Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas
Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas
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Abstract
In this re-examination of the notion of cannibalism, the author offers the argument that cannibalism is mostly “cannibal talk,” a discourse on the Other engaged in by both indigenous peoples and colonial intruders which results in sometimes funny and sometimes deadly cultural misunderstandings. Turning to Polynesian societies in the early periods of European contact and colonization, the author deconstructs Western eyewitness accounts, carefully examining their origins and treating them as a species of fiction writing and seamen's yarns. He argues that 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. 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. This book 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.”
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Front Matter
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One
Anthropology and the Man-Eating Myth
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Two
“British Cannibals”: Dialogical Misunderstandings in the South Seas
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Three
Concerning Violence: A Backward Journey into Maori Anthropophagy
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Four
Savage Indignation: Cannibalism and the Parodic
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Five
The Later Fate of Heads: Cannibalism, Decapitation, and Capitalism
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Six
Cannibal Feasts in Nineteenth-Century Fiji: Seamen’s Yarns and the Ethnographic Imagination
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Seven
Narratives of the Self: Chevalier Peter Dillon’s Fijian Cannibal Adventures
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Eight
On Quartering and Cannibalism and the Discourses of Savagism
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Conclusion
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End Matter
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