Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World (Early American Places, 14)

**A comparative history of cross-cultural encounters and the critical role of cannibalism in the early modern period** Cannibalism, for medieval and early modern Europeans, was synonymous with savagery. Humans who ate other humans, they believed, were little better than animals. The European colonizers who encountered Native Americans described them as cannibals as a matter of course, and they wrote extensively about the lurid cannibal rituals they claim to have witnessed. In this definitive analysis, Kelly L. Watson argues that the persistent rumors of cannibalism surrounding Native Americans served a specific and practical purpose for European settlers. These colonizers had to forge new identities for themselves in the Americas and find ways to not only subdue but also co-exist with native peoples. They established hierarchical categories of European superiority and Indian inferiority upon which imperial power in the Americas was predicated. In her close read of letters, travel accounts, artistic renderings, and other descriptions of cannibals and cannibalism, Watson focuses on how gender, race, and imperial power intersect within the figure of the cannibal. Watson reads cannibalism as a part of a dominant European binary in which civilization is rendered as male and savagery is seen as female, and she argues that as Europeans came to dominate the New World, they continually rewrote the cannibal narrative to allow for a story in which the savage, effeminate, cannibalistic natives were overwhelmed by the force of virile European masculinity. Original and historically grounded, __Insatiable Appetites__ uses the discourse of cannibalism to uncover the ways in which difference is understood in the West. In this comparative history of cross-cultural encounters in the early North Atlantic world, Kelly L. Watson argues that the persistent rumours of cannibalism surrounding Native Americans served a specific and practical purpose for European settlers. As they forged new identities and found ways to not only subdue but also co-exist with native peoples, the cannibal narrative helped to establish hierarchical categories of European superiority and Native inferiority upon which imperial power in the Americas was predicated Cover Title Page Copyright Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Inventing Cannibals: Classical and Medieval Traditions 2. Discovering Cannibals: Europeans, Caribs, and Arawaks in the Caribbean 3. Conquering Cannibals: Spaniards, Mayas, and Aztecs in Mexico 4. Converting Cannibals: Jesuits and Iroquois in New France 5. Living with Cannibals: Englishmen and the Wilderness 6. Understanding Cannibals: Conclusions and Questions Notes Bibliography Index Insatiable Appetites offers a thoughtful and wide-ranging analysis of cannibalism as a crucial ingredient of European imperialism during the early modern period. Watson finds references to cannibalism as a savage manifestation of disordered sex and gender in the accounts of Spanish, French, and English chroniclers across four centuries before it finally gives way to a new representation of cannibalistic men in the nineteenth century