Thinking about Cannibalism.pdf - Lucina Birth Services

THINKING ABOUT CANNIBALISM 489
By the end of the eighteenth century, as maritime exploration turned its focus
to the scientific classification of animal and human species (Boulay 2001, p. 32),
and with the death and disappearance of the navigator Defresne (killed and eaten
by the Maori), the disappearance of De Lange and La Perouse, and the death of
Cook in 1779, the idealized image of the noble savage was no longer tenable. The
stereotype of the noble savage had always contained within it its mirror opposite,
the ignoble savage. In this new location, the dualism became gendered in the form
of the beautiful, enticing siren and the malicious, bestial cannibal, a distinction
that, as colonial intentions became more focused, would be extended to civilized,
white Polynesians and savage, black Melanesians. In the South Pacific, the Western
sense of self had produced another fantasy of longing and transgression: a world
of sirens without men and cannibals without women
(Boulay 2001, p. 114).
The construction of the stereotype of the South Seas savage took place
on many
fronts. Beginning in London in 1851 and ending in 1931 in Paris, international
exibitions proclaimed the superiority of Western civilization. Visitors to the 1889
Paris exhibition were invited to view the skulls of primitive
men
organized by the
exhibition's director of anthropology, illustrating the ladder of races with whites
at the summit. One hundred "kanaks" were
imported from New Caledonia for the
1931 Paris exhibit, where they were installed in the Bois de Boulogne, a park for
exotic plants and animals. Newspapers ran stories about two sensational attractions:
wild cannibals and 1000 crocodiles. The "kanaks" were
subsequently exhibited as
savage cannibals and polygnists in a number of German towns, although most of
the Polynesians
were
practicing Catholics (Le Fur 2001, pp. 44-45).
The image of the primitive savage was also a creation directed at young minds.
A pedagogical discourse on the antipodes
was
developed in nineteenth-century
French atlases and encyclopedias designed for children. A 1910 history book for
primary schools still noted that barbarians are people who do not know how to
cultivate the earth, have no metal nor schools, and are ignorant. In addition, they
do not know how to nourish, clothe, or house themselves properly, they are always
quarelling with one another, and they have no understanding of justice. They are
the reverse of all that is civilized. Jules Verne's novels, in which children survive
a terrible confrontation with Pacific cannibals, represent a gerne of adventure
stories reflecting these views. Between 1880 and 1910 his contemporary, Louis
Boussenard, published
more than 50 similar adventure books: Le Tour du Monde
d'un Gamin de Paris (1880) and Aventures d'un Gamin de Paris en Oc?anie (1890)
were among the most popular (Boulay 2001, pp. 146-62).
Nineteenth-century missionary literature was particularly skillful at creating
an
image of primitivism. Called on to explain the existence of savagery in divine cre
ation, the ecclesiastics proposed that the long migration of the sons of Ham from
the banks of the Euphrates, passing through India, had come to rest in Melane
sia. Thus, one finds among the blacks in Africa, Asia, and Oceania "loathsome
vices.. .and cannibalism in all its hideous subtleties" (Boulay 2001, pp. 104-9).
Such nineteenth-century romanticism, which dwelt on an
image of the heroic
missionary marching toward the supreme sacrifice, perhaps destined to impress