Seeing Cannibals

Nasheli Jiménez del Val

The corpus of images analysed throughout this dissertation evidences the role that the figure

of the cannibal played in the development of European discourses of otherness that were

deployed during the conquest and colonial periods in Hispanic and Portuguese America.

Ranging from marvellous hybrid monsters to the Noble Savage of the Enlightenment, these

images document the array of functions that the trope of the American cannibal played in

Europe’s struggle for predominance over the New World. Throughout this analysis, Mason’s

assertion that “representations are seen to refer to other representations and not to the truth of

the represented” (1990:8) has been central. By concentrating on the relations established

between representations of cannibalism, and not on the links drawn between representations

and the presumed ‘truth’ of the represented, this dissertation has mapped out the various

discursive formations that housed, reaffirmed and gave authority to the trope of the native

cannibal as a key player in European colonial discourses.

The analysis of the corpus was based on an overarching Foucauldian archaeological

and genealogical framework (Foucault 1966, 1969, 1980, 1983). By concentrating on the

main tendencies or themes present in the images, it was possible to establish what the

dominant discourses on the indigenous peoples of the Americas were, how the main

discursive formations around the trope were shaped, and how these formations changed in

configuration over space and time. The repetitions throughout the corpus were also the object

of analysis, particularly because their presence indicates the ways in which certain discourses

became reiterated and thusly imbued with authority. Furthermore, in analysing the overall

patterns in the corpus, a great deal of emphasis was placed on the potential silences,

contradictions or exceptions within the visual representations of cannibalism. This was

considered important given that such silences or contradictions typically point to the sites

where the struggle over representation takes place and becomes contested, negotiated or

reaffirmed.

There are several tendencies that were located in the corpus of images. The dominant

themes that characterised this group of pictures have been explored in the previous chapters,

and they refer to the interdiscursive links established between the images of the cannibal and

embodiment, cosmographical and theological discourses. Through this, it has been possible

to explore the discursive formations configured through the points of intersection between

these discourses and the visual representation of the American other. In chapter five, the

relationship between the cannibal as a subject constituted by an excessive bodily state and

prevailing European discourses on embodiment was explored. Importantly, this chapter

analysed the tropes of the whole and the fragmented body, looking at the implications these

themes had in terms of the construction of a particular type of body politic. This chapter also

studied the ultimate colonisation of the cannibal body through the early anatomical practices

that further disintegrated the cannibal through dissection and the search for the depths of the

body. Chapter six focused on the role that the figure of the cannibal played in relation to

prevailing European discourses on time and space. Specifically, the Latin American cannibal

was located on the fringes of civilisation in the European imaginary and, as such, functioned

as an emblem of distance, marking the limits of European geographical knowledge.

Furthermore, the cannibal was also distanced in time, in many cases being depicted under the

guise of classical and medieval representational schemes, thus becoming othered through the

denial of contemporaneity with his European conquistador. Chapter seven looked at the

importance of religious imagery in the representation of the New World cannibal,

establishing that the same iconographical conventions used to refer to the inner others of

Europe were consistently applied to the American native. Once more, the tendency in

European depictions of difference was rarely based on the incorporation and assimilation of

new representational strategies, but on the confirmation and imposition of well-established

visual codes upon the subject of representation. Importantly, the localisation of these themes

has confirmed the aim of this dissertation to prove that for the European to incorporate new

knowledge about previously unknown peoples, it was consistently necessary to look back to

the familiar points of reference that had characterised the prevailing European epistemic

regimes of the period. In other words, the ‘newness’ of the Americas was described under the

terms of pre-existing visual representational strategies and discursive nuclei, resulting in

interesting constructions of meaning that say more about the culture producing the images

than about the peoples described in them. In sum, these three chapters have demonstrated that

European colonial discourses on the New World cannibal were frequent, relatively consistent,

and imbricated in other prevailing colonial and non-colonial discourses that characterised

Europe’s entry into modernity. Hence, the cannibal was by no means a secondary

representational phenomenon but, instead, played a crucial role for Europe to establish the

limits and objectives of its colonial mission.

Beyond the thematic configuration of the corpus, representational patterns for dealing

with the cannibal have also been located as shifts over time and space. The earliest images of

the American natives were rough woodcuts depicting the peoples of the Caribbean isles

encountered by Columbus and those on the coasts of Brazil who Vespucci lived with for

some time. Produced mainly in the format of loose-leaf pamphlets reproducing Columbus’s

letter to the Spanish monarchs or Vespucci’s description of Brazilian tribes, these images

were very widely distributed on short notice. Two main regions, the Italian and German

speaking areas, produced the most imprints and dissemination of information on the New

World at this time. Many of the early images were originally produced in Italian printing

presses in Latin, some accompanied by illustrations. As the demand for news on the Americas

increased, new editions began to be printed in Germanic and Flemish countries that had more

developed techniques for including images in pamphlets produced on a mass scale. This

move resulted in a profusion of illustrated texts that included images of the newfound peoples

in order to satisfy a European public’s curiosity on the Americas. It was at this stage that

many of the misrepresentations of the American Indians would take root and persist in the

future images of the continent. However, while there were various ethnographically incorrect

details in many of these images, compared to the following stage of representation these

images are produced with a relatively low degree of fantasy or deformation of the American

native. In fact, it would seem that the characteristics described by Columbus and Vespucci

that most impacted the European imagination were the nudity of the inhabitants and their

‘normal’, ‘well-proportioned’ bodies. It can be surmised that this emphasis on the ‘normalcy’

of the American native was the result of previously generated expectations derived from

medieval epistemic regimes. If the peoples living on the fringes of the world had been

traditionally imagined to be deformed, living on their heads, and part animals, then the reality

of the encounter with American peoples must have been shocking in its disproval of such

theories.

In fact, it would seem that this initial impression of the ‘normalcy’ of the cannibal

body became immediately ‘corrected’ in a second representational stage. Reverting to

medieval conceptions of foreign peoples through the trope of the Plinian races, the maps of

the early and mid-sixteenth century emphasised the absolute estrangement of the American

native. While there were several images of indigenous peoples as cannibals in the early

images of the Americas, it was during this second period that the American native began to be

consistently represented as a hybrid cannibal, part man part animal. A similar phenomenon

took place in the genre of world compendiums, a type of proto-encyclopaedias that aimed to

collect all the available information on the peoples of the world. Both of these genres were

highly illustrated and, therefore, crucial in establishing the image of the American native as

essentially cannibalistic, savage and primitive. In terms of the centres of production of such

maps and compendiums, most of them were produced in Germanic and Flemish regions that

had an established printing tradition, with the possible exception of the highly sophisticated

Portulan maps created in seafaring Portugal. Perhaps it is this regional specificity that can

account for the regression to medieval representational devices in order to depict the New

World cannibal. It is important to recall that while Renaissance pictorial conventions were

becoming consolidated in Southern Europe, medieval representational regimes continued to

prevail in Northern Europe at this period. Furthermore, images like Lorenz Fries’s ‘Canibale’

point to the possibility that these pictures were produced to satisfy a popular audience’s

demand for images of the faraway peoples, and it would not be farfetched to consider that in

many cases these representations catered to the sensationalistic in order to titillate popular

curiosity. Another explanation may be that in many cases, the cannibal became an

emblematic figure of the New World and ceased to be depicted on an exclusively literal or

narrative level. Rather than functioning as a kind of ‘snapshot’ brought back from overseas, it

is possible that at this time the image of the cannibal was also used as a type of geographical

symbol to represent the boundaries between the known and the unknown lands. As explored

in chapter six, at this level the cannibal was not necessarily meant to be taken as a literal

inhabitant of the Americas but as a cartouche for marking the limits of knowledge in

European cosmography. The role of the dog-headed cannibal was to mark the limits of a

growing body of knowledge on the world being collected in Europe at that time. Hence, the

hybrid cannibal could hold a dual function: to mark the limits of Western knowledge and to

confirm the strangeness conferred upon the distant other.

However, in many cases the use of the cannibal figure as cosmographical marker was

riddled with contradiction. In Münster’s Cosmographia (1552), for instance, the same images

used to illustrate the peoples of the New World have been previously used to depict cannibal

practices in Tartary under the explanatory text “The foods, drinks and dress of the Tartars”:

If they capture any of their enemies, they sometimes have them roasted to demonstrate their horrible cruelty and the desire they have for vengeance: and after that they gather together in a large group and eat and devour this body like famished wolves; and beforehand they collect the blood and put it inside cups or goblets and they drink it. (1552:1308)

Similar examples can be found in the Desceliers map of 1550. The same image of a human

body on a chopping block that was consistently used to mark the cannibal region in Brazil

can be found in the isle of Gyave (modern-day Borneo). Fries’s ‘Canibale’ in the Carta

Marina (1525) is further example. Beyond the geographically inaccurate Alsacian setting

where the dog-headed cannibals of the New World are depicted, it appears that this very

image had been used previously by the same printshop in 1522 in order to illustrate an edition

of Ptolemy’s Geography (Kügelgen Kropfinger 1990). However, in the Ptolemy edition, the

engraving was used to accompany the section on the peoples of Asia. Hence, the images of a

human figure being roasted on a spit or of the cannibal marketplace were used as passes-par-

tout, the same images and descriptions being applied indiscriminately to any faraway region,

regardless of the ethnographic specificity of such claims. This sort of ‘bricolage’ of images

responded to “a practical cartography based on the lore of sea-going mariners” (Lestringant

1994:112) and, as such, the recycling of images confirmed a Eurocentric representational

regime whereby the further the explorers travelled from the European centre, the more the

foreign peoples merged into each other and became non-specific emblems of difference. In

this sense, these maps and cosmographies were kind of:

empty canvas to inscribe on it the delineation of newly “invented” or discovered lands; a form at once closed and open, full and lacunary, that represented the ideal construction in which to house, with their approximative and disparate localisations, the “bits” of space that navigators brought back from their distant voyages. (Lestringant 1994:7)

By the mid to late-sixteenth century, another important shift in the representation of the

New World cannibal took place. Broadly based on Mandeville and Marco Polo’s travels to

Asia, a new genre of New World travel literature was starting to emerge and, with it, new

ways of visualising the cannibal. Other factors played an important role in this new way of

depicting the cannibal. As Northern European regions started consolidating vested interests in

the Americas through their settling of new colonies on the Brazilian coast, there was a boom

in illustrated travel narratives being printed in Europe. Hans Staden’s Captivity (1945 [1557])

pioneered this genre, with a novel mix of proto-ethnographical observations and a high

number of engravings illustrating the narrative. While many of these illustrations were

relatively rough in execution, they accomplished their function of providing European

audiences with very detailed visual descriptions of the Brazilian Tupinamba’s customs and

artefacts. This text opened a watershed of other similar publications, most of which were

written by Protestant explorers, in many cases demonstrating the growing tensions between

two models of colonialism: one championed by the Catholic Spanish and Portuguese, the

other advocated by newly emerging Protestant or semi-Protestant countries such as France,

the Netherlands and Germany. In many cases, the figure of the New World cannibal was used

as a point of contrast in the ongoing propaganda war between these two models. As

Lestringant (1997) has argued, texts like Staden, Léry and Montaigne’s used the cannibal as a

rhetorical figure with which to question European society and Catholic models of

colonisation of the Americas. Hence, the rivalries between the emerging colonial powers

became distilled in the struggle to imbue the New World cannibal with a local propagandistic

function.

In addition to this, the production of images at this stage was further enhanced by the

development of important innovations in printing technologies. Through advances in

copperplate technologies, more detailed illustrations became possible, culminating in

Theodor de Bry’s imposing series America (1995 [1592-1619]). This series consisted of a

collection of engravings accompanied by the most circulated travel narratives on the

Americas that had been produced until that point. Crucially, the collection was highly visual,

giving pride of place to incredibly detailed illustrations of explorers’ and colonisers’

experiences in the New World. By focussing on the narrative dimension of the illustrations

and by exercising free interpretative criteria for depicting the New World natives, de Bry’s

engravings were a key turning point in the construction of the Americas in the European

imaginary.1

Importantly, the production of these images by figures like Staden, Benzoni, Thévet,

Léry, Collaert and de Bry took place in a very short span of time, indicating a significant

degree of discursive density in the corpus on the New World cannibal. These texts were

published between 1557 and 1596, four short decades during which the production of

numerous images on the Americas superseded the relatively small number of engravings that

had been made in the previous seventy years. There is also a high degree of repetition taking

place in this discursive formation. For instance, de Bry compiled and revamped many of the

Staden and Benzoni illustrations, reproducing them in his particular style. In turn, the impact

of de Bry’s illustrations was so far-reaching that almost identical copies were printed for van

der Aa’s 1729 La gallerie agréable du monde and subsequent editions of America continue to

be printed today.2 In fact, the matter of repetition was so crucial to the production of these

engravings that in an edition of America de Bry added this word of caution:

Finally, if someone dared copy, by engraving them, these artworks of mine, being that one lives in a time when many heartless men are desirous of taking advantage of the efforts and labours of mine, I beg of you, benevolent reader, do not lend belief to such pictures. As there are hidden in my pictures several secret marks that, if not properly registered, will cause great confusion. (1995:16)

Given this warning, one can assume there were a large number of lower quality copies

circulating, thereby indicating the high degree of public interest in the images and the

economic profitability of the enterprise.

It is very telling that in this site of discursive density, the majority of the images were

produced in French, Germanic or Flemish regions. With the exception of a few Italian and

English authors, during this period the bulk of engravings featuring the New World cannibal

were printed in these areas. Actually, images produced in countries which had stronger

colonial interests in the region are sorely lacking. Why, for instance, weren’t more images of

the American native produced in Spain and Portugal? Moreover, of the engravings produced

in Spain and Portugal, why don’t any of them depict the American Indian as a cannibal?

While French and English expeditionaries were sending artists to the colonies in North

America in order to collect images directly, no equivalent can be found for Meso and South

America at this time. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo was one of the few Spanish authors to

complement his text on the New World with images taken directly from the model, yet none

of these engravings illustrate the purported cannibal rituals of Mesoamerica. This silence in

the corpus can be explained through several factors. Firstly, the printing press was undeniably

more developed in the Northern European regions than in the Iberian Peninsula. This can

account for the high number of images being produced in the region versus the almost

inexistent illustrations in Spanish and Portuguese texts. Furthermore, the production and

distribution of knowledge on the colonies varied according to different models of

colonisation. As argued in chapter one, while the Protestant colonial model was based on

private funding and, therefore, benefited from the public distribution of information on the

Americas, the Iberian model was funded by the monarchy and was quite secretive in

releasing information to the general public for fear that competing powers would usurp their

hold on the region. Moreover, the production of these images took place in the context of the

religion wars that were affecting Europe at the time. A Protestant corpus of images served the

function of propaganda against Catholic models of colonialism, with the figure of the New

World cannibal serving an important propagandistic function. As explored in chapter seven,

the transubstantiation debate over the Eucharist was a nodal point in the tension between

Catholicism and Protestantism, and the discussion of anthropophagy (whether it was the

cannibal Tupi or the devout Catholic) was placed at the forefront of European discourses.

Concurrently, the appearance of the allegory of the Americas took place around this

time. Transitioning from the realm of the fantastic (dog-headed cannibals) to the ethno-

narrative (Staden and de Bry’s engravings) to the abstract-symbolical, the association

between the cannibal and the New World became consolidated with this move. In this shift,

the believability or accuracy of the images was no longer deemed central nor was narrative

function considered indispensable to the construction of the image. Instead, the allegory of

the continent was based on an abstraction of the region following the selection of a few

attributes specific to the Americas. By representing the Americas through a handful of

assumed traits, many of which were based on mistakes or generalisations, the allegorisation

of the continent was a way of dealing with the incommensurability of the New World and, in

a process of symbolic reduction, making it commensurable. In this context, cannibalism was

produced as the central trait of the continent. This reduction played a crucial role in the

essentialisation of the continent as a land of savagery.

This process continued well into the seventeenth century. The number of images of

New World cannibals is lower than in the preceding century, but the range of variations on

the trope has increased, indicating a significant continuation and evolution in the discourse.

A sample of this variation includes Crispijn de Passe’s Saturnus (1600), Antoine Jacquard’s

Pourtraicts (1615-1620), Honorius Philoponus’s Nova typis (1621), and Visscher’s America

(1650-1660), among others. What all these images have in common is the persistence of the

cannibal as a constant presence in the New World. Attributes such as the barbecue grill, the

fragmented body and the construction of the continent in terms of the marvellous first

became associated to the Americas in the preceding century, but it is during the seventeenth

century that these representations become fully explored. This collection of images, ranging

from the fantastical to the anatomical depiction of the cannibal, point to the different

strategies enacted in order to achieve a symbolic possession of the American native. Going

well beyond the ethnographic details that initially fed into many of the images produced

during the sixteenth century, at this stage the marvellous, the sensationalistic and the

anecdotal superseded other ways of depicting the American colonies. Perhaps the culmination

of this disregard for the accuracy of the representations was Montanus’s 1671 engraving

“Scene of offering and ritual” in De Nieuwe en ondekende, where the representation of an

oral-voracious Aztec deity holds little resemblance to the actual indigenous depiction of

Huitzilopochtli, the god of war.3 However, at this stage not all representations of the

Americas necessarily included a cannibal. Other series of images dealing with the Americas

seem to have downplayed the cannibalism trope and concentrated, instead, on the pure

allegorisation of the continent. Hence, texts by authors such as Ramusio (1606), León Pinelo

(1630) and Aldrovandi (1642) do not include cannibalism in their visual representations of

the Americas. However, what these engravings do have in common is the representation of

America as dislocated from a real space, and the images respond more to an imagining of the

region than to a direct contact with it.

During the early and mid-eighteenth century further changes in the representation of

the American Indian took place. With the advent of the Enlightenment and the revalorisation

of reason that came with it, new representational strategies were put into place for illustrating

the Americas. Large collections or compilations of world customs and world religions were

published, among them the influential Cérémonies et coutumes religiueses (1723) by Picart

and Gallerie agréable du monde (1729) by van der Aa. These compilations excel in their

accumulation of knowledge about world peoples and also in the vast amount of engravings

that were produced in order to supplement the texts. Importantly, these two publications are

the nuclei of accumulation and repetition of preceding discourses on the cannibal. Both of

them are based on previously designed and executed engravings; in many cases the authors of

these texts have commissioned only minor modifications on copies of Thévet, de Bry, and

Montanus’s engravings. In a sense, this group of engravings is the utmost summary of the

body of images on Latin American cannibals. By collecting, repeating and systematising

previous works, these authors have imposed the new agenda of reason on the corpus of New

World images. In other words, these books make the world accessible, classifiable and

understandable. By presenting the world as a gallery of pictures, the European spectator can

collect the world and fully possess it through these images.

Through the analysis of the continuities, changes, repetitions, modifications and

absences in the corpus accumulated for this research, it has been possible to localise the

persistence of the trope of the American cannibal. As Pellarano (1988) has argued, a

systematic collection and examination of the images of the Latin American native has

facilitated the understanding of the pictorial interdependence and derivation of the images.

While there are notable exceptions, and not all the images produced on the topic of the

Americas include cannibals or references to cannibalism, the presence of these tendencies

supports the argument that the figure of the cannibal played a crucial role in the development

of European colonial discourses on the region. Transiting from the marvellous to the

versimile, from the excessive to narrative hyperbole, from the proto-ethnographic to the

classificatory, these images tell the story of Europe’s confrontation with and construction of

otherness. It is precisely through this approach that the overall value of this research is

established.

The cannibal seen

It has been argued that the images of cannibalism in the Americas played a continuing role in

European colonial discourses. However, there is one central question that must be explored.

Why were images produced in the first place? Weren’t the tales and descriptions of the

inhabitants sufficient to convey the ‘newness’ of what was being encountered overseas? What

function did these images cover that texts could not? As Elliot (1970) has argued, one of the

most difficult challenges in the European encounter with the uniqueness of America was the

process of conveying “this fact of difference […] to those who had not seen it” (1970:21); for

him, this problem of description “reduced writers and chroniclers to despair” (1970:21). The

process of observation was the first of four processes enacted in order to achieve a realistic

depiction of the unknown:

The second process was description – depicting the unfamiliar in such a way that it could be grasped by those who had not seen it. The third was dissemination – the diffusion of new information, new images and new ideas, so that they became part of the accepted stock of mental furniture. And the fourth was comprehension – the ability to come to terms with the unexpected and the unfamiliar, to see them as phenomena existing in their own right, and (hardest of all) to shift the accepted boundaries of thought in order to include them. (1970:18)

When the description of the ‘newness’ of the Americas was impossible to achieve through

verbal or written narration, pictures were constantly used. As Bestard and Contreras (1987)

explain, in many of the chronicles there is an insistence that the phenomena of the New

World is impossible to believe if one does not see it. It was this urgent need that may have

directly resulted in the production of the first images of the Americas. Perhaps these images

are the expression of what Foucault has described as the “almost exclusive privilege of sight

that is the sense of evidence and of the extended” (1966:145). Relying on the evidential

function of the image, these engravings were akin to the spectacle of the presentation of the

American native before the monarchs. In a way, these engravings were a graphic, spectacular

presentation of the Indian before an extended European audience.

The importance of sight in the Western world was well-established even before the

encounter with the New World. And with the exploration of the American continent, the

visual dimension gained further import. As Mason (1990) underlines, cosmographer Mercator

called history the Oculus Mundi (the Eye of the World) and Ortelius described geography as

the ‘Eye of History’. When Staden included the numerous woodcuts into his narrative of

captivity among the Tupi, what was at stake was the credibility of his tale. Hence, by

providing visual ‘evidence’ of the customs and artefacts of the cannibals, he was able to

confer authority upon his story. Other writers used these images in the same way, with the

likes of Benzoni, Fernández de Oviedo, Thévet, Léry, and Humboldt all fully illustrating their

first-hand experiences in the Americas. At this point, there was a tendency to send

exploratory expeditions accompanied by painters or draftsmen because it was deemed

necessary to include engravings in order to provide a fuller account of the exoticness

encountered in the continent (Bestard & Contreras 1987). In this sense, sight was used as

testimony. In Mason’s (1990) words, “truth and alterity are combined in the assertion of first-

hand observation (autopsy). The strangeness of the other is confirmed as true because it has

been witnessed by the speaker” (1990:176). The privileging of sight is, then, one of the core

values in colonial discourse. In the production of these images, visuality, knowledge and

power became enmeshed and directly contributed to the setting up of the exotic other in the

European imaginary.

In most cases, the engravings of the New World cannibal were the result not of direct

observation, but of illustration based on textual description. As Pellarano (1988) has

explained, in particular genres on the Americas the artist did not work from nature but

illustrated according to the descriptions in the texts at hand. This dialectic between the

written and the visual representation was to prove fundamental in establishing the figure of

the New World native as savage cannibal in the European imaginary. As Foucault (1983)

argues, the dialectic between written text and accompanying illustration is frequently

obviated but plays an important role in the process of representation:

On the page of an illustrated book, we seldom pay attention to the small space running above the words and below the drawings, forever serving them as a common frontier. It is there, on these few millimetres of white, the calm sand of the page, that are established all the relations of designation, nomination, description, classification. (1983:28)

It is in this relationship between text and illustration that the all-important dynamic of

translation takes place. This relationship has been addressed by Panofsky (1972), who has

argued that the production of historically and ethnographically inaccurate images in Western

art responds to a direct translation of descriptions found in literary sources, and that these

distortions respond, primarily, to the perpetuation of visual representational traditions. By

using written texts almost exclusively as the source for the production of these illustrations,

European artists and engravers gave preference to the evocative function of written

description(s) over more challenging issues, such as the assimilation of new forms, colours

and objects into European visual traditions. Hence, instead of producing illustrations which

were relatively accurate to the actual models present in the Americas, the artists crafted these

images through Eurocentric visual codes, giving priority to their decipherability by European

audiences. This representational conundrum – whether to base the illustration of newness on

the actual model or on written description – further reveals an intrinsic conflict in coming to

grips with difference. These images are, in essence, an example of a typically Western

representational strategy that seeks to place newness either in the realm of the abstract

(written description) or the concrete (material images). However, in both written description

and material images, the strategies for dealing with difference are severely limited. On the

one hand, many European explorers would despair at the inability of their pens to fully

describe the New World, calling instead on a Leonardo or a Michaelangelo to properly depict

the ‘wonders’ of the Americas. On the other hand, illustrations of the New World were never

fully free from textual description and literary narrative. Many of these images would depend

on the anchoring function of captions or on the sequentiality of successive narrative frames.

Hence, in these texts the relationship between the written description and the visual image is

a relationship that is never fully resolved but that, instead, oscillates between the poles of

textual abstraction and material concretion.

Furthermore, these images of the cannibal responded to a dual role assigned to the

image as producer of evidence but also as materialisation of fantasy. However, this apparent

contradiction had not been problematic in medieval representational regimes. As White

(1987) explains, fiction and fantasy in medieval narrative “would have posed no problems

before the distinction between real and imaginary events was imposed upon the

story” (1987:3). This was echoed in late medieval approaches to image-making:

In the visual arts, direct observation of reality was normally limited to details, supplementing rather than supplanting the use of traditional schemes, as the medieval artist worked from the exemplum rather than from life. (Panofsky cited in Mason 1990:21)

Hence, in the Western representational regimes of the early modern age, priority was given to

traditional representational schemes over a direct observation of reality. In this context, it was

as important that the New World native be represented according to the classical and

medieval tradition of the Plinian races than as a non-deformed whole man. It was this

referencing of past pictorial traditions that allowed the message of the cannibal to be

communicated more effectively to a European audience that was familiar with a particular

traditional representational regime and its conventions.

In this manner, the cannibal was caught in the middle of a tension between the

categories of fantasy (illusionism) and evidentiality (realism) that are functions of the image.

These two modalities of representation, as they have been theorised by Mitchell (1994) were

crucial in the development of colonial discourses on the New World and characterised the

entry of Europe into modernity. Yet these modalities rarely existed independently of each

other. As Kappler (1980) has argued, monsters are believable and instil fear precisely because

they are simultaneously myth and reality. Concurrently, it can be argued that the haunting

power of the cannibal depended on his construction as an other who was, like monsters, at the

same time reality and myth. The cannibal was the product both of the ‘truth’ and of

phantasia. Phantasia, defined since Plato as image, imagination, phantasm, illusion and

fancy, literally means image-making, and this modality’s function is to depict “absent things

as though they were present” (Kelley 1997:6). Yet a high degree of value was also assigned to

the ‘truthfulness’ of the image of the cannibal. In medieval tradition “commentators assumed

that because words were imperfect guides to meaning, images might ‘at some ideal level of

visual form’ be transparent to higher truths” (1997:6). Hence, the effectivity of the images of

cannibals depended precisely on the tension between these two modalities. In the New World,

fantasy existed in reality through the figure of the cannibal.

The images of the cannibal were, in short, strategic ways for negotiating difference in

a representational terrain where Eurocentric categories and practices secured the positional

superiority of Western discourses. Given that images can only affirm and never deny what

they are representing, the invention of a picture of the cannibal functioned as a sort of

nomination and form of possession. By producing an image of the native, he became

captured and paraded around in European books as evidence that savage peoples exist in the

fringes of the world and they look ‘exactly like this’. Moreover, pictures were crucial in

generating particular viewing positions for the spectator and subject positions for the referent

of the discourse. Again, the establishment of these positions involved a relationship of

valorisation and power between the two. The objectification of the other permitted a

systematic placing of the colonised “as ‘evidence’ of […] superiorities and

inferiorities” (Preziosi 1998:453). Hence, in this system of signification the other-come-

object is the signifier of a much wider discursive and material colonial project. In this

manner, the cannibal other was deployed as “cogent ‘evidence’ […] enabling us thereby to

articulate certain kinds of desirable (and undesirable) relations between ourselves and

others” (1998:518).

The other cannibal

As Todorov has argued, the encounter with America marked an important starting point in

“Europe’s attempt to assimilate the other, to deprive it of its exteriority and

alterity” (1982:251). Within this framework, the figure of the cannibal was a crucial site for

exploring difference. Why was cannibalism used as a symbolic site so disputed with regards

to meaning-making? Perhaps this was because, as a highly contested discursive site, the New

World cannibal housed a maximum tension of similarity and difference. Hence, the New

World cannibal represented a double layer of conceptual tension. On the one hand, the

cannibal practices of the American other were clear markers of the difference between the

‘civilised’ European and its ‘savage’ other. As Kearney explains, “‘civilised’ society could

confirm its own sense of unitary consensus by virtue of its contemplation of outcasts. Men

were men because they were not monsters” (2003:115). As Bennet states (in Karp & Kratz

2000), the other is presented as a category of visual spectacle which the audience is invited to

imagine itself in contrast with. Faced with the ‘savage’ other, Western viewers can confirm

their predominantly white, homogenous European culture. In van Alphen’s words, “alterity is

a code that helps identity to become meaningful, that is, to gain content. Alterity, then is

nothing, has no meaning in itself. It is merely a device for producing meaning” (1994:260).

Hence, there can be no meaningful identity without difference, and the cannibal was the

ultimate confirmation of a paradigm of European identity. On the other hand, the cannibal

abolished the dichotomy of similarity/difference through the very literal practice of

incorporation of the other into the selfsame. Perhaps what European representational regimes

were trying to control and fix once and for all through their possession of the American

cannibal was the paradox intrinsic to cannibalism: the fading of clear borders between the

self and the other.

Following Mitchell’s (1998) theorisation of the role of representation in the

production of the non-Westerner, three main features were crucial in establishing an intrinsic

divide between the civilised European and the savage cannibal. Firstly, the cannibal was

produced as radically different through essentialisation. This discursive strategy is based on

the depiction of the non-Westerner as the product of unchanging cultural essences and, in the

case of the American cannibal, the consumption of human flesh was constructed as a

defining, essential trait. For instance, in many of the travel narratives and New World

compendiums, the cannibal rites practiced by the native peoples are transposed as an essential

component of their selves. Thus, the Tupinamba do not cannibalise; the Tupi are cannibals.

Their cannibalism becomes their distinguishing trait. Secondly, the production of absences

plays a fundamental representational function in the construction of difference. This is

achieved through the establishment of a series of absences or silences in what is said about

the other. By silencing other potential accounts of the indigenous peoples (their development

of technologies and sciences, their established societies and cultural practices), the cultural

traits that held an ideological function useful for the legitimation of the colonial enterprise

became highlighted. The third discursive strategy that was deployed in order to reinforce the

border between the European ‘self’ and the cannibal was the othering process. By

representing the American Indian as a polar opposite of the West, be it through the trope of

the antipodes, through the figure of the wildman, or through the animalisation of the native,

differences became heightened and mobilised in order to serve very specific political and

practical functions.

Moreover, the genealogy of the corpus of the New World cannibal is a story of the

normalisation of difference. If the Indian was a cannibal, and cannibals marked the difference

between ‘savage’ and ‘civilised’, then the ultimate proof of the victory of European

colonialism was the eradication of cannibalistic practices. Immersed in the logic of what

Mignolo (1998) has called Occidentalism, the story of the cannibal is one of the

transformation of differences into values, the naturalisation of representations, and of a series

of interventions in favour of the reproduction of asymmetrical power relations. Hence, the

normalisation of the colonial other was achieved through the logic of Occidentalism. In this

logic, the other must be dissolved into the same. By considering the West and the non-West

as “autonomous and opposite entities” (1998:50), this opposition becomes resolved through

“the incorporation of non-Western […] communities in the triumphant march of Western

expansion” (1998:50). In order to vanquish the cannibal, colonial Europe had to cannibalise

him.

However, as Bhabha (1994) has theorised, the fixing of the colonial other is a never-

ending task. By placing the colonised “simultaneously inside and outside Western

knowledge” (McLeod 2000:53), the discourse of colonisation highlights the essential

difference between coloniser and colonised while also insisting on the common human

identity as a fundamental “moral and philosophical precondition for the civilizing

mission” (Spurr 1993:7). It is this ambivalence that has given the figure of the cannibal its

sustained presence in European colonial discourses, hence ensuring its repeatability in

different historical and geographical contexts. Once the cannibal had been physically and

symbolically expelled from the Americas through the triumph of colonisation, he took up

residence in Africa and the South Pacific. Suddenly, all kinds of cannibals started appearing

in regions that were the object of renewed European colonial interests. In the nineteenth and

early twentieth centuries’ scramble for Africa, images of African cannibals followed the same

discursive line that had been established in the Americas. The same phenomenon took place

in the colonisation of the South Pacific.

And the discourse of cannibalism persists in modern-day Latin America. When

abortion first became legalised in Mexico City in 2007, the mayor of the city was

excommunicated from the Catholic Church. The Bishop of Mexico argued, much in the same

tone of a Cortés or an Acosta, that abortion was a way of forcing Christians “to eat the flesh

immolated before the idols” (cited in Balboa 2007). The trope of the cannibal has not been

surpassed to this very day. In fact, as Foucault has argued, “there are monsters on the prowl

whose form changes with the history of knowledge” (cited in Kearney 2003:4); it will be

interesting to see what new forms the cannibal takes on and the function that these forms will

play in the constitution of our ideas of self-identity and difference.

The central question that has guided this dissertation has been if, and how, the

representation of Latin American indigenous peoples as cannibals has been a constant

presence and served a specific function in the deployment of European colonial discourses

and practices. Through the collection of a large corpus of images and their subsequent

analyses in chapters five, six and seven, it has been established that, effectively, the figure of

the cannibal was used frequently and consistently in the depictions of Latin American

natives. Moreover, it can be forwarded that, while there are notable exceptions to this manner

of representing the Amerindian, there is a strong tendency to represent the native as either

Edenic innocent or voracious cannibal in European colonial discourses. Recalling

Bartolovich’s approach to the topic, “cannibals as such emerge at this historical juncture

when Europeans encounter the ‘New World’” (1998:207, emphasis in original). The New

World cannibal marks “a very particular configuration [of man-eaters], inscribed with

colonialism and incipient capitalism” (1998:207). Visual proof of the cannibal’s existence

was used as a learned argument in favour of the hasty colonisation of the Americas or as the

categorical ‘evidence’ of humanity’s progress (Boulay 2001:74). The cannibal other was

observed, measured, registered, and documented: the cannibal was made the object of

colonial discourse. Yet it is key to understand that Latin American anthropophagy was

“fundamentally a European invention and obsession” (Subirats 2000:28). America was

situated in the fantasy world of the Europeans. As Seed points out, the discourses on the New

World were constructed in such a way that:

symbolically enacting colonial authority meant that ceremonies, actions, speeches, and records primarily targeted their fellow Europeans. It was above all their own countrymen and political leaders that colonists had to convince of the legitimacy of their actions, not indigenous peoples. (1995:11)

Hence, throughout the genealogy of the early visual representations of the Americas, the New

World cannibal assumed the varying symbolic functions established for him in European

discourses. In other words, the cannibal took on whatever shape was necessary for Europe to

be better able to discuss itself with itself. In the development of these discourses, the role of

the image was crucial, as was the othering strategy through which the production of the

cannibal subject was achieved.

From the fantastical dog-headed marginal races of the early modern era to the

sophisticated naked philosopher of the Enlightenment, the cannibal played a crucial role in

the construction of a European sense of identity; in all his different forms, the cannibal

marked the border separating the European self from the New World other. In sum, these

images depict nothing about cannibals themselves but everything about those who see

cannibals everywhere. Importantly, the cannibal continues to haunt Western discourses on the

Latin American; the role of the cannibal was, and continues to be, central to European

colonial discourses. With this understanding, as Latin Americans we can now recognise the

Western fear and vulnerability implicit in the perpetual hunt for monsters. Indeed,

cannibalism marks the “limits to Europe’s capacity to contain, assimilate, or […] destroy the

resistant societies of the region” (Colás 2001:130). Perhaps now having become fluent in

Prospero’s language, we can use it against him and for ourselves. And at the end of this

process we will be able to exclaim: “Mais je ne suis pas ton cannibal! Je suis mon cannibal à

moi!”.

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1 Excerpt from the dissertation Seeing Cannibals: European Colonial Discourses on the Latin American Other submitted to the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, 2009. The author wishes to acknowledge the generous funding from the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACyT) in the form of a full doctoral grant, and the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies partial tuition award, both of which made this research possible.

1 For a more detailed structural analysis of the de Bry’s series, see B. Bucher’s Icon and Conquest (1981).

2 De Bry’s engravings have proven so popular that in current publications on the New World his illustrations have graced texts that range from Andrade’s Revista de Antropofagia (1928), Bucher’s Icon and Conquest (1981), Greenblatt’s New World Encounters (1993), and Lestringant’s Cannibals (1997), among many others.

3 It is quite telling that the Montanus illustration proved so popular that it was subsequently reproduced by Manesson Mallet in 1683, Aveline in 1720, and van der Aa in 1729 in almost identical versions. Clearly this fantastical depiction of the Aztec god proved very popular, perhaps because of its sensationalistic value, perhaps because it resonated on the previous medieval discourses for representing the devil as a hideous monster.