Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas

Preface

P R E FAC E xv Cannibal Talk is almost entirely based on previously written articles and papers delivered at various universities during the period 1989–2003 amidst other writing commitments.1 My first foray into cannibalism was during my tenure as a fellow at the National Humanities Center in 1989–90 while working on my book The Apotheosis of Captain Cook (Princeton University Press, 1992). That was a wonderful year in my intellectual career, and I must thank the center’s staff, especially those working in the library, for making my stay so successful. My first lecture on cannibalism was delivered there, and I am grateful to the president of the center, Bob Connor, for his insightful comments and to Henry Louis Gates who urged me to publish the text of my lecture in Critical Inquiry under the title “‘British Cannibals ’: Contemplation of an Event in the Life and Resurrection of James Cook, Explorer” in the volume Identities (Chicago University Press, 1992), edited by Gates and by Anthony Kwame Appiah. That paper has been revised and expanded into chapters 2 and 3 in the present volume. Chapter 2 benefited from the assistance of my favorite folklore guru, Alan Dundes, who helped track down an obscure reference to Thackeray visiting the great cannibal Napoleon Bonaparte in St. Helena. “British Cannibals” set the stamp for my future research on cannibal talk. Although this book may be considered a continuation of my earlier work, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific, it should also be seen against the backdrop of my recent book, Imagining Karma: Ethical Trans- formation in Amerindian, Buddhist and Greek Rebirth (University of California Press, 2002). Imagining Karma made a case for a revisionist nomological approach to comparative religion and ethnography and argued against the naive relativism entrenched in the human sciences today. I tried to write simply, but Imagining Karma remains a “heavy” book to read owing to its length and sometimes complicated theorizing. Cannibal Talk provided me a kind of “relief ” from the arduous work of its predecessor. Hence, the present volume is light in touch, and I have indulged in it my partiality for puns, sarcasm, and sometimes vulgar humor, although I hope that my lapses into levity will not undermine the seriousness of my scholarly quest. Other stylistic quirks remain. I use the term consubstantial community to designate a commensal community eating of a consecrated substance, based on the literal meaning of “consubstantial” as “having the same substance or essential nature.” Theologians and historians of religion may not forgive me for this, but I could not find a better term. I use the word taboo in the dictionary sense of something forbidden, for example, the incest taboo; but tapu or tabu refers respectively to the Maori and Fijian sense of “sacred power.” The word dialogical does not refer to Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism but to social life, including ethnographic inquiry, which rests on dialogue and discursive actions. Many of the texts I quote have peculiar orthographies, therefore I use sic only sparingly. I do not subscribe to a single ideology or philosophy of writing social science; however, I am sympathetic to poststructuralist thought in general. But then I am selectively sympathetic to prestructuralist thought also and, indeed, to other forms of thought that simply do not fall into these convenient categories. The deconstructive strategy employed in this work suits the topic of cannibal talk because for me “method” or “against method” is not a conscious presupposition or a priori thing in itself but one geared to the particular problem being investigated. Thus the methodological strategy in Imagining Karma is different from that of Cannibal Talk though there are areas of overlap owing to my sympathy for “genealogical” inquiry and the comparison of cultural forms exhibiting “family resemblances.” This work would not have been possible but for the help of foundations and friends. I am grateful to the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, which gave me a grant for a research assistant to collect data on cannibalism in Polynesia and Melanesia during the calendar year 1991, and to Sasanka Perera, who carried out the research. My next foray into cannibalism was in the Essex Symposium in July 1995 at the University of Essex where I read a paper entitled “Fergus Clunie and Fijian Cannibalism: European and Native Cannibal Talk in the Nineteenth and xvi . p r e fa c e [3.144.116.159] Project MUSE (2024-04-20 14:10...