Wednesday, 18 November 2015 5 p.m., room 9-A

Cannibals, Christians, and the Ethnographic Imagination: Montaigne and his Contemporaries

Columbus never realized he was in a New World, but the Caribbean presented him with strikingly new cultures where one of his Arawak informants confirmed to him that the Caribs [or “Canibs”] were anthropophages – eaters of human flesh. Over the next few centuries cannibalism would become one of the defining traits or representations of the “barbarism” of many of the peoples of the New World and, therefore, of the presumed superiority of European cultures as they took possession of the recently discovered continents. Yet the great French humanist Michel de Montaigne famously questioned this claim to cultural superiority in his Essays (1580). Martin’s talk will explore Montaigne’s critique of his European contemporaries within the broader context of the fashioning of an early modern ethnography of the cannibal through the writings of a number of French, Spanish, Portuguese, and German travelers to the New World. Real or imagined, the European encounter with cannibalism played a major role in the shaping of what we might call the ethnographic imagination of early modern Europe.