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rushthatspeaksSome while ago, as I was looking over the entries for the 2009 Diagram Prize For Odd Book Titles, I happened to notice An Intellectual History of Cannibalism (which, correctly, didn't place, as I don't think it's an odd title at all; most of them weren't; my vote for best, though not weirdest, goes to On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers). Anyway. I saw this title, and I said, 'Wow, somebody wrote a book with an audience of Thrud'. As in, I have never seen a book more specifically and obviously written for one person the author has never met or heard of, ever. Therefore we have a copy, and I have been meaning to read it for some while and putting it off because it is very, very dense.
Please note, this is an intellectual history: this is the history of how European philosophy has thought about cannibalism, not an actual history of cannibalism, and therefore this is quite a readable book for persons who are used to the general amount of gore found in, oh, histories of religious conflict and so on. I mean it is not prurient, though I rather wish there weren't chapter-heading illustrations, even though they are useful contemporary art related to whatever is being discussed.
Anyhow, this is very definitely a European history, one ranging from Herodotus to Freud but concentrated on the Enlightenment and the shift from casuistry towards the modern scientific method. As such, it is one of the most valuable books on the history and theory of colonialism and a certain type of racism that I have ever met, although I am not entirely certain that it knows that about itself.
Allow me to present the book's argument. It follows very logically.
You see, cannibalism is in some ways a very useful edge case for several philosophical questions. Take the concept of natural law. If there is a natural law, engraved into all human beings before birth, that is the way all humans naturally ought to behave, possibly ordained by a divine creator-- as was a very prevalent belief just pre-Enlightenment-- then there are several ways of determining what that natural law might be, many of which boil down to either a) looking around and seeing what the aggregate of humanity thinks natural law ought to be (irregardless of what they actually practice as civil law) or b) observing what humans in a state of nature actually do. If you are going with b), you will expect groups of people you meet in what you consider to be a state of nature (as opposed to civilization) to be following natural laws, or at any rate to be doing things that are closer to the natural laws than you are. What if the people you find in a state of nature turn out to be cannibals? What does that do to the concept of natural law? This was talked about for many years in European philosophy as a theoretical construct, because no one in Europe knew of anywhere people were living that was supposedly in a state of nature.
However! Taking the point of view of medieval dialectic, the world is a theatre of opposites. You talk about a thing by reference to its opposite, in argument; and all qualities have an opposite quality. Civilized man, that is man who lives in what medieval dialectic thinks of as civilization, would never dream of cannibalism except in circumstances of extreme war, deprivation, and the total breakdown of all order and of civilization itself.* Therefore one expects that the opposite of civilized man, i.e. natural man who lives in a state of nature, would hold-- the opposite of that quality, yes? One would expect them to be cannibals, and not only that, to enjoy it.
One of the first things the Europeans ever conjectured about Native Americans was that they were living in a state of nature. There wasn't what the Europeans recognized as civilization (the errors of this lack of recognition are fairly glaring).
Therefore the European theorizers who first encountered Native Americans, and the travel narratives that sprang up around Native Americans, were expecting two things: one, the noble savage, the people who live how people should live (or as close to that as people can in a fallen world) following natural laws and/or two: cannibals. I repeat, they were expecting cannibals. And they were expecting saints. And these two myths began to fight it out, and the consequences were terrible.
Because there were also myths, in Europe, about the tribes of monsters who live in foreign savage countries. The monopods. The men with dog heads. The cyclops. The anthropophagi, the cannibals. None of those monsters have souls, none are human-- they're monsters, sometimes demons. So if a person who knows those legends hears of a tribe who are said to be cannibals, how likely is it that they are human? This is one reason for those horrific sixteenth-century debates among the European intelligentsia over whether Native Americans have souls. Cannibalism was also defined culturally as probably co-existing with other unthinkable qualities such as atheism, and the travel narratives, many of them hearsay or entirely fabrication, were pouring story after story of Native American cannibals back into Europe-- partly because that was what everyone expected.
And the theory of a natural law (in the way that they were thinking of it) broke, and gave way over time to Hobbes and Locke and utilitarianism, and there were many reasons behind that, but the concept that the people who were living in a state of nature turned out to be cannibals was one of them. And the King of Spain held that he had a divine right to conquer those who were breaking the laws of God by being cannibals and atheists. And it just goes on and on and on, the poison of this particular direction of myth, it's amazing. This book goes into so many ramifications, there are just so many things about how cannibalism worked in European thought that work together to dehumanize and devalue and disbelieve in people once they've been assigned that label and it's not a label it was easy to shake off, either. There are a lot of incredibly complex intersectional interlocking layers of discourse I'd never sorted out, here, or even seen considered.
You've probably noticed by now that I agree with this section of the book's argument and find it very informative. The problem I have with the way the book presents this material is that it's two-thirds of the way through the book or later before Avramescu mentions that ninety percent of the travel narratives, which he has been quoting and analyzing at great and fascinating length, are complete and utter hearsay and nonsense and never happened. It's true that in terms of the way people reacted to them when they came out this is beside the point, but seriously, when discussing the way in which a group who are still oppressed right now to this day have been slandered in a really amazingly nasty set of ways that helped cause a really amazingly nasty set of atrocities, shouldn't you start by reminding everybody that those travel narratives aren't true? Or at least go into the factual verification or lack thereof of each one of them as it comes up, sheesh. This genuinely aggravated me.
Of course, the politics aren't Avramescu's main point. Possibly they aren't his point at all. He's doing a genuine overview of the cannibal in European philosophy and the fact that so much of that surrounds Native Americans and stuff that is still current politics may honestly not be something he notices: I mean he's at the University of Bucharest and this book was originally written in Romanian and I don't know how much he knows about current or past American racial anything. He's talking about the discourse in Europe, so I can't tell from the book.
There's a whole bunch of other material here too, all of it interesting, about questions like the resurrection of the body-- if a human eats a human, and the flesh of the second becomes part of the first, what happens at the Christian resurrection? more complex than you'd think, that debate. And he does mention the question of cannibal symbolism in the Eucharist, and brushes in passing (I want more about this) something I had totally failed to notice, the most widespread instance possibly in human culture ever of intentional cannibalism, the use of mummy dust as medicine all through the Renaissance. And he's got a great chapter on the medicalization of isolated instances of cannibalism, the way it becomes a symptom of psychosis and madness as opposed to a moral failing or a failure of civilized behavior (he pins the attribution of it to madness firmly, and quite believably, on de Sade).
But he doesn't mention blood libel, and that annoys me too, because I can't see how it isn't relevant. It's... really really relevant, honestly. Maybe no one theorized about it enough at the time it was ongoing? But he mentions even author's lists of tribes and peoples who are believed to be cannibals, in his lit overviews. I don't know.
At any rate: great book. Well researched, well translated, well argued, well organized, useful for theory both in the area he is working in and an entirely different one, dense, complex, frightening, flawed, full of a thousand things I want expanded. This only came out in English last year. I would be fascinated if some people who are, you know, actually doing post-colonial studies were to read this.
* This is a generalized axiom believed widely in discourse at the time, not a factually true statement; it is provably not a factually true statement.
Please note, this is an intellectual history: this is the history of how European philosophy has thought about cannibalism, not an actual history of cannibalism, and therefore this is quite a readable book for persons who are used to the general amount of gore found in, oh, histories of religious conflict and so on. I mean it is not prurient, though I rather wish there weren't chapter-heading illustrations, even though they are useful contemporary art related to whatever is being discussed.
Anyhow, this is very definitely a European history, one ranging from Herodotus to Freud but concentrated on the Enlightenment and the shift from casuistry towards the modern scientific method. As such, it is one of the most valuable books on the history and theory of colonialism and a certain type of racism that I have ever met, although I am not entirely certain that it knows that about itself.
Allow me to present the book's argument. It follows very logically.
You see, cannibalism is in some ways a very useful edge case for several philosophical questions. Take the concept of natural law. If there is a natural law, engraved into all human beings before birth, that is the way all humans naturally ought to behave, possibly ordained by a divine creator-- as was a very prevalent belief just pre-Enlightenment-- then there are several ways of determining what that natural law might be, many of which boil down to either a) looking around and seeing what the aggregate of humanity thinks natural law ought to be (irregardless of what they actually practice as civil law) or b) observing what humans in a state of nature actually do. If you are going with b), you will expect groups of people you meet in what you consider to be a state of nature (as opposed to civilization) to be following natural laws, or at any rate to be doing things that are closer to the natural laws than you are. What if the people you find in a state of nature turn out to be cannibals? What does that do to the concept of natural law? This was talked about for many years in European philosophy as a theoretical construct, because no one in Europe knew of anywhere people were living that was supposedly in a state of nature.
However! Taking the point of view of medieval dialectic, the world is a theatre of opposites. You talk about a thing by reference to its opposite, in argument; and all qualities have an opposite quality. Civilized man, that is man who lives in what medieval dialectic thinks of as civilization, would never dream of cannibalism except in circumstances of extreme war, deprivation, and the total breakdown of all order and of civilization itself.* Therefore one expects that the opposite of civilized man, i.e. natural man who lives in a state of nature, would hold-- the opposite of that quality, yes? One would expect them to be cannibals, and not only that, to enjoy it.
One of the first things the Europeans ever conjectured about Native Americans was that they were living in a state of nature. There wasn't what the Europeans recognized as civilization (the errors of this lack of recognition are fairly glaring).
Therefore the European theorizers who first encountered Native Americans, and the travel narratives that sprang up around Native Americans, were expecting two things: one, the noble savage, the people who live how people should live (or as close to that as people can in a fallen world) following natural laws and/or two: cannibals. I repeat, they were expecting cannibals. And they were expecting saints. And these two myths began to fight it out, and the consequences were terrible.
Because there were also myths, in Europe, about the tribes of monsters who live in foreign savage countries. The monopods. The men with dog heads. The cyclops. The anthropophagi, the cannibals. None of those monsters have souls, none are human-- they're monsters, sometimes demons. So if a person who knows those legends hears of a tribe who are said to be cannibals, how likely is it that they are human? This is one reason for those horrific sixteenth-century debates among the European intelligentsia over whether Native Americans have souls. Cannibalism was also defined culturally as probably co-existing with other unthinkable qualities such as atheism, and the travel narratives, many of them hearsay or entirely fabrication, were pouring story after story of Native American cannibals back into Europe-- partly because that was what everyone expected.
And the theory of a natural law (in the way that they were thinking of it) broke, and gave way over time to Hobbes and Locke and utilitarianism, and there were many reasons behind that, but the concept that the people who were living in a state of nature turned out to be cannibals was one of them. And the King of Spain held that he had a divine right to conquer those who were breaking the laws of God by being cannibals and atheists. And it just goes on and on and on, the poison of this particular direction of myth, it's amazing. This book goes into so many ramifications, there are just so many things about how cannibalism worked in European thought that work together to dehumanize and devalue and disbelieve in people once they've been assigned that label and it's not a label it was easy to shake off, either. There are a lot of incredibly complex intersectional interlocking layers of discourse I'd never sorted out, here, or even seen considered.
You've probably noticed by now that I agree with this section of the book's argument and find it very informative. The problem I have with the way the book presents this material is that it's two-thirds of the way through the book or later before Avramescu mentions that ninety percent of the travel narratives, which he has been quoting and analyzing at great and fascinating length, are complete and utter hearsay and nonsense and never happened. It's true that in terms of the way people reacted to them when they came out this is beside the point, but seriously, when discussing the way in which a group who are still oppressed right now to this day have been slandered in a really amazingly nasty set of ways that helped cause a really amazingly nasty set of atrocities, shouldn't you start by reminding everybody that those travel narratives aren't true? Or at least go into the factual verification or lack thereof of each one of them as it comes up, sheesh. This genuinely aggravated me.
Of course, the politics aren't Avramescu's main point. Possibly they aren't his point at all. He's doing a genuine overview of the cannibal in European philosophy and the fact that so much of that surrounds Native Americans and stuff that is still current politics may honestly not be something he notices: I mean he's at the University of Bucharest and this book was originally written in Romanian and I don't know how much he knows about current or past American racial anything. He's talking about the discourse in Europe, so I can't tell from the book.
There's a whole bunch of other material here too, all of it interesting, about questions like the resurrection of the body-- if a human eats a human, and the flesh of the second becomes part of the first, what happens at the Christian resurrection? more complex than you'd think, that debate. And he does mention the question of cannibal symbolism in the Eucharist, and brushes in passing (I want more about this) something I had totally failed to notice, the most widespread instance possibly in human culture ever of intentional cannibalism, the use of mummy dust as medicine all through the Renaissance. And he's got a great chapter on the medicalization of isolated instances of cannibalism, the way it becomes a symptom of psychosis and madness as opposed to a moral failing or a failure of civilized behavior (he pins the attribution of it to madness firmly, and quite believably, on de Sade).
But he doesn't mention blood libel, and that annoys me too, because I can't see how it isn't relevant. It's... really really relevant, honestly. Maybe no one theorized about it enough at the time it was ongoing? But he mentions even author's lists of tribes and peoples who are believed to be cannibals, in his lit overviews. I don't know.
At any rate: great book. Well researched, well translated, well argued, well organized, useful for theory both in the area he is working in and an entirely different one, dense, complex, frightening, flawed, full of a thousand things I want expanded. This only came out in English last year. I would be fascinated if some people who are, you know, actually doing post-colonial studies were to read this.
* This is a generalized axiom believed widely in discourse at the time, not a factually true statement; it is provably not a factually true statement.
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no subject
Date: 2010-10-23 12:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-25 12:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-24 01:31 pm (UTC)This sounds fascinating, though, as you say, the assumption that one can deal with these narratives without putting the matter of their truthiness front and centre seems rather blinkered.
And, yes, failing to mention blood libel - um, what? I mean, especially when talking about cannibal symbolism in the eucharist (which deserves more than a mention, I think, when trying to triangulate European attitudes to eating other people). And one would have thought the blood libel is in some ways case zero for insisting on cannibalism as a defining lack in Christian civilisation. I don't really know how much it was theorised over the centuries when it was current either, but I would imagine ... a lot? I mean, I'd be very surprised if there wasn't a lot of medieval stuff on it, just for starters - and I don't see that you can exclude versions from mystery plays and suchlike, which were most certainly current and from what little I know doing quite a bit to define discourse around the subject, even if they weren't theory as such. Too close a focus on travel narratives, I suspect, is part of the problem here - but then the book seems rather cagy in general about unpicking the broader ramifications of dehumanising people as cannibals.
And medicinal mumia! One of my favourite bits of medical history (I mean, for certain values of 'favourite'). I remember reading that it started with the medicinal use of bitumen under Avincenna et al ... aaaand then people noticed that one useful source of tarry substances was Egyptian tombs and the contents thereof. Win and profit and fake mummies ensued. I think the very awesome Ambroise Paré (also notable for publicising the idea that cauterising wounds tended to do more harm than good) was one of the first guys to hold up a restraining hand and say that perhaps it wasn't such a great idea.
Also, On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers is indeed a most awesome title.
So ... I hope you don't mind me dwircling you?
no subject
Date: 2010-10-25 12:52 am (UTC)There is actually an entire chapter in the book on cannibal symbolism in the Eucharist and various philosophical treatments of and reactions to it-- I probably should have gone into that more, but the post-colonial-theory applications of the first chapters were so striking to me that I read some other bits of the book possibly with less emphasis on them than the author intended. That really was where I was expecting material on the blood libel, though, and was very surprised not to find it. In the LJ crosspost of this entry Earis is talking about how the European view of cannibalism was amazingly and substantially influenced by the blood libel and it just seems a weird omission on Avramescu's part.
I suspect that what may have been going on is that Avramescu is focusing on academic/philosophical sources exclusively, and makes a valid case for the travel narrative as a form of intentional philosophical argument (exemplified by things like Diderot's supplement to Bougainville and Montesquieu's Persian Letters). I honestly have no idea whether academicians and philosophers were doing anything at all on the blood libel contemporarily. Popular sources certainly were. But Avramescu never uses "popular" sources unless he can argue that they are intended as philosophy; there isn't any popular fiction cited except Robinson Crusoe, which he uses almost entirely as a metaphor.
I... really amazingly disagree with this as a reasonable methodological limitation for an intellectual history, because I think it draws an artificial line between "intellectual" and "popular" discourses, but it is true that the book would have had to be four times as long if he didn't draw that line. And he does acknowledge that line and that he is drawing it. I just wish he'd stated outright if the blood libel fell under the category of material only covered by "popular" sources, it just seems weird for it never ever to be mentioned in the book at all. Sigh.
The book tends to keep the ramifications of dehumanizing people as cannibals exclusively in the realm of philosophy also. Which is probably in its mandate, but I hope someone takes this scholarship as a base and runs with it.
Apparently the faking of mummies extended at one point to actual grave-robbing! Whoa. And I did not know that about Ambroise Paré. Cool. Thank you.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-25 03:27 am (UTC)And thank you also for laying it out that Avramescu was really dealing exclusively with explicitly philosophical sources, which I really should have got from your original post. But ... I think I was resisting it because I too disagree so so strongly with this approach as a strategy for intellectual history, especially when you're dealing with something as sensational as cannibalism which has a really ... stark, sharp profile in popular culture?
I can absolutely believe he can defend the supplement to Bougainville, eg, as philosophical argument. I mean, it is. But how is it useful to peel something like that away entirely from its popular context?
I appreciate that lines have to be drawn and I'm glad Avramescu comes right out and says that's what he's doing. But cannibalism in particular seems a topic that's really not very amenable to cutting off from popular discourse ... even assuming 'popular' culture is this isolated Rabelaisian slough lurking out there to be poked gingerly on occasion, which, yeah, no.
Fascinating book nevertheless, though - I'll have to keep an eye out for it.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-25 06:46 pm (UTC)On the other hand, I was surprised and fascinated by how much material there was in things that are explicitly philosophy, I wasn't expecting it. So, really good and useful book that I hope serves a foundation for a lot of further research, because as a starting point it's awesome and as the Only Thing it is a tad problematic.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-25 12:28 am (UTC)I agree this is a topic that seems to be hot lately in English-language fiction and I'm not sure why.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-23 12:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-25 12:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-23 02:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-23 03:17 pm (UTC)I see blood libel when I read Lovecraft, but then, I'm weird.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-25 12:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-25 04:37 pm (UTC)The narrator hears strange rumors about Innsmouth. He goes there, is creeped out by how strange the inhabitants look, and strenuously avoids talking to any of them. He does talk to someone who recently moved there and also the town drunk, both of whom agree that the long-term inhabitants are evil and kill babies. That night, there's a knock on his hotel room door. He freaks out, sure that they're trying to kill him, and escapes through the window. Later, he sees froglike people searching for something--he assumes they want to find and kill him. He leaves town and reports the rumors he's heard as fact. Authorities come in, take everyone from the town, and put them in internment camps.
I find Lovecraft's stories deeply disturbing, but not always in the ways he intended.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-25 06:40 pm (UTC)That reading of that one had never occurred to me. The hotel chase scene is one of the bits of Lovecraft that actually scares me, so I don't reread that story very often. (There are two bits of Lovecraft that actually scare me and the other one is a huge chunk of 'Under the Pyramids'.)
What do you make of the protagonist discovering at the end that Innsmouth is his ancestry and turning into one of them, then? I've always thought of it as rather like the bits with the Great Old Ones in At the Mountains of Madness, where the protagonist realizes that just because they don't look human doesn't mean they aren't sentient and civilized and that his initial revulsion was completely unjustified, but I've seen people argue for the end of 'Innsmouth' as one of those horror twist endings, which I guess is reasonable though it makes no sense to me at all.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-25 07:03 pm (UTC)So far I haven't been able to sell my story about the oppression of the Deep Ones in desert internment camps--everyone likes it, but no one wants Lovecraft pastiche. Nevertheless, I've just thought of another Aphra Marsh story, because after she gets out of the camp, I don't think she'll be thrilled to find out that Lovecraft's narrator is still around, and one of her few surviving relations.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-25 02:57 am (UTC)But it did make me realise that 'The Colour Out of Space' is an absolutely classic instance of a well-poisoning story, yeech.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-25 04:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-25 06:41 pm (UTC)Funny how we failed to make the Elder Sign upon meeting one another.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-25 07:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-27 09:44 pm (UTC)*Googles 'Dunwich'*
... apparently there is a Dunwich in Suffolk, half of which got eaten by a 'sea surge' in 1286. Huh.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-27 11:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-28 12:00 am (UTC)And thanks for expanding on your reading of Shadow Over Innsmouth, as well, which does make sense - I'd forgotten it included child sacrifice.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-25 12:31 am (UTC)Do you still have the syllabus?
Also, who taught it? They sound like a professor Thrud ought to go talk with, which she is in a position to do pretty easily, I think.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-25 02:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-23 05:01 pm (UTC)Yes. I was looking forward to that part. Hm.
Otherwise, though, Cătălin Avramescu sounds entirely like someone your household should know.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-25 12:32 am (UTC)