Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Food and smell 187
lurks the determination of each person present to be a diner, not a dish. It is one of the
chief roles of etiquette to keep the lid on the violence which the meal being eaten
presupposes. (Visser 1992: 3–4)
Cannibalism or anthropophagy, as it is labelled by anthropologists and
historians, is the strongest of all our food taboos, if not society’s ultimate
taboo. It comes in many forms. There are the well-known cases of survival
cannibalism, where desperate victims of air disasters and shipwrecks eat their
dead comrades, or in extreme cases draw lots and sacrifice the living. Some
groups of people eaters, such as the Aztecs and those of Old Polynesia,
practised a kind of ritual cannibalism. This has a deeply religious significance,
usually involving the public killing and eating of an enemy. In other
groups, it can be a more private intimate practice; as part of a funerary ritual,
for example, whereby people consume parts of their dead kin (in Papua New
Guinea and Amazonia) or for medical and nutritional purposes (in parts of
China). Then, of course, there are the real-life Hannibal Lecters – ‘cannibal
killers’ who murder other people and eat their flesh. In their history of
cannibalism, Korn, Radice and Hawes document the ghoulish tales of some
of these psychopaths, from one of the first recorded cases, the sixteenthcentury
Sawney Beane and his cannibal family, who terrorized the Galloway
coast for about twenty-five years, through to the twentieth-century Jeffrey
Dahmer, whose murderous tastes turned from sadism and gay necrophilia to
cannibalism. 28
The technical term anthropophagus first appeared in English in the early
1500s (from Greek anthropos ‘man’ and phagein ‘eat’). It has spawned a
surprising number of alternative expressions such as anthropophaginian,
anthropophagist, anthropophagite and anthropophagizer that are rarely encountered.
The more familiar word cannibal is a Spanish corruption of what
was originally one of the forms of the ethnic name for the Caribs from the
West Indies, as used by Christopher Columbus in his journal of 1492. They
were reputed to be anthropophagi, and the term extended to include all people
eaters – probably reinforced by Columbus’ association of the term with the
Great Khan of the Mongols whom he expected to encounter on his voyage.
A later folk etymology that connected cannibal with the Latin canis ‘dog’
contributed to the term’s wide acceptance. 29
These days the expression cannibal, like primitive and savage, tends to be
avoided because of its racist overtones. The highly coloured cannibal narratives
of the early chroniclers were an effective way of justifying the activities
of the ‘civilized’ colonizers – human sacrifice and flesh-eating are ‘savage’
practices, and people who eat other people are not quite human. 30 European
invaders either converted them to Christianity or had few qualms about
wiping them out entirely. Perhaps knowing these details makes many guilty
westerners reluctant to believe accounts of cannibalism. They are the stuff of