Introduction
I think there is nothing barbarous and savage in that nation, from what I have been told, except that each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practices; for indeed it seems that we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of opinions and customs of the country we live in. There is always the perfect religion, the perfect government, the perfect and accomplished manners in all things.
Michel De Montaigne, “Of Cannibals,” 1580
In his famous essay “Of Cannibals,” Michel de Montaigne argues that Western societies rarely judge other cultures on their own terms.1 Rather, in his estimation Europeans tend to project negative qualities onto others, so that the cultural practices they observe actually mirror their own faults. Montaigne uses the practice of cannibalism in Brazil to reflect on European civilization, arguing for a nuanced understanding of difference and a careful examination of cultural practices before declaring them barbarous.2
Despite the seriousness of his argument for cultural relativism, Montaigne was not without a sense of humor. He ends the essay with this clever line: “All this is not too bad—but what’s the use? They don’t wear breeches.”3 He jokingly suggests that any reason or intelligence possessed by Indians is negated by their lack of clothing. This phrase highlights the difficulties of the work that he asks of his reader: no matter how hard one tries, cultural assumptions are difficult to overcome.4 A lack of proper clothing was a common descriptor of savagery in medieval and early modern Europe, but Montaigne underscores the absurdity of this assumption. Simply because they did not don clothing, should Indians be assigned a lower place in the hierarchy of humanity? “Of Cannibals,” written in 1580, was an important essay and shaped intellectual thought about imperialism and cannibalism in Europe, but beyond that it also demonstrates the inevitable tensions that resulted when Europeans encountered cannibals.
In this same essay Montaigne argues that “our eyes are bigger than our bellies, and that we have more curiosity than capacity; for we grasp at all, but catch nothing but wind.”5 This phrase plays with the idea of cannibalism, as it defines the limitations of an incorporative epistemology of imperialism. Montaigne hints at the limits of European knowledge about the New World and its peoples as he denigrates the rapid processes of imperialism and colonialism. Europeans rushed forth into the New World, conquered its peoples, destroyed its cities, and exploited its landscape without a thorough understanding of what they were doing and why they were doing it. Montaigne’s passage depicts the European conquest of the Americas as greedy and impetuous. European powers claimed lands and divvied up resources successfully, yet as they grasped at everything, they ignored the wider implications of their desires.
Montaigne’s metaphor for European imperialism provides a useful way of thinking about the discourse of cannibalism and the ways this discourse aided in the establishment and maintenance of imperial power in North America. Early modern writers rarely connected the supposed acts of cannibalism that they described with the larger issues of imperialism, yet hierarchy, dominance, and power were implicit in every account. The desire of the writers to record the supposed atrocities of Indigenous Americans for an eager readership back in Europe masked the true power of anthropophagic accusations. Through their accusations of cannibalism European writers implicitly and explicitly argued that Indians were inferior. As these conquerors, soldiers, priests, and settlers documented their perception of Indian barbarity, they underscored their preexisting belief in their own superiority. However, following Montaigne’s warning that curiosity exceeded capacity, this book examines sources of cannibalism from a new perspective. Rather than taking descriptions of cannibalism in European accounts as either true representations of savage Indian acts or dismissing these descriptions as merely propaganda, I uncover the ways the imperial context affected the discourse of cannibalism represented in European texts as well as the ways the discourse of cannibalism changed the dynamics of imperial power in North America.6 More specifically I also investigate the subtle and often hidden ways imperial power was gendered and was instrumental in redefining gendered and sexual norms.
Insatiable Appetites reveals new insights into historical documents, arguing for a recentering of gender in the analysis of the discourse of cannibalism. Recent discussions of cannibalism have tended to focus on the connection between cannibalism, savagery, and race. However, in the early modern period European understandings of cannibalism and savagery were more closely linked with gender and sexuality. Imperial power depended on the assertion of European superiority and the assumption of Indian inferiority, and the discourse of cannibalism played a key role in these determinations. As conquest always involved the domination of bodies in addition to land and resources, it is imperative to acknowledge and scrutinize the way that conquered bodies were gendered. Cannibalism is an embodied act, and an investigation of the discourse of man-eating illuminates the development of early modern ideas about race, gender, and sexuality. There is a great deal of scholarship that examines the racialized and gendered discourses of empire and colonialism, but there is a dearth of scholarly work that develops these ideas in the early modern North Atlantic.
My focus is on the discourse of cannibalism in European records from approximately 1492 until 1763. The objects of inquiry are primarily written texts, although some discussion of the role of images in the establishment and maintenance of imperial power is advanced as well. Through an analysis of these sources, I interrogate the construction of the idea of the cannibal in European empires rather than the actual practice of cannibalism among the Native people of the Americas. Not only is it virtually impossible to uncover concrete evidence of Indigenous practices solely through European records, but the idea of cannibalism and its associations with savagery were significantly more important in imperial discourse than were the actual rituals of human consumption.
Historically the consumption of certain body parts and some methods of corpse ingestion were treated as different from cannibalism. Human bodies were widely used for medicinal purposes in early modern western European nations and their colonies. Mummified remains of ancient and sometimes more recent origins were commonly prescribed as a treatment for a wide range of ailments. Human blood was used to treat epilepsy in England into the middle of the eighteenth century, for example.7 While corpse medicine was ubiquitous, it was not without critics, including Montaigne himself.8 Yet the producers and consumers of corpse medicine were not viewed as savage, bloodthirsty man-eaters, indicating that not all acts of the consumption of human bodies were viewed in the same way. Rather it was the cannibal practices of exogenous others that were linked with savagery, barbarism, and heathenism.
Acts of man-eating are generally placed into two broad categories, endo- and exocannibalism, referring to the consumption of insiders and outsiders, respectively. These categories loosely parallel the distinction between funerary and warfare cannibalism.9 While the definition of cannibalism may seem quite clear at first glance, establishing the limits of what constitutes an act of cannibalism is actually quite complex. On the simplest level, a cannibal is a person who consumes the body of another human being. But how much of another person does one have to consume to be a cannibal? Does the accidental ingestion of bodily fluids, for example, make one a cannibal? Does it have to be an intentional act to constitute anthropophagy? Or, put another way, does the consumer have to willfully and knowingly consume human body parts to be a cannibal? Does the doctrine of transubstantiation make Roman Catholics cannibals? Is there a difference between consuming the bodies of those who have died and killing people in order to consume them? We could keep asking these kinds of questions ad nauseam, but ultimately what matters for my purposes is that all of the acts of man-eating discussed herein are linked with savagery.
Determining whether or not groups of people actually practiced anthropophagy is difficult and comes laden with thousands of years of inherited prejudices and inequities. To label a population cannibalistic has always been a strategy of defamation. Indeed even asking the question presupposes that one human consuming another has significance well beyond the fulfillment of nutritional needs, for one does not ask a question whose answer is meaningless. Thus the determination of anthropophagy reveals something about both the questioner and the object of inquiry. Modern-day descendants of purported cannibals in history often take umbrage at the characterization of their ancestors. This is quite understandable given the faulty and prejudicial historical records that scholars have relied on to make