| Abstract [eng] |
In this article the author discusses the practice of cannibalism by, asking why the practice was popularly attributed to distant people long after Europe had exchanged the myths of classical antiquity for the cold and sceptical application of human reason to the wonders of the unknown world. The article discusses Jan Nederveen Pieterse's (1992) opinion about cannibalism as the fearsome trait of those just across the border, just beyond the line that divided the known from the unknown. To explain the persistence of cannibal imagery in the West, and its attribution to the inhabitants of Africa just as the conquest and pillage of Africa by European powers began Pieterse points out that cannibalism earlier served to position Europe's "others" in a hierarchy of exclusion and denigration, delineating the moral boundaries of European "civilization" against the "savagery" of others. Another part of the article analyses cannibal humour, from the late nineteenth century onwards; and from 1980 to the present, that of mechanized cannibalism. The stereotypes that clash here may well reveal profound historical antagonisms, may well embody historical relations between the black and the white. But to disentangle these images from each other, to see them deriving from different "histories" or orders of signification, to see difference emerge from such a binary simplicity, these things require a look at the mechanisms and politics of displacement. |
