The binary construct of civilization/savagery provides a clearer framework for understanding the ways Europeans articulated difference and otherness. The term savage encompassed a range of behaviors, beliefs, and assumptions about Others and was used by European writers to describe those behaviors, beliefs, and actions. However, both civilization and savagery were variable terms, and writers indicated that there existed degrees of each. For example, the seventeenth-century French writer Pierre D’Avity listed what he believed were the five indicators of brutishness: the inability (or refusal) to use reason, a savage diet, nakedness, poor quality of shelter, and a lack of government.17 Possessing these characteristics indicated that a particular group of people was suitable for conquest.
Race, as expressed through an understanding of physical and phenotypical characteristics that represented moral worth, social standing, and intellectual potential, would play a much more important role in the discourse of cannibalism in later centuries. By the nineteenth century the connection between emerging ideas of scientific racism and cannibalism was firmly established. In the period I discuss, gender was of greater importance to the discourse of cannibalism and was central in determining the effect that such discourse had on imperial power dynamics. Within the complex set of indicators of savagery and civilization, understandings of gender and gendered practices were fundamentally important for Europeans in establishing the place of a particular group within the hierarchy of human beings. Civilization itself was viewed primarily as a gradual process of cultural, social, religious, and intellectual developments. Therefore the so-called savage peoples of the Americas were seen as inferior and primordial and their understandings of sexuality and gender were viewed as equally atavistic and dangerous. For Europeans the figure of the cannibal hearkened back to an earlier era, a savage time that had been all but eliminated by the march of civilization. When these conquerors encountered “real live” cannibals, it was easy to see them as holdovers from the past.18 Furthermore not only were the conquerors truly men, but they had complex understandings of Native peoples as feminized and as failed men.
My decision to focus on the “discovery” of America in 1492 should not be taken as an acceptance of this date as the first European interaction in the “New World.”19 Nor should it be taken as an acceptance of the great historical division between premodern and early modern, as such divisions are always messy and fraught with assumptions. The shift from medieval to modern did not occur in a moment, and medieval ideas and traditions played an important role in the early modern world. The discovery of the Americas by Columbus did not, as is often repeated, spur an immediate rethinking of historical processes.20 Rather the “discoveries” made by Columbus set events in motion that would eventually radically reshape the histories of both Europe and the Americas. There is no specific year that clearly distinguishes the colonial from the nationalist period of North American history, as different parts of this vast landscape were colonized at different times and European imperialism did not end in one fell swoop; however, the end of the Seven Years War in 1763 provides a satisfying conclusion to this book.
The Treaty of Paris, which ended the Seven Years War, did not signal a complete end to European imperial expansion in the Americas. However, it did radically reshape the balance of power between France, Spain, and England in North America, greatly reducing the power of France and increasing that of England. Furthermore as the English became the dominant power on the eastern seaboard, groups of Indians, such as the Iroquois, were less able to play European groups against one another and carve out an influential space as middlemen, gatekeepers, and trading partners. Additionally, after the American Revolution, tales of cannibalism decreased rapidly in the eastern United States and were common only on the western frontiers. Thus the “triumph of civilization” in eastern North America meant that cannibalism ceased to be an important trope through which alterity was negotiated in that specific context. The firm establishment of imperial power in the Caribbean, Mexico, New France, and New England also led to the decline of writing about cannibalism. It seems that once the tangible threat of contact with savagery was eliminated, cannibalism was no longer an important topic of discussion in a particular region. Rather accusations of cannibalism lodged against Native peoples traveled along a moving imperial frontier. For example, in the nineteenth century accusations of cannibalism were much more often lodged against Africans as Europeans raced to carve up that continent for themselves.
The texts examined in this book come primarily from the late fifteenth to the eighteenth century as I compare and provide general findings about cannibalism and empire. In this vast swath of time, from “discovery” to the Seven Years War, Europeans writing of the New World witnessed and reported on the presence of cannibalism, enabling us to document the changes in these discourses over time.
Most academic scholarship on cannibalism has been written by anthropologists and literary theorists, although historians have not been completely silent. The works of such literary theorists as Tzvetan Todorov and Frank Lestringant have proven quite useful for their rich interpretations of the literature of conquest. Todorov’s The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other is a linguistic and semiotic analysis of the ways Europeans constructed Indigenous Americans as Other and an investigation of the effects of this imbalance of power. Although Todorov focuses primarily on the Spanish conquest of the New World, his ideas about Otherness resonate in other contexts as well. Frank Lestringant’s Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne is notable for its focus on how the idea of the cannibal impacted European thought. Lestringant documents the changes in European understandings of the figure of the cannibal over time in order to demonstrate its continued importance. Like Todorov, Lestringant primarily restricts his investigation to Central and South America. Furthermore he engages with the idea of the cannibal in the works of important French literature and philosophy.
Scholars of psychoanalysis have also taken an interest in cannibalism as a cultural phenomenon. In Cannibalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form, Eli Sagan argues that cannibalism, as both a fantasy and an actual practice, stems from sublimated aggression. The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein provocatively argues that cannibalism is one of humanity’s basest desires and that during infancy children must learn to effectively sublimate their desire for the consumption of the Other or risk developing psychological problems in later life.21
The use of psychoanalytic insights by literary scholars is quite common. The work of Maggie Kilgour, for example, examines cannibalism as a trope through which writers negotiate opposition between forms, such as inside and outside, consumer and consumed. The act of incorporation, which is at the center of all acts of cannibalism, is something to be both feared and desired, according to Kilgour. In this way cannibalism in literature reveals the primary tension between Self and Other.22 Kilgour’s work is featured in an interdisciplinary collection entitled Cannibalism and the Colonial World, which includes the work of other key researchers of cannibalism.23 Together these essays trace the idea of cannibalism from the colonial to the postcolonial world, from literal acts to metaphor, and demonstrate a wide array of approaches to the study of cannibalism, although with a limited discussion of North America. Peter Hulme, who coedited Cannibalism in the Colonial World, and the anthropologist Neil Whitehead are among the most important scholars of Carib cannibalism, and anthropophagy in general.24 Whitehead’s careful reporting on the evidence of Carib cannibalism in European records is especially useful.
Anthropological studies of cannibalism can be grouped into several categories, all of which assert that cannibalism is reflective