Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History(52)
I was perfectly confounded and amazed; nor is it possible for me to express the horror of my mind at seeing the shore spread with skulls, hands, feet, and other bones of human bodies; and particularly I observed a place where there had been a fire made, and a circle dug in the earth . . . where I supposed the savage wretches had sat down to their human feastings upon the bodies of their fellow-creatures.
After spewing his lunch (the suitable response of any civilized Englishman), Crusoe hurries back to his side of the island and his “castle” where, for the next two years, he fixates about “the wretched, inhuman custom of their devouring and eating one another up.” Crusoe fantasizes gruesome plans for revenge, including one in which he sets off explosives under the cannibal cooking pit and another in which he blows off their heads from a sniper’s nest. While brooding over his own obsession, Crusoe begins to doubt whether the savages actually knew that they were committing horrendous crimes. In a rare instance of 18th-century clarity regarding Columbus and those who followed him, Crusoe wonders whether killing the cannibals would “justify the conduct of the Spaniards in all their barbarities practiced in America, where they destroyed millions of these people.”
Initially, the fictional castaway decides to steer clear of the savages, but he winds up killing one of them while rescuing “Friday”—a cooking pot escapee, who is himself a cannibal. Once the main party of man-eaters departs, Crusoe and Friday return to the scene of the cannibal feast.
The place was covered with human bones, the ground dyed with their blood, and great pieces of flesh left here and there, half eaten, mangled, and scorched. . . . All the tokens of the triumphant feast they had been making there, after a victory over their enemies.
After piling up the body parts and setting them ablaze, Crusoe observes that Friday “still had a hankering stomach after some of the flesh,” and he lets the savage know in no uncertain terms that death awaits should he give in to his cravings. Friday quickly gets his own point across (presumably using a combination of miming and interpretive dance) that he “would never eat man’s flesh anymore.”
Years later, Crusoe and Friday come upon another cannibal banquet, and this time the next course appears to be Bearded White Guy. At this point, all of Crusoe’s previously developed ideas about non-involvement in local customs are put to the test. But after downing a few shots of rum, the castaway and his lethal sidekick (“now a good Christian”) wade in, and “Let fly . . . in the name of God,” slaughtering 17 or 18 of the 21 man-eaters, with guns, swords, and a hatchet.
Robinson Crusoe had a major impact on readers all over the world. According to University of Sorbonne professor of literature Frank Lestringant, “Defoe’s work is an effective contribution to the black legend of the Cannibals. It represents the normal English attitude towards them throughout the ages of discovery and colonization.” In short, cannibalism was an abomination and cannibals were to be avoided, since God would ultimately sort out their fate. But if that didn’t work, anyone who practiced man-eating could be enslaved or killed by any method, no matter how cruel or gruesome it might appear.
In 1890, Sir James Frazer (1854–1941) produced The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, a massive, globe-spanning, comparative work on mythology and religion. Much of this material was accompanied by a hefty dose of archaeological support, and Frazer’s enormously popular compendium of rites, practices, and religions greatly influenced the emerging discipline of anthropology. Throughout his magnum opus, Frazer discussed the practice of cannibalism and other barbarous customs. He also advised his readers not to be fooled into “judging the savage by the standard of European civilization.”
Frazer pointed to several African tribes whose religious rites included “the custom of tearing in pieces the bodies of animals and of men and then devouring them raw. . . . Thus the flesh and blood of dead men are commonly eaten and drunk to inspire bravery, wisdom, or other qualities for which the men themselves were remarkable.” According to Frazer, this type of cannibalism also took place among the mountain tribes of southeastern Africa, the Theddora and Ngarigo tribes of southeastern Australia, the Kamilaroi of New South Wales, the Dyaks of Sarawak, the Tolaalki of Central Celebes, the Italones and Efugao of the Philippine Islands, the Kai of German New Guinea, the Kimbunda of Western Africa, and the Zulus of Southern Africa.
During the first half of the 20th century, The Golden Bough influenced an array of major authors including Joseph Campbell, T. S. Eliot, Robert Graves, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, and William Butler Yeats. As previously mentioned, Frazer’s work also became an enormously popular resource for the budding anthropologists who were beginning to trek into some of the most remote regions on the planet. Although each subsequent generation found flaws in Fraser’s work or had to modify certain aspects of it, there is little doubt that his stance on the prevalence of cannibalism among indigenous people colored the mindset of many a fresh-faced anthropologist. As a result, when such groups were encountered, they were assumed to be savages whose behavioral repertoire would likely encompass all manner of strange rites including cannibalism. Contributing to this attitude was perhaps the most well known of these new anthropologists, Margaret Mead (1901–1978), who was famously quoted about some of the Pacific Islanders she was studying, “The natives are superficially agreeable but they go in for cannibalism, headhunting, infanticide, incest, avoidance and joking relationships, and biting lice in half with their teeth.”