Cannibal talk the man-eating myth and human sacrifice in the South Seas - Obeyesekere, Gananath (University of California Press, 2005)
Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002
Includes bibliographical references and index
Introduction: Anthropology and the maneating myth -- "British cannibals" : dialogical misunderstandings in the South Seas -- Concerning violence : a backward journey into Maori anthropophagy -- Savage indignation : cannibalism and the parodic -- The later fate of heads : cannibalism, decapitation, and capitalism -- Cannibal feasts in nineteenth century Fiji : seamen's yarns and the ethnographic imagination -- Narratives of the self : Chevalier Peter Dillon's cannibal adventures -- On quartering and cannibalism and the discourses of savagism -- Conclusion
In this radical reexamination of the notion of cannibalism, Gananath Obeyesekere offers a fascinating and convincing argument that cannibalism is mostly "cannibal talk," a discourse on the Other engaged in by both indigenous peoples and colonial intruders that results in sometimes funny and sometimes deadly cultural misunderstandings. Turning his keen intelligence to Polynesian societies in the early periods of European contact and colonization, Obeyesekere deconstructs Western eyewitness accounts, carefully examining their origins and treating them as a species of fiction writing and seamen's