of all the distinction between those who eat and that which is eaten. Because the sign is contaminated with the channel, the symbolic with the real, cultural techniques such as cutlery, tableware, and table manners are necessary to enact the procedure of symbol generation in the real, and to prevent anthropophagy. The transcendence of matter requires, first and foremost, the right technology.

Derrida distinguishes the accidental contretemps—the singular accidentality of the accident—from the essential contretemps; the latter is the “nonaccidental” accident. As a structuring anomaly the needful accident overturns the philosophical dicta that the perfection of substance is far more perfect than the objective perfection of the accident. Engaging with doctrines of collateral damage and programs of enforced disappearance, this essay anatomizes the political deployment of the contretemps as the time out of time of wartime that fractures any polemological idea of progress, just war, and accountability. The contretemps in its peripheral errancy constitutes a temporal counterweight to any continuist model of sovereign power, crosscutting the latter with shape shifting and empowering indeterminacy. The aphoristic naming and enframing of adversaries, targets, and victims are the protological contretemps and essential accident that occurs at and as the inception of war.

This chapter explores the theft and enclosure of Indigenous land through a consideration of settler agriculture and the emergence of commercial agriculture and agricultural economies of scale. Drawing upon the work of Jason Moore, it considers settler agriculture as part of the ecological metabolic of capital, looking to the capture and commoditization of Zea mays, or corn, as they relate to the production of cheap food and the capacitation of the worker as an urban, industrial character. Corn provides a figure through which to think the history of Indigenous sovereignties as braided with forms of vegetable and animal life, and the settler capture of corn as part of its disavowal and disentanglement. Moreover, the culture of corn within settler agriculture provides an opportunity to think anthropophagy as central to the settler experience of the land, as they steal its mineral nutrients—the literal remains of Indigenous peoples—to sustain their economies and themselves. The chapter concludes with a consideration of flame and cooking as technologies of home, and home as a vector of colonial infestation.

This chapter introduces the framework of cultural translation and cultural anthropophagy (de Andrade) as a counter-paradigm to the framework of appropriation presented in the previous chapters. It develops the claim that klezmer, as a lay, accessible and easily enjoyable medium, is one of the most intensive “Jewish Spaces” (Pinto) or Jewish/non-Jewish “contact zones” (Pratt) in Europe, providing a space where Jews and non-Jews have the chance to meet, but also where non-Jews can live out their interest in Jewish issues. This unique contact zone is marked by both “meeting” and “eating.” That is, it enables, on the one hand, dialogue, learning and communication, and, on the other, consumption, commercialization and appropriation of elements of the culture of the other in the process of defining the self. Taking this dual nature of the phenomenon into consideration, the chapter also deals with the relations between the klezmer scene and local Jewish communities in the context of the commercial success of klezmer.

This chapter demonstrates the dynamic cultural and racial mixing of post-independence Brazil. This offers a stunning backdrop for inquiry into modernism’s occasional collusion with oppressive governments. Barros associates acclaimed composer Heitor Villa-Lobos with wearing many masks and personas to promote Brazil’s modernist movement. Barros explains that Villa-Lobos defended and modified European musical traditions for Brazilian audiences through the metaphor of anthropophagy, while cultivating an exaggerated claim to “primitive” musical inspiration—a suspect musical engagement with African and Amerindian encounters—when speaking to European audiences. Most provocatively, perhaps, Barros argues that through these personas, Villa-Lobos was part of a larger, state-promoted modernist program to condition his audience to modernist music—an effort that disguised an almost dictatorial agenda that promoted what Villa-Lobos viewed as modernist aesthetic techniques while it actually eliminated diversity, in the name of sound pedagogy.

This chapter offers an interpretation about the dog's necrophagy by focusing on the prevalent image of the dog as a devourer of corpses in the Homeric poems Iliad and Odyssey and its scavenging tendency in Greek culture. Instead of talking about “the corpse-eating dog,” it looks at the dog's corpse-eating behavior as one aspect that the Greeks included in their encyclopedic definition of kyōn. It also considers the key symbolic implications of the act of feeding a corpse to animals and argues that the dog, in contrast to other corpse-eating animals, adds a symbolic value that is directly associated with the unique elements in the Greek representation of the man–dog relationship. Finally, the chapter examines three factors that serve as the principle axes for developments of the trait of anthropophagy in dogs: commensality, the debt of nurturing, and the ability to recognize the master as a person and an authority.

This chapter explores the culinary diversity of Chinese cuisine. Roughly speaking, Chinese regional cooking can be observed in four distinct areas. The eastern part of China is predominantly Buddhist, with an appetite for vegetarian dishes as well as seafood. The south is likewise a haven for seafood, though its history of foreign trade allows a large and at times shocking variety of flavors; including dog, cat, monkey, and rat. The north, which was traditionally the seat of the royal court, suffers from particularly tedious winters; its flavors remain modest and practical, with an emphasis on grain products and food preservation. Finally, the west is known for its spicy dishes, although the spices primarily used in its cooking had been introduced from overseas. Additionally, this chapter explores the practice of anthropophagy in Chinese culinary history, as well as the cuisines enjoyed by the minority cultures living in China.

This chapter pursues a non-Eurocentric ‘return to zero’ by tracing the radical shift in Glauber Rocha’s political cinema from his early Cinema Nôvo phase to his later syncretic experiments. In all cases silence is used to express the fact that ‘the people are missing,’ that they are ‘yet to come,’ and ultimately unrepresentable. Thus Terra em Transe traces the tragic odyssey of the alienated poet, Paulo Martins, as he vacillates between the right wing demagogue Porfirio Diaz, the Populist Felipe Vieira and traditional Marxism. Alienated on all fronts, Martins ends up advocating the violent overthrow of Diaz, leading to his own assassination. Der Leone Have Sept Cabeças (1970) underlines the shortcomings of this failed poetics by adopting Che’s Tricontinental Manifesto which advocated simultaneous anti-colonial wars in Asia, Africa and Latin America as a means of overstretching the Global North’s resources. Filmed in the Congo, Rocha’s syncretic hodgepodge of colonialism and resistance uses silence to show that revolution will be a ‘long march.’ Finally, in The Age of the Earth, Rocha produces an unlikely ecosophical solution, coloured by the intertextual Tropicalist and cannibalist tendencies (anthropophagy) that dominated Brazilian cinema at the time.

This chapter argues that animality, present and offered in the bread of the eucharist, also awaits its Passover; indeed, it awaits its metamorphosis into a humanity that will recognize its divine filiation. The transformation of the sense and of threshold of cannibalism by Christianity is not enough to exempt the eucharistic mystery completely from the suspicion that weighs on it: that one is eating the man (anthropophagy) and, indeed, eating God (theophagy). Whether or not one escapes from the charge of anthropophagy, the issue remains problematic in a consideration of the start of the eucharistic Last Supper, when it is no longer ethnological and anthropological but becomes a metaphysical and theological question. There are two ways of getting around, or at least reducing, the scandal in the eucharist of flesh given to humans to eat, or even to chew (trogôn) (John 6:56–57): through exegesis, and in philosophical terms. These are both technical moves, but they also serve as an excuse for the believer not to be, or no longer to be, satisfied simply with what Péguy calls the “habituated” soul.

This chapter examines the theme of cannibalism in serious and popular novels. The texts discussed include a variety of genres, and the representations of anthropophagy within them vary widely: cannibalism appears in most of the categories into which anthropology classifies it—ritual, mortuary, institutional, and pathological, both the “aggressive” and the “affectionate” varieties. Its representation in some of the texts is to be taken literally, in others metaphorically—as, for example, a feminist rebellion against social or sexual victimization. In other texts it is simply a satirical device for attacking bourgeois smugness and hypocrisy, together with bourgeois literary conventions. What is noticeable, however, and possibly more interesting, is that all of these texts that have cannibalism as a theme involve, in one way or another, a notion of “displacement.”