ABSTRACT
In an age which prides itself on challenging taboos, cannibalism retains a remarkably potent charge of horror. It is the ultimate form of violence or dominance, the most extreme possible aggravation of corporeal terrorism. Even at the habitual, everyday level of seemingly casual speech, certain basic fears or fantasies about anthropophagy seem to be revealed: an experience or a personality, for example, might be ‘all-consuming’ or ‘devouring’. As these examples suggest, cannibalism can be seen as an especially severe form of invasion. If someone steps into our personal space, stares too long or too aggressively at us, or even simply addresses us in an unacceptable way, we register their behaviour as invasive. Fundamental boundaries are being violated. Cannibalism shifts this kind of attack into a whole new dimension. The boundary line is not simply crossed, but utterly annihilated, as two individuals are collapsed together by the act of consumption. Given the enduring, arguably mythic power of cannibalism in the human imagination,
we need to realise at once that there is some well-documented reality behind the myths and the slurs. Anthropologists have often been uneasy about identifying cannibalistic communities, because of the long-standing use of ‘cannibal’ as a convenient propaganda weapon. Once labelled in this way, and effectively dehumanised, tribal peoples in the Americas, Africa and Australasia could be ‘legitimately’ civilised, colonised, or outrightly destroyed. There is little doubt that cannibalism was both a political tool and a dangerously unstable fantasy in the minds of European Christians during the decades that followed Christopher Columbus’ momentous landing. Cannibals were deliberately invented or imagined without justification. But they did exist. The (perhaps well-meaning) attempt of the anthropologist William Arens, in 1979, to deny that cannibalism had ever taken place as a general custom has now been substantially discredited.1 For some years, accumulated evidence from archaeological finds, from historians, and from anthropologists, has put this basic question beyond all doubt.
