Amerindian cannibalism: practice and discursive strategy

This paper examines certain colonial and contemporary texts for their representations of Amerindian cannibalism during the Columbian period. Colonial texts from this period describe cannibalism as one of the Amerindians’ major “offences” against humanity. Some contemporary studies criticize this depiction of Amerindian cannibalism as a “myth” perpetrated by colonizers and their apologists to justify the enslavement and genocide of Amerindians. On the one hand colonial texts fall prey to an ethnocentric view of cannibalism; on the other hand contemporary texts explain away this amply documented cultural phenomenon. While the two positions appear to be at variance with each other, it is suggested that what they hold in common is a schema of analyzing culture that does not easily admit the existence of a phenomenon that is “Other” without explaining it as a totalized alterity or without explaining it away. Both positions thus help reinscribe the Wild Savage-Noble Savage stereotypes. ...each man calls barbarism, whatever is not his own practice ... Michel De Montaigne