Faerieland’s Cannibal Metaphysics: Spenser with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

Abstract

This essay places Spenser in the company of the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and explores how ontological pluralism might afford a rich, provocative approach to the worlds of The Faerie Queene. We begin with an example of how Viveiros de Castro’s work might allow a specific episode from Book V to be reimagined. We then offer an overview of his anthropological writings, exploring both his historical account of European encounters with Amerindians in the sixteenth century and his rejection of the nature/culture distinction as typically deployed by anthropologists in favor of a “multinaturalism” informed by Amazonian cosmologies. Noting how Viveiros de Castro’s rethinking of cannibalism, as a practice that involves incorporating the perspective of the other, resonates with the place of this practice in Book VI of Spenser’s poem, we consider the symbolic entanglements of the Salvage Nation with the key themes of the Book of Courtesy. Cannibalism emerges not just as a projection of European fantasies but as a way of reckoning with the constitutive role of absolute alterity.