Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World by Kelly L. Watson (review)

Insatiable Appetites is a sweeping overview of European understandings of cannibalism, specifically the relationship between cannibalism, norms of gender and sexuality, and the colonization of the Americas. Kelly Watson’s focus ranges from the classical period to the eighteenth century, and from Europe to North and South America, using cannibalism to explore divergent understandings of the place Native Americans played in European imperial projects.

The book begins with a description of Western ideas of man-eating, dating to the classical and medieval periods. Cannibals were envisioned as outsiders in two senses: beyond the geographical borders of the civilized world and outside the customs of civilized life. Watson argues that cannibalism was the embodiment of savagery itself, and as Western Europeans defined who cannibals were (Scythians, for example), they decided where to find them. Not surprisingly, when they traveled to these places, Europeans like Marco Polo described the practices this discourse had prepared them to find: anthropophagy, but also ungoverned female sexuality, sodomy, and adultery.

By the early sixteenth century, the Caribs “took the symbolic place of the Scythians as the paradigmatic cannibals in the minds of European writers” (51). The writings of Columbus, Vespucci, and other sailors were deeply influenced by medieval travel writers. “By calling [Caribbean Indians] cannibals, the Natives were no longer fundamentally unknowns but could be categorized and dealt with accordingly. This allowed the Spanish, French, and English empires to justify their actions and establish imperial power in the New World” (86).

For the Spanish, cannibalism was foremost among the practices that conquest and colonization was intended to root out and replace, no matter that this “civilizing” process required enslavement of native peoples. One significant limitation of Watson’s approach emerges in this portion of her book and persists throughout: she does not argue whether Native Americans did or did not practice cannibalism, only that European writers used the trope of the man-eater as a key feature of gendered power and imperial justification.

For Cortés, Díaz, and other writers of the Spanish conquest of Central Mexico, cannibalism became a way to articulate a superior Spanish masculinity in contrast to the Mexica. The Spanish imperial project was aimed at incorporating Indian labor and extending Spanish masculine control of female Indian bodies, and “accusations of cannibalism both justified the conquest and helped to establish the gendered order of Spanish imperialism” (118).

Moving from the tight focus of the first three chapters to the Jesuits of New France, Watson finds cannibalism equally a vital sign of savagery and a crucial element of masculinity. In place of the Spanish masculinity of conquest, Jesuits’ understanding of suffering and martyrdom made them envision cannibalism in different ways: on the one hand, it was an indication to potential supporters in France of the importance of their work, and, on the other, it presented an opportunity to experience martyrdom for their faith.

The final chapter, examining English understandings of man-eating, stretches from the 1580s through the 1760s and embraces a wide range of source material, including early promotional and ethnographic accounts and later captivity narratives. Here the question of whether Europeans were imagining or describing becomes acute, as Watson admits: “It is also possible that the Native people the English encountered were not anthropophagous” (151). The English arrived after long European experience in North America, and they did not describe the sorts of fantastic medieval monsters the early Spanish accounts did. Nor did they describe many actual examples of cannibalism, as the Jesuit Relations did, although English writers did regard it as the ultimate badge of savagery.

Still, the only documented case, from Jamestown’s “starving time,” is one of Europeans eating Europeans, which Watson struggles to fit within her interpretive framework, as she does to some extent with eighteenth-century captivity narratives. Those written by Puritans were involved in constructing a quite different sort of narrative, one not as “necessary for the...