From Cannibalism to Genocide: The Work of Denial

From Cannibalism to Genocide:

The Work of Denial

In Cannibal Talk, Obeyesekere sets out to expose cannibalism as racist slander, no more than the empty "talk" of Europeans seeking to rationalize colonial atrocities and of anthropologists upholding a mistaken sense of "identity" (2). In an academy dominated by projection and self-delusion, inherited in the "license to lie" that arose in the Age of Exploration, Obeyesekere sets himself the task of deconstructing centuries of falsehood and defamation in order to "restore" the self-worth and integrity of a people defined as "savage" and to put back "the human face" of anthropology (4, 266).

The existence of cannibalism is not in question. Why, then, is Obeyesekere determined to deny it? Why does he champion a set of ideas that undermines his noble project?¹ He turns cannibalism into a crime too terrible ever to have happened, only to categorize it with "other" real atrocities, like "dismemberment and disembowelment, castration and decapitation, and rape," that occur routinely in the "ethnic, communal, internecine, and genocidal violence [that has] become an intrinsic feature of our global situation. . . . in Rwanda, in Liberia, in the Congo . . . and in Asian killing fields, including Sri Lanka, where [he] was born, raised and made aware. In the throes of violent passion people everywhere, mostly males, can commit the kinds of violence found in cannibal texts everywhere [sic]" (16–17).

Obeyesekere uses cannibalism as sheep's clothing for the beast of genocide, the "gruesome violence" and "ungovernable dread" that he wishes either to classify as slander or to treat as aberration outside the bounds of social rules or analysis—a troubling and convoluted denial from so erudite and acclaimed a scholar. How can something that is "everywhere" be unreal or exceptional? Surely, the task of a self-appointed "restorer of ethical understanding" is to explain it rather than to explain it away. Yet, if Obeyesekere can expose as a malicious construction "the fact" of a socially sanctioned cannibalism, then he may "open the door" on real crimes—the global horrors that he lists—lending them the same aura of anomaly and unreality.

Demonizing the Savages

Obeyesekere is often correct in his accusations of Savagism; it was a "crude metaphysics" and as a precursor to Orientalism, a "theodicy for colonization" (242, 265). Tracing it in the works of William Shakespeare, Christianity, the Spanish Inquisition, vampirism, the Voyages of Discovery, Herman Melville's Mardi, mob violence in nineteenth-century France, and other "unorganized mythemes contained in European cultural memory" is a fascinating and underexplored approach. But the work of excavation, exposing the "genealogy" of slanders embedded and compounded over centuries, does not in itself rectify our vision of the past nor restore the histories of conquered peoples: Recognizing that colonizers may have invented fantasies of cannibalism as a projection of their own demons and that scholars are sometimes prone to "mythopoeic imagination" does not mean, ipso facto, that cannibalism was only a myth (250, 256). Revealing calumny does not prove innocence; it merely creates a moral vacuum into which Obeyesekere can project his imperious voice.

Obeyesekere makes cannibalism vile and preposterous not simply to redeem the slandered savage but, more importantly, to fit it onto his list of "prohibited actions," frenzied acts of pure rage, and "indiscriminate," culturally unjustifiable acts that are never "customary or normative." The effect is to make everything on his list seem "unreal" and open to revision. "These acts provoke out-rage in us," he explains, "because they entail the very violation of a cherished value, the taboo against such acts," implying that disgust and intolerance for atrocity lie etymologically within the word outrage itself (17, original emphasis). But rage is not in outrage, which comes from the Latin ultra by way of...