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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.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
comments over there.
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.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
