Cătălin Avramescu. An Intellectual History of Cannibalism. Translated from the Romanian by Alistair Ian Blyth. Princeton University Press. April 2009.
[From N + 1]
Justin E. H. Smith
In July 2008, while travelling on a Greyhound bus between Edmonton and Winnipeg, Vincent Li beheaded his sleeping seatmate, a man he had never met, with a butcher knife. Li held up the head in crazed triumph as the bus screeched to a halt and the other passengers rushed out. He then began to pace back and forth along the aisle, witnesses report, tearing off the ears, gouging out the eyes, pulling out the tongue, and eating them.
This event, as well as Li's recently concluded trial—not guilty by reason of insanity—might serve as an opportunity to take measure of the present state of cannibalism studies, mostly a minor academic industry, though one not without its star performances and its polarizing debates. For a long time, the field was dominated by a curious variety of négationnisme, most famously spelled out by William Arens in his 1980 book The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy. According to Arens, cannibalism is nothing more than a projection of fear-induced fantasies upon unknown others, and in the past 500 years this projection has served as part of the ideological soundtrack to the European conquest of the rest of the world. As the incident on the Greyhound reminds us, however, sometimes people really do eat people.
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The title of the original Romanian version of Cătălin Avramescu's giddy book, Filozoful crud, translates as both "the cruel philosopher" and "the raw philosopher." "Crude" in the sense of "uncooked" (think of "crudités") and "cruel" share the same etymology, and in at least one Romance language—the easternmost and most obscure, yet in some sense also the purest, because the closest to Latin—these two meanings remain packed into one and the same word. In what sense, now, could a philosopher be both "cruel" and "raw"? Does Avramescu want to say that philosophers have somehow been both the perpetrators and the victims of anthropophagy?
When Columbus encountered the Arawak tribe of Hispaniola, they reported to him on the vicious, man-eating Caribs of the neighboring islands, whose name would later become our "cannibal." Did the Caribs in fact eat the Arawaks? Is it naïve to wish to know? Part of what an intellectual history involves, Avramescu thinks, is a disregard for the question as to who, precisely, was eating whom, and when. His book is "in no way a history of cannibalistic practices." Of course, he adds, "the instances of verifiable anthropology have sometimes left their traces in the ideal productions of the philosophers. However, whether cannibals existed or not is in fact of marginal importance." Avramescu's cannibal "is in the first place a scholarly creature, a personage who animates theoretical texts, and only to a lesser extent, if at all, is he a subject for the anthropology of the aberrant."
Avramescu wants to know why the history of thinking-with-cannibals is coextensive, more or less, with early modern history, the period from the age of discovery to the age of enlightenment. Why did the historical life of the cannibal seem to come into existence at a certain moment, and die out at another? The question of origins is easier to answer: it was the encounter between Columbus and the Arawak and others like it that exploded in frequency towards the end of the 15th century. The reasons for this history's end present a larger intellectual challenge, but Avramescu believes he knows why, by sometime in the early 19th century, the cannibal is no longer capable of "constituting any starting point for the articulation of a moral philosophy."
