Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas.  Gananath Obeyesekere Berkeley, CA: University of California, 2005. Xx + 320 pp.

Reviewed by Sara M. Bergstresser, Harvard Medical School

With Cannibal Talk, Gananath Obeyesekere has undertaken another detailed reading of the history of cultural contact in the Pacific; it appears as somewhat of a sequel to The Apotheosis of Captain Cook.  Obeyesekere begins the discussion with linkages to his work on Cook and the ways in which Europeans brought their own myths and expectations to the interpretation of Cook’s arrival in Hawaii.  Cook then appears as an occasional figure throughout the book, often providing the basic example of the sailor-explorer and his crew.  In this book, the focus is on cannibalism and anthropophagy, particularly in reference to the Maori of New Zealand and the inhabitants of Fiji as viewed by Europeans in times of expanding interaction and trade.

This book unravels like a detective story (p. 222), or like one of Freud’s case studies, where remarkable insight and improbable jumps of logic coexist together in a narrative of suspense.  With the background of the cartoon image of cannibals stewing unlucky explorers, I cannot help but think of Obeyesekere’s work as an un-stewing of history.  It is rare to find such thorough attention both to detail and to the grand picture, where ship’s logs and recording discrepancies coexist with a meta-commentary on the destructive legacy of colonialism.  

The entire book is a pleasure to read.  It is full of humor; the irony and sarcasm throughout remind us that not everything should be taken seriously or at face value.  Obeysekere’s voice, subtly present throughout, every now and then emerges clearly as something like a theatrical aside.  Examples without context do not have the same power, but I will still provide an example.  In this case, after a discussion of Captain Cook’s ship-board meals of “sweet” dog meat and a “fricassee of rats,” Obeyesekere suggests: “However, soon afterward [the crew members who had shunned dog meat] could be persuaded to eat the aforementioned rats.  This should not be a surprise to us because it is likely that for many Europeans eating dog, even though of the [vegetable-fed] variety was perhaps more heinous than cannibalism, since dogs were pets and enemies were not.  But rats?” (p. 48).

The first two chapters work to set the scene of cannibalism and contact, but in this case there is at least as much focus on the British and European cultural baggage brought to the encounter.  Cannibalism, here, is introduced as primarily an attribution of Otherness.  Europeans feared that the Maori were cannibals, and the Maori feared that the British were the fearsome cannibals!  Obeyesekere describes a dark comedy of errors and misunderstandings, where each group’s uncertainty about the other “confirms” pre-existing anxieties and stereotypes.  The British sailors brought memories of shipwreck cannibalism that occurred in times of starvation as well as incessant questions about supposed Maori cannibalistic practices.  With the lack of mutual understanding, according to Obeyesekere, what British took as confirmation was likely Maori curiosity about the British as potential cannibals.  Additionally, it is possible that the Maori hoped to scare the British, drawing on what they identified as their worst fear.

The next three chapters examine facets of the introduction of new European and global trade routes into the South Seas.  Were descriptions of post-contact conditions accurate representations of Maori culture in the pre-contact period?  With the overarching disruption and violence of the European presence, Obeyesekere describes how Maori life would have had to change in profound ways.  Those native groups who found themselves without muskets would certainly be at a sudden disadvantage.  The European trade in curiosities – heads, body parts of the other – illustrates the dissection and comodification of Maori life.  Similarly, parody and power, and the misunderstanding of sarcasm as truth, emerge as new forms of misunderstanding and alienation.  Somewhere in this shifting mess, the fate of human sacrifice as a sacred practice dissolves into confusion, and the trope of gluttonous cannibal feasts remains.

Chapters six and seven delve deeply into narratives of Fiji written by European travelers, especially sailors.  This is where the most detailed deconstructive processes appear, where each date and event and claim is checked against other narratives and shipboard records, Fijian traditions, and examples of European mythology.  The primary task here is to show that writings often taken as ethnography are actually novels, fictionalized biographies, or the stringing and re-stringing of seaman’s “yarns.”  The European desire for adventure stories set amongst the cannibals was a powerful force that existed in the background.  Did anyone want to read dispassionate recordings of banal details?  Admissions of the actual confusions and omissions of memory would not have made good reading, and therefore the sensationalized becomes the record of the day.  This point has salience also in the present day, with discrepancies between media reports and everyday lives. Narratives with the most verisimilitude may well be those that are most historically suspect, and fiction and biography are not necessarily separate genres.

Finally, the chapter “On Quartering and Cannibalism and the Discourses of Cannibalism” is where Obeyesekere brings everything together.  Savagery is, rather than a characteristic, a grand attribution of Otherness.  In a way similar to Orientalism, “Savagism” encompasses both the desire for and the repulsing forces of the Other.  When you quarter, it’s one thing.  When they do it, it’s cannibalism.  Anxiety, expectations, and communal agreement on the state of the world can at times come together to produce violence based on attributions of savage appetites.  Obeyesekere describes at length an episode in nineteenth century France where a murderous horde of peasants were described as cannibals for their killing and subsequent quartering of an unfortunate noble falsely identified as a Prussian spy.  Familiar with the dismemberment of pigs in their agricultural worldview, the quartering tradition here echoes the transformation of human to livestock as an ultimate insult.  The irony here is that the peasants felt that they were acting honorably within their own conception of patriotism.  This story also may have parallels in modern political situations.

The contributions of this book extend not only to the general anthropological literature but also to our understanding of psyche, society, and history.   Individual and cultural legacies, at points of collision, accumulate and interact replete with misunderstanding, hypocrisy, and self-aggrandizement.  It is not necessary to believe all of Obeyesekere’s specific interpretations to appreciate the larger purpose of the work.  It also provides valuable commentary on the anthropologist’s ways of perceiving, recording, and understanding history through our own ethnographic work.