Regimes of Cannibality: A Peripheral Perspective on War, Colonization and Culture

There are many evidences of anthropophagy in the history of mankind, from the ritual preparation and consumption of the brain mass of dead men in the Paleolithic age (2), to the recent erotic rituals of a discreet German citizen. However, the cannibalistic act in itself is considered unacceptable due to reasons that can be successively referred to the intolerable and the unthinkable in most civilizations. However, the harshest rejection seems to come from Western culture. In fact, the silence about and condemnation of the cannibalistic act sets the ego of the modern individual against the cannibalistic imprint of the irrational, where one finds the morbid failure to distinguish between anthropophagy, insensitiveness and cruelty, in short, what any missionary might regard as a basic form of demonism. The effects of such a judgment are seen in the indifference and fear of researchers who approach this subject, sometimes with the best intentions. (3) Taking a different path, this essay argues that cannibalism is not just a verifiable social fact but may also clarify a considerable part of the dynamics of the death impulse in different social formations. But, instead of regarding the problem as a dilemma--about the differences between the logical formulation of arguments that guarantee a scientific 'foundation' for the thanatic impulse that characterizes cannibalism and the reconstruction of mythical traditions, ritual procedures and symbolic systems--I think it would be more productive to choose a strategy which runs in both directions: an ethnographic interpretation as well as a deconstruction of the limits that every age places on the topic of cannibalism, from a conceptual perspective that acts as a framework for the general dynamics of Latin American culture. In this sense, the denial of cannibalism by Hispanic culture is part of a general project aimed at the abolition of Amerindian thought as a prior condition for the construction of a new type of individual and the implementation of new ways of individuation. The result has been an interposed identity, that is, a simulacrum of a subject that appears before the conquered man as ideal by means of the linguistic, policing, and institutional power of the conqueror. Such a construction of the subject ends up producing a collective unconscious that, paradoxically, puts the stigma of cannibalism (4) on the initial identity of the indigenous people of America, but at the same time, refuses to recognize the trace of cannibal thought and ritual in the constitution of psychic life, as a vector that guides the destiny of the flows of desire and leaves an imprint on the processes of social inscription. (5) In the methodic search for such a relationship between the traces and the act of cannibalism, it is interesting to consider certain research guidelines set forth by Foucault and Derrida. On the one hand, according to Foucault, it would be necessary to describe the field of enunciates on cannibalism that begins with the chroniclers of the Indies and which, along with other hypotheses and results, became an important nucleus of Americanist ethnography in the second half of the 20th century. On the other, Derrida, through his proposal for interpreting the traces, footsteps and gestures that characterize language, opens up the possibility of addressing the mythical and ritual language about cannibalism and its 'cultural metonymies', as a part of a written archive preceding the spoken word and the alphabetical practice of writing. (6) The result is a paradoxical conjunction between the archaeological method that provides certain archiving techniques and dynamics, and the deconstructive obsession with pointing at everything that proves to be unarchivable in the very emergence of the archive. (7) From this point on, I assume that these two moments can be incorporated as alternating, successive motions of an archival dynamics that records the appearance--while recreating the metonymical absence--of the cannibal act. …