ABSTRACT
Disgust is a commonplace sentiment in the “Discourse of the Cape.”1 In this body of proto-ethnographic writing by seventeenth-century European travelers, halting at the Cape of Good Hope en route to the East Indies, disgust becomes a kind of generic convention. In particular, the dietary habits of the native inhabitants provoke the expression of unmitigated disgust. Traveler after traveler suspends his seemingly objective narrative voice to note the stench of raw entrails eaten by the Hottentots, the sight of excrement smeared on their food, or their ability to taste food “like dogs.”2 A series of anthropological observations regarding their dwelling, their dress, and their language inevitably culminates in commentary about the gross intermingling of food and filth.
