Unspeakable Rites: Cultural Reticence and the Cannibal Question

Social Research, Spring, 1999 by Claude Rawson

So we know Swift knew, as we know Montaigne knew, and the question arises of why, in a work whose cruel fantasy is for the most part uncompromisingly given its head, the last painful twist is withheld. Swift is not an author who usually shrinks from last painful twists, and the omission is even more striking than Montaigne's, whose own claim to a special truthfulness is that he takes his reflections wherever the subject might lead. Arguably, things were easier for Swift than for Montaigne, if self-implication in the cannibal idea is the obstacle to literal disclosure, since the savage old Irish could be bracketed, in the way of Spenser and others, with "all savage Nations." Swift may have blocked off that route for himself by redefining the Irish as a whole to include his own Anglo-Irish people, thus allowing them to fall, in the fiction, under an imputation traditionally reserved only for natives. Or, perhaps like other Anglo-Irishmen, he may already have been nursing that sense of a likeness between the Irish and the English, which is based on a recognition of ethnic relatedness and on a continuous cultural interpenetration, and is currently the subject of some attention: a perceived kinship variously registered by Shaw and others, including the critic Declan Kiberd, who sees the two groups as so similar that they need, and indeed deliberately mythologize, their differences from one another in order to define their own selves. It would not have been necessary for Swift to adopt the latter view in order to feel an uneasiness of cultural self-implication in a too literal application of the cannibal slur.

Cannibalism cannot be contemplated among "us," even in our supposedly most clear-sighted and ruthless exposures of ourselves, except in a metaphorical form. The possibilities of a literal application to "ourselves" as distinct from others are a matter of endlessly fascinating speculative self-implication and tease, but usually blocked, in the last analysis, by strategies that range from soft-pedaling evasions or circumventions, as in Montaigne, to barefaced denial. A French anthropological joke has an anthropologist asking a tribal chief if there are any cannibals left in his tribe, to which the chief replies, "Not any more: we ate the last one yesterday." It is widely reported that tribes which are thought or known to practice anthropophagy routinely deny it, ascribing the practice instead to a neighboring tribe. This seems to be the pattern involved in the distinction between Arawaks, who told Columbus about the man-eating Caribs, and the Caribs themselves, from whom our word "cannibal" derives. It is a secondary need of ours that our "us" should be balanced not by one but by two "thems," a good and a bad, an interesting phenomenon there is no time to discuss here, but which is probably not unconnected with that preference for tripartite rather than binary divisions that has given us the concept of a "third world."

At all events, the instinct to affirm that the other tribe is "cannibal" seems universal, and belongs to a long history of imperial imputations. All civilizations have always had multiple barbarians to despise, but each often identifies special or typifying groups. To the Greeks, it was the Scythians and their neighbors who were cannibals; to the Romans, at a particular point, the early Christians; to later European empires, successively Amerindians, Africans, Polynesians. According to Arens, New Guinea has now taken over from Africa. It is indeed probable that a geopolitical history of empires could be written by charting the successive places where a dominant culture located its cannibal other. The common factor in the long history of cannibal imputations is the combination of denial of it in ourselves and attribution of it to "others," whom "we" wish to defame, conquer, appropriate, or "civilize." In the present atmosphere of postcolonial guilt and imperial self-inculpation, the culture of denial has turned outward, in defense of those once accused of "unspeakable rites," down to the recent academic fantasy that no people has ever practiced cannibalism as an authorized tribal activity, which makes from the undoubted fact of politically motivated imputation a dubious inference that the imputation was always false.