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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.”

This book provides a philosophical history of the evolving conceptualizations of place and space in Western thought. Not merely a presentation of the ideas of other philosophers, it is acutely sensitive to silences, absences, and missed opportunities in the complex history of philosophical approaches to space and place. A central theme is the increasing neglect of place in favor of space from the seventh century a.d. onward, amounting to the virtual exclusion of place by the end of the eighteenth century. The book begins with mythological and religious creation stories and the theories of Plato and Aristotle and then explores the heritage of Neoplatonic, medieval, and Renaissance speculations about space. It presents a history of the birth of modern spatial conceptions in the writings of Newton, Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant and delineates the evolution of twentieth-century phenomenological approaches in the work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, and Heidegger. In the book’s final section, the text explores the postmodern theories of Foucault, Derrida, Tschumi, Deleuze and Guattari, and Irigaray.