Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South SeasIn this radical reexamination of the notion of cannibalism, Gananath Obeyesekere offers a fascinating and convincing argument that cannibalism is mostly "cannibal talk," a discourse on the Other engaged in by both indigenous peoples and colonial intruders that results in sometimes funny and sometimes deadly cultural misunderstandings. Turning his keen intelligence to Polynesian societies in the early periods of European contact and colonization, Obeyesekere deconstructs Western eyewitness accounts, carefully examining their origins and treating them as a species of fiction writing and seamen's yarns. Cannibalism is less a social or cultural fact than a mythic representation of European writing that reflects much more the realities of European societies and their fascination with the practice of cannibalism, he argues. And while very limited forms of cannibalism might have occurred in Polynesian societies, they were largely in connection with human sacrifice and carried out by a select community in well-defined sacramental rituals. Cannibal Talk considers how the colonial intrusion produced a complex self-fulfilling prophecy whereby the fantasy of cannibalism became a reality as natives on occasion began to eat both Europeans and their own enemies in acts of "conspicuous anthropophagy." |
Contents
the ManEating Myth | 1 |
Dialogical Misunderstandings in the South Seas | 24 |
A Backward Journey into Maori Anthropophagy | 57 |
Cannibalism and the Parodic | 88 |
Cannibalism Decapitation and Capitalism | 117 |
NineteenthCentury Fiji Seamens Yarns and the Ethnographic Imagination | 151 |
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Common terms and phrases
adventures anthropophagy Bay of Islands Bayly bêche-de-mer body Bonaveidogo bones British Buchert cannibal feast Cannibal Jack canoes Captain Catoira chapter chief colonial conspicuous anthropophagy context Cook Cook's crew cultural Davidson dead discourse dread eaten Endicott enemies ethnographic European event fantasy Fiji Fijian Fijian cannibalism fire Forster Grass Cove guns Hawai'i Hawaiian heads Hongi Hongi Hika human flesh human sacrifice Ibid imagined Indians invented Jackson Jackson's Narrative Journal Kapiti Kapiti Island killed king La Pérouse later Lestringant Lockerby Maori anthropophagy Maori cannibalism Marion Marsden Melville Mendana missionary monsters musket wars muskets mythemes myths natives Nga-Puhi nibalism Pérouse Peter Dillon Polynesian practice priest prisoners quartering Rauparaha ritual roasted sailors savage says seems ship slaves South Seas stories Sydney Gazette Tahiti Tahitian tapu taua Te Rauparaha tion trade traditional tribes Tupinamba University Press Vanua Levu victim voyage warfare whale women Zealand