The Coloniality of Perception: the Other as a Cannibal

Abstract

The article analyses the way in which Western ethnocentrism perceives the otherness revealed through the ‘discovery’ of the New World. One of the first neologisms to be coined by the expansion in the New Worldis the word “cannibal” which, as a cultural trope establishes the manner of understanding Others. Therefore, in the history of Latin American culture, cannibal should be rather associated with thinking and notions than with eating. The figure of the cannibal became one of the most obsessive and recurrent topes of Latin America, which dominated the colonial discourse about the Other. Although at the beginning of the conquest „cannibal” was employed with regard to the natives due to their barbarity, with the advance of colonisation the term began to denote Indians who resisted colonisation on the areas where workforce was in short supply. Thus the matter of cannibalism is less and less an issue related to the consumption of human flesh by Indians, and more and more a consumption of the workforce by the encomenderos.

 The testimony of such Europeans as Hans Staden, André Thevet and Jean de Léry, who spend some time among the Brazilian Tupinamba Indians in the latter half of the 16^th century, prove that the ways in which cannibalism was presented have little to do with pure ethnography, whereas the expansion of the European trade capitalism becomes the core context. The relations of those travellers make a distinction between tribes considered to be allies, whose anthropophagy is presented as ritual, and the hostile tribes from outside the trade, whose cannibalism is motivated by sheer pleasure of eating human flesh. 

 In the early 19^th century, when the Latin American countries gained independence, the cannibal trope is still present in the reality of the continent, albeit in a mutated form. In the 20^th century the cannibal trope is replaced by the metaphor of Kaliban, which symbolizes that which is Latin American.