Taming Cannibals

Race and the Victorians

Patrick Brantlinger

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780801450198
• eBook ISBN: 9780801462641
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Grande-Bretagne

In Taming Cannibals, Patrick Brantlinger unravels contradictions embedded in the racist and imperialist ideology of the British Empire. For many Victorians, the idea of taming cannibals or civilizing savages was oxymoronic: civilization was a goal that the nonwhite peoples of the world could not attain or, at best, could only approximate, yet the "civilizing mission" was viewed as the ultimate justification for imperialism. Similarly, the supposedly unshakeable certainty of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority was routinely undercut by widespread fears about racial degeneration through contact with "lesser" races or concerns that Anglo-Saxons might be superseded by something superior—an even "fitter" or "higher" race or species.

Brantlinger traces the development of those fears through close readings of a wide range of texts—including Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, Fiji and the Fijians by Thomas Williams, Daily Life and Origin of the Tasmanians by James Bonwick, The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold, She by H. Rider Haggard, and The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. Throughout the wide-ranging, capacious, and rich Taming Cannibals, Brantlinger combines the study of literature with sociopolitical history and postcolonial theory in novel ways.

Part I

Two Island Stories

1

Missionaries and Cannibals in Nineteenth-Century Fiji

“Fiji, Cannibal Fiji! Pity, O pity, Cannibal Fiji!”

Reverend James Watkin, “Pity Poor Fiji”

Although in the 1800s both Tasmania and Fiji became British colonies, their historical trajectories were in several ways mirror opposites. In 1801 the British established a penal colony in Van Diemen’s Land (as Tasmania was first named). Free settlers began to arrive two decades later, and by the 1830s nearly all of Tasmania’s Aborigines had been exterminated by violence and disease. Much of the violence took place during the “Black War” of the late 1820s, when the Aborigines put up a fierce resistance to the invasion of their island. Missionary, humanitarian, and anthropological efforts to save at least the remnants of the “dying race” failed. The last full-blooded Tasmanian Aborigine died in 1876. In contrast, Wesleyan missionaries first came to Fiji in the 1830s, where they discovered ongoing warfare and such “diabolical” customs as infanticide and cannibalism, which they diligently sought to eliminate. Although a handful of white traders and beachcombers arrived, Fiji did not become a territory of white settlement. The missionaries’ proselytizing succeeded, and by the 1850s Thakombau, the most prominent Fijian chief and notorious cannibal, began pleading with Britain to make the archipelago a crown colony, which it finally did in 1874.

The Missionaries and the Great Cannibal Debate

A familiar cartoon shows a white explorer staring into a cannibal cooking pot and asking, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” No, the great missionary-explorer was not killed and eaten by “cannibals.” Throughout his travels, Livingstone found most Africans peaceful and welcoming, and he was suspicious of claims that any of them engaged in cannibalism. But the motif of the missionary as cannibal fare has been a staple of Western popular culture for centuries. Is this motif just the result of white racism, or does it have a historical basis? The answer appears to be both. The main locus of missionary-cannibal stories, however, is not Africa but the South Pacific. Their main source, moreover, is the missionaries themselves.

Given the debate about whether customary cannibalism has ever been practiced anywhere, the missionaries’ testimony is at least intriguing. In Cannibal Talk, Gananath Obeyesekere seeks to end the debate in favor of the skeptics, but he scants missionary accounts. And then there are the accounts by those identified as “cannibals” in Western texts. Can the “cannibal” subaltern speak? Yes—to a degree. “For the Cannibals did really exist,” writes Frank Lestringant, “and have never ceased to speak to us” (7). They do so, however, through the mediation of Western languages and texts, which is precisely the issue posed by Gayatri Spivak in “Can the Subaltern Speak?”1 Thus the ceremony of apology conducted in the fall of 2003 by the village of Navasutila in Fiji made international news. The Fijians were apologizing for their ancestors’ having killed and eaten the Reverend Thomas Baker in 1867; they invited Baker’s descendants, and several from Australia attended, as did Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase of Fiji (Kikau 1). The Times of London reported that the “cannibals” had also tried to eat Baker’s boots, but found them too tough even after boiling them for a month (Barkham 3). The “cannibals,” however, seem to have resented the notion that they were so foolish as to try to eat a pair of boots.2 Nevertheless, one of the boots is on display in the National Museum in Suva, along with the bowl in which Baker’s remains were supposedly served.3

Anthropologist Steven Hooper cites the Navasutila ceremony as an example of Fijians “talking” about their cannibal past. “With respect to so-called ‘cannibal talk,’” Hooper notes, “the ‘talk’ of Fijians seems to have been ignored or discredited in some circles…. [But] Fijians have long talked privately and publicly of cannibalism as a cultural practice” (20).4 Modern Fijians, however, know about cannibalism only as history. Fijians talking about cannibalism from precolonial Fiji speak most clearly through the mediation of missionary texts. Besides Baker, between the 1830s and 1870s there were many other missionaries in Fiji, and many of them testified, both as eyewitnesses and through ventriloquizing their native informants, about customary cannibalism. Sometimes, moreover, they produced texts that invite evaluation by the standards of modern anthropology.

Beginning with William Arens’s study The Man-Eating Myth in 1979, the debate over customary cannibalism has compounded the crisis in anthropology caused by poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and the disappearance of “primitive” cultures (Brady, “Myth-Eating”; Hulme; Osborne; Lindenbaum). Arens, Obeyesekere, and their supporters cast doubt on all accounts of customary cannibalism. They contend that while cannibalism may once have been practiced in a few parts of the world, there is no reliable evidence about it. Are their opponents perhaps prey to a mass delusion that has produced the specter of the cannibalistic “Other” throughout history? In contrast, Hooper, Lestringant, Marshall Sahlins, and their allies contend that there is plenty of evidence to show that, though not necessarily universal, customary cannibalism used to be widespread (Brown and Tuzin; Goldman; Leach). They see the skeptics as too eager to defend non-Western peoples from being stigmatized as cannibals or ex-cannibals; the skeptics are the deluded ones.5

The skeptics rightly note that the real practitioners of the various types of cannibalism have never had as much impact on (Western) history as their stereotypic simulacra. Both sides agree that imaginary cannibals have been all too influential as a negative stereotype of non-Western Others and as an excuse for the extermination of those Others (Obeyesekere 2). In her study of Australian captivity stories, Kay Schaffer notes that during the first two or three decades of colonization, “it is difficult to find even one reference to [Aboriginal] cannibalism in the local Australian press.” The Tasmanian Aborigines were seldom tarred with the cannibal brush. But as white settlement expanded and met with increasing Aboriginal resistance, starting in “the late 1820s…the Sydney Gazette began to publish letters from settlers attesting to scenes of…cannibalism.” Such stories “helped to justify colonial practices of extermination” (118; see also Pickering, “Consuming”). From the Renaissance through the 1930s, the same ideological utility was found for cannibalism in other supposedly benighted parts of the world. It not only supported “exterminating all the brutes,” to quote Mr. Kurtz’s genocidal phrase in Heart of Darkness, but also supported the missionaries, making their activities seem urgent and heroic.

Mortuary rituals provide some of the best evidence for customary cannibalism (Conklin 2001). In reverence, some peoples used to eat part or all of their deceased kinfolk. The motivations for endo-cannibalism no doubt vary from culture to culture but seem often to involve preventing the revered ancestor’s corpse from rotting or from being eaten by animals. For the subtitle of her 2001 study of the Wari of Brazil, Beth Conklin uses the phrase “compassionate cannibalism”—a far cry from the bloodthirsty sort associated with mass slaughter and missionary stew (cf. Lewis 73). Some evidence for violent exo-cannibalism comes from New Guinea as recently as the 1970s (Gardner 29–36; Knauft; Shaw 180–81). Archaeologists have also provided new evidence, some of the latest involving DNA analysis, so the general case no longer stands or falls on eyewitness observation (White; de Gusta; Kirch 160–61). Although Obeyesekere does not mention it, primatology, too, may be relevant; cannibalism occurs fairly often among chimpanzees (Brady, “Cannibalism” 165; Hiraiwa-Hasegawa). All of this recent evidence, combined with that provided by missionaries, explorers, and the cannibals or ex-cannibals, makes a strong case for customary cannibalism in at least some societies. As in Obeyesekere’s Cannibal Talk, the debate has devolved into issues of frequency and interpretation.

The skeptics point out that anyone who goes looking today for customary cannibals will not find them. This, however, is largely the result of both the extirpation of many indigenous peoples through the impact of imperialism and the conversion of the survivors to modern, Western ways and often to Christianity. No one disputes the fact that there have been numerous cases of survival cannibalism throughout history, and also of criminally insane cannibalism.6 And after the 1970s customary cannibalism may no longer have been practiced anywhere in the world. That makes it a matter of historical record, or perhaps of nonhistorical nonrecord, or even of prehistory. In much Western discourse customary cannibalism has always been something that occurred in the primitive past, perhaps even before history began. Thus in Totem and Taboo, Freud’s story of the origin of culture, the brothers of the primal horde murdered the ur-father to end his sexual monopoly over the women. “Cannibal savages as they were,” Freud writes, “it goes without saying that they devoured their victim.” But oedipal guilt prompted the brothers and their descendants to reenact the cannibal event as ritual repetition. “The totem meal, which is perhaps mankind’s earliest festival, would thus be a repetition and a commemoration of this…criminal deed, which was the beginning of so many things—of social organization, of moral restrictions and of religion” (Freud 142). So the cannibal act that Freud posits as the origin of culture is precisely precultural and therefore prehistorical.7

But if cannibalism is prehistorical, how can it be historically apprehended, except through sheer speculation like Freud’s? Without even asking whether other primates devour their own kind (they do), Freud simply assumes that the members of the primal horde were “cannibal savages.” Freud was not alone, however: most nineteenth-century observers, including natural scientists and early anthropologists, assumed that many peoples throughout the world practiced anthropophagy. Cannibalism marked the low end of the evolutionary totem pole from savage to civilized. Darwin mistakenly believed that the Tierra del Fuegians were cannibals (Darwin, Voyage 214). And in Man’s Place in Nature (1863), Thomas Henry Huxley included an illustration from a sixteenth-century Portuguese text that purports to show a cannibal butcher shop in West Africa. The otherwise scrupulously scientific Huxley admits that this image has no relevance whatsoever to his argument (Obeyesekere 223–25).

Before the major European explorations of central Africa starting in the 1850s, the locus classicus of cannibalism in the Western imaginary was the South Pacific, which from Cook’s voyages forward surpassed the Caribbean. After all, the ferocious Caribs, from whose name the word “cannibal” derives, were exterminated by the Spanish long before the 1700s. In their Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (1784), Captain James Cook and James King write:

When Great Britain was first visited by the Phoenicians, the inhabitants were painted savages, much less civilized than those of Tongataboo, or Otaheite; and it is not impossible, but that our late voyages may, in process of time, spread the blessings of civilization amongst the numerous islanders of the South Pacific Ocean, and be the means of abolishing their abominable repasts, and almost equally abominable sacrifices. (quoted in Wilson, Island Race xv)

From the 1790s through the 1850s, in the wake of Cook’s voyages, much of the eyewitness evidence about South Pacific cannibalism comes from missionaries, so if the skeptics are correct, then missionaries were among the main fabricators of the nonexistent cannibals.

There are also, however, numerous non-missionary accounts, such as those concerning Fiji by Samuel Patterson, Peter Dillon, William Lockerby, William Endicott, Captain Charles Wilkes of the U.S. Exploring Expedition, John Twyning, Mary Wallis, and John Jackson (“Cannibal Jack,” a.k.a. William Diaper or Diapea).8 Obeyesekere “deconstructs” the accounts by Dillon, Endicott, and Jackson, showing—to his satisfaction, at least—why they cannot be trusted. But Marshall Sahlins contends that, taken together with missionary accounts, they possess an ethnographic consistency not easily dismissed. In “Artificially Maintained Controversies,” Sahlins stresses the sheer number of accounts that describe the same quite specific behaviors by Fijians after raids or battles. And then there are the accounts by Pacific Islanders themselves, like the Rarotongan convert and “native teacher” or missionary Ta’unga, who claims to have witnessed plenty of cannibalism on the islands he visited, and who provides detailed information about preparing, cooking, and eating human cadavers.9 “You will probably want to ask, ‘How do [I] know’?” writes Ta’unga; “I am telling you that with my own eyes I have witnessed these things” (Ta’unga 91). Arens tries to discredit Ta’unga’s account, but the most he can show is that Ta’unga may have exaggerated (Arens 31–32). Whether fully credible or not, moreover, Ta’unga is an extraordinary witness: he is simultaneously native informant and missionary ethnographer, and the same is true of both Joel Bulu and Maretu. “I have actually experienced cannibalism,” writes Maretu; “some of our own family gave us human flesh to eat from [my father’s] oven, and instructed us never to forget” (Maretu 41; see also Gill 234–35; Tippett).

Ta’unga, Bulu, and Maretu may have exaggerated the violence of the “heathens” to please the white missionaries who had converted and trained them. But exaggeration is not wholesale lying, the charge Obeyesekere brings against Endicott, Jackson, and Dillon. The skeptics want to treat all accounts of cannibalism as entirely true or entirely false, with no shadings between these extremes. But whether exaggerating or not, on what grounds can missionaries, either collectively or as individuals, be dismissed when they claim to be sojourning among cannibals? There is no evidence that they suffered from some sort of collective delusion about cannibalism. On the contrary, as Sahlins emphasizes, at least in the Fijian archipelago their individual accounts form a consistent, cumulative record over time and distance. Missionaries to the South Pacific were also often fearless defenders of the indigenous peoples they encountered, even those they held to be cannibals, against non-missionary colonizers. And some of them wrote detailed, surprisingly sympathetic accounts of the cultures of those they sought to convert.10

In the 1790s directors of the London Missionary Society (LMS) were influenced by Cook’s Journals and other accounts of Polynesian societies as more welcoming than dangerous to choose the South Seas for their first proselytizing endeavors. In the Reverend Thomas Haweis’s estimation, the main danger would be sexual temptation rather than violence. His Edenic description of Tahiti, stressing the perilous “fascination of beauty, and the seduction of appetite,” concerns missionary rather than cannibal appetite (quoted in Samson, “Ethnology” 102).11 The first “godly mechanics”—so called because, though some were ordained clergy, many were working-class artisans chosen for their practical skills—set sail to the islands of promising savagery in 1796 (Gunson). Their journals and records, written in the first instance for the governing bodies of the societies that supported their work, were often edited and reprinted for as wide a readership as possible, partly in the hope of gaining even more converts at home. Throughout the nineteenth century, the missionary press in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Two Island Stories
• Part II Racial Alternatives
• Part III The 1860s: The Decade after Darwin’s Origin
• Part IV Ancient and Future Races
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Works Cited