Cătălin Avramescu
An Intellectual History of Cannibalism
Translated from the Romanian by Alistair Ian Blyth
Princeton University Press, August 2011 (originally published 2003). 350 pp.

Eating people is wrong. But why? People of different sorts, at different times, expressing their views in different idioms, have had different answers to that question. Right now, our culture isn’t obsessed with cannibalism, though we are still unwholesomely fascinated enough to buy books and go to movies about anthropophagy among the Uruguayan rugby team that ran out of food after their plane crashed in the Andes; or about “the Milwaukee cannibal,” Jeffrey Dahmer; or Armin Meiwes’s successful, internet-mediated search for a voluntary victim (and meal) in Germany in 2001; or, most famously, about the (still controversial) dietary practices of the Donner party stranded in the Sierra Nevada mountains in 1846.

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But it hasn’t always been this way: Cannibalism was once taken very seriously indeed, and the Romanian philosopher Cătălin Avramescu’s learned and brilliantly told intellectual history of anthropophagy recovers the cannibal’s once central place in formal thought about what it means to be human. Commentators from antiquity through at least the 18th century needed first to establish whether cannibalism actually existed as a collective practice. Everyone knew of spectacular acts of individual cruelty littering the historical record and populating folk memory. In Greek myth, there was the multicourse meal Atreus served his brother Thyestes, payback for cuckolding him. Very tasty, said Thyestes, whereupon Atreus had the last course brought in: the heads of Thyestes’s children, whose bodies had gone into the other courses. However, from Antiquity, most interest historically centered on nations or races routinely engaging in anthropophagy. Ancient Greek and Roman writers knew that the Scythians and the Issedones — peoples living to the north and east of the Black Sea and in Central Asia — were man-eaters, and Herodotus referred to a people known as Androphagi to the north of the Scythians: “their manners are more savage than those of any other race. They neither observe justice, nor are governed, by any laws … They are cannibals.” In the fourth century, it was later reported, St. Jerome saw with his own eyes a people called the Scots (“a British race”) “eating human flesh,” and related how,

'When these men came in the forests upon herds of swine and sheep, and cattle, they would cut off the buttocks of the shepards and paps [breasts] of the woman and hold these for their greatest delicasy.'

It was the discovery of the Americas, and especially Columbus’s voyages to the West Indies, that gave the European imagination more cannibals than ever existed before. Indeed, Columbus discovered cannibals almost at the moment he discovered America: The word cannibal came into European languages via Columbus’s usage, probably from the Carib people he encountered. Trying to make out both where he was and the identity of the indigenous peoples he encountered, he wrote that “there are men with one eye and others with dogs’ snouts who eat men. On taking a man they behead him and drink his blood and cut off his genitals,” and on November 23, 1492, the word “canibales” appears in his log for the first time. “Cannibal” was the proper name of a defined group of people-who-eat-people that came to designate anyone who ate human flesh. In The Tempest, the name of the wild-man Caliban has been widely understood as a loose anagram of cannibal.