ABSTRACT

This chapter presents a case study on Postcolonial Cannibalism and Colonial Cannibalism. It talks about what democracy in a country like Indonesia should be like, how one could be open to cultural differences and how a postcolonial state, housing so many different peoples, could do justice to all these different voices. The modern state, the state as invented in Europe, in Christian Europe, Deleuze and Guattari emphasize, makes the difference when it comes to how European racism, and thus colonial and postcolonial cannibalism, are different from these more primitive notions of cannibalism. The way cannibalism is at work in the writings of Martyr and Chanca is exactly how Deleuze and Guattari conceptualize European racism. In the case of cannibalism, our colonial and postcolonial excursions necessarily lead us to theories of state formation and territorialization, to a notion of difference in degree and to what we may call a philosophy of the inside.