American Pentimento: The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches

6 Cannibals: Iberia’s Partial Truth

6 Cannibals: Iberia’s Partial Truth In 1992, at the Essex conference attended by many indigenous activists from Spanish America, a prominent English historian, John Hemming, gave a talk about the sixteenth-century peoples of Brazil.1 When I politely taxed him after the presentation with the fact that his extensive historical description of the sixteenth-century coastal Tupis was missing an important dimension of their lives, namely, cannibalism, a Mapuche activist from Argentina leaped to his feet. “You can’t say that,” he interrupted in a raised voice, addressing me, not Hemming. “That’s the excuse they always use to attack us.” As he continued to berate me for having raised the subject, it became crystal clear why Hemming had omitted references to cannibalism. Although four hundred years—or more—have passed since Tupis practiced cannibalism, and thousands of miles and dozens of other cultures separate Tupis from the Mapuche in present-day Argentina, the mere mention of indigenous cannibalism in any region of South America is still a sensitive political issue. Such public defensiveness indicated that Hemming’s omission of the subject had likely not been accidental. But Hemming is far from alone in his reticence to mention the topic. Such touchiness abounds in Spanish- (and sometimes Portuguese-) language literature on aboriginal peoples in the Americas—both within and outside of Latin America. Outsiders have ≈ 91 ≈ noted the extent of such omissions. Anthropologist Sherry Ortner, for example , recently observed that a well-regarded historian of the Maya conquest had omitted and downplayed references to Maya cannibalism in the years prior to conquest.2 Literary critics of Spanish America sympathetic to aboriginal peoples carefully and repeatedly qualify their characterizations of “cannibal” practices. Some writers have even gone so far as to challenge the reality of cannibalism, even though few outside of IberoAmerica and its scholars find such discounting credible.3 Furthermore, to those who neither write on nor reside in Ibero-America, such touchiness appears excessive. In contrast, the mention of historical Pawnee, Caddoan, or Iroquois cannibalism—all equally well-documented occurrences—draws little or no protest from English-speaking Native American activists.4 Nor does mention of nineteenth-century cannibal practices among Pacific Islanders provoke such a response among contemporary Maori, Fijians, or Tongans.5 Rather, all such reports of previous cannibalism are met with shrugs of indifference . The subject is historical, hence academic, and certainly not one that generates political heat, and especially not in the present day. In these regions of the contemporary world—all colonized by English rulers, incidentally—the issue of historic cannibalism remains politically insignificant . Such indifference is clearly not the case in Ibero-America. War over Moral Standards In the centuries preceding the conquest of the New World, intermittent warfare dominated the Iberian Peninsula. This warfare occasionally intensi fied into full-scale battles and then subsided into decades of border raiding between fixed lines of combat. These moments of relative quiet were originally named the “cold war,” an expression more familiar for its later appropriation by the United States and Soviet Union. During these often centuries-long intervals of cold war, hit-and-run raiders swooped down on pastures, often on horseback, carrying off crops and people. Alexandre Herculano described the “continual combat and repeated [twelfth century] raids in order to take away captives.”6 The organized incursions aimed not to strengthen the military position of either side, but, as Herculano declared, to obtain prisoners. These episodic frontier raids rarely resulted in the loss of life, for prisoners from wealthy families could be held for ransom or captives could be sold as slaves to urban areas such as Cordoba. During labor shortages, leaders of Muslim towns were required to send specified numbers of Christian C a n n i b a l s ≈ 92 ≈ slaves every year to North Africa. The Muslim leaders of Alcácer (Al-Kassr al-Fetah) during the twelfth century, for example, had “to send a hundred Christian prisoners every year to the emperor of Morocco.”7 When Christians captured Alcácer in 1217, they enslaved all its inhabitants— approximately two thousand people.8 And when Ferdinand captured Málaga in 1487, he similarly enslaved all of its inhabitants. The unique characteristic of Iberian slavery was the religious distinction between slave and master. In the early Middle Ages, Anglo-Saxons often enslaved Welsh, Irish, and Scots, and Genoese and Venetians took Christian Greeks...