In my family, stories of our Fijian ancestors' cannibalism have been irreverently recycled in tale-telling moments laced with both solemnity and the absurd. I never seriously questioned the reality of the stories, accepting instead their mythical quality and their underlying social allegory. With almost a wink and a nudge these tales of past cannibalism come to life as fables that nearly always taper off into the redemption of being civilized. As I explore in this article, for us as for many who engage cannibal stories, cannibalism refers to more than the cultural practice of anthropophagy. In the wake of William Arens' provocative critique of this meta-myth, it has become more difficult in recent years to uncritically accept and repeat claims of other peoples' cannibalism.Footnote ¹ Studies by a generation of scholars of history and culture have ensured that the study of cannibalism now is as likely to interrogate those that view and seek it, as it is to examine those reputed to practice it.Footnote ² Anthropologies of tourism and cultural critiques too have cemented its conceptualization as an enduring discourse of savagery.Footnote ³

The rendering of cannibalism as a knowledge that exists independently of the cultural and culinary practices of others has not gone uncontested and in heated exchanges the quest for cannibals has been defended as a legitimate, if historically fraught, anthropological pursuit.Footnote ⁴ To a large extent, however, these debates have missed important opportunities to explore the past with which cannibalism has become so irrevocably entwined. The idea of systematized cannibalism has become emblematic not just of the recognitions of “self and others” that accompanied historical encounters, but of positions of alterity peculiarly “colonial” in historical character and form.Footnote ⁵ Regardless of whether or not, or in what form cannibalism has actually existed in the past, discourses reifying it have been notoriously diagnostic, particularly during the colonial era. As is discussed below, since the word “cannibal” emerged from colonial conquest in South America, wherever claims of ritualistic cannibalism have tended to proliferate, so too has colonialism and conquest. The observation that “cannibalism” was the etymological offspring of modern colonialism is, of course, not to suggest that the practice of anthropophagy is a mere invention of the era. In fact, it says nothing of the cultural practice at all. Rather it alerts us to the careful distinctions we must make when we talk about past cannibalism, between empirical cultural practices and the political and social constructions that dovetailed with a range of discourses enabling and compelling colonial activity. Such a distinction is signified here by referring to the actual practice of cannibalism with a small “c,” and the discourse describing and representing it with a capital “C,” or as a proper noun. In this way I hope to indicate the central argument of this article, which is that Cannibalism was an effective and deployable tool of empire.

Explorations of Cannibalism's history have tended to suspend deeper analysis of the historical power relations and processes that gave it physical and administrative form in past colonial contexts. This article seeks to explore Cannibalism's life as an “extremely complex dialogue” through its historical manifestations in and of sites of colonial activity.Footnote ⁶ Similarly, Gananath Obeyesekere's work on the life of Cannibalism in colonial relations in New Zealand explored its functionality for those who branded cannibals as well as those who were branded. Fighting terror with terror, he speculated, Maori in New Zealand engaged European interest in cannibalism as a tailored resistance to colonial incursion.Footnote ⁷ At the same time he suggests that the self-professed cannibalism of converted Maori who testified to an abandoned savage past, was a self-primitivization, or an internalization of discourses of rule. Cannibalism, the discourse, in other words was utilized as a “weapon of the weak” at the same time as it created governable subjects. A complex dialogue indeed.Footnote ⁸

Obeyesekere's speculative linking of the life of Cannibalism with the conditions of colonial encounters begins to extend existing debates in fruitful directions. But to properly examine Cannibalism as a means of diagnosing historical patterns of colonization, we need to view its operation not just in the discursive realms of public spectacle, but also in those private archival moments closest to the decision-making of empires. This article seeks to ground the evolution and deployment of Cannibalism in a specific colonial context where the tensions and negotiations of contact, control, and administration were played out. I leave aside the question of the extent to which Cannibalism, as a cumulative body of knowledge, leaves a superficial account of past anthropophagic practices, and instead explore its life amidst the operations of empire.Footnote ⁹ This article focuses on Fiji in the western Pacific, which was produced as a popular and available site of colonial activity during the early nineteenth century. Cannibalism epitomized Fiji in Europe, Australia, and the United States, where a vibrant market emerged in postcards, travel narratives, missionary reminiscences, exhibits or traveling freak shows displaying human and other specimens such as “knives and forks used for eating human flesh … [and] fish hooks made from human bone.”Footnote ¹⁰ In exploring this, this article historically locates Cannibalism in a wider colonial “contact zone,” exploring the possibilities of reading its “encrypted traces” of colonial cultural practices.Footnote ¹¹

This article is also a study of the discursive dimensions of the violence that mediated colonialism's contact zones. In the western Pacific these were shaped by the traffic of tourists, speculators, settlers, labor-hunters, and missionaries who began arriving in numbers after the 1840s. The arrivals of settlers and speculators from the United States and the Australian colonies rose significantly in Fiji during the 1860s, along with their characteristic settler-colonial hunger for land and labor. This period of informal colonization culminated in the annexation of the islands by Britain in 1874. The orthodox narrative of this event tends to be benign, in which the self-titled Tui Viti (King of Fiji) Ratu Seru Cakobau, offered the islands with loloma (love and trust) to Britain. Indeed Ratu Cakobau was successful in negotiating terms of settlement that safeguarded Indigenous land rights and political paramountcy—a legacy that has lasted into the unsettled present. But as I argue below, Ratu Cakobau's decisions were made in the context of agitation, violence, and unsettlement within and between indigenous Fijian landowners and white settlers. On the one hand Fiji was a frontier being constructed by administrators and settlers alike as a potential settler colony whose cheap land and labor could be readily appropriated. On the other, Cakobau's decision was not representative of all Fijian chiefs, particularly those from the western interior of the main island Vitilevu, who resisted both his ascendancy and the creeping alienation of their land. The resistance of people from these interior Colo provinces from 1867–1876 culminated in what has been dismissively termed Fiji's “Little War,” while ongoing simmering uprisings were frequently conceived of simply as cargo cults.Footnote ¹²

This article gives emphasis to the turbulent period of transition from 1867–1876, when Fiji transformed from an informal to a formal British colony. At this time, we can see discursive traditions of Cannibalism being enabled and appropriated by expressions of violence and force. Indelibly linked with racial discourses, the reputed existence of cannibalism was also framed as an atavistic tendency capable of explaining acts of rebellion in ways that de-politicized and infantilized indigenous resistance. At the same time, however, I argue that it provided a political expression of disaffection when used by indigenous Fijians in opposition to colonial rule, itself deeply symbolized by Cannibalism's dichotomized antithesis in Fiji—Christianity. Cannibalism—the discourse rather than the empirical practice—was therefore an essential conceptual force shaping colonial relations from all sides of colonial divides. While the discourse was popularly, even playfully, constituted by missionary texts, adventure fantasies, “seamen's yarns,” and tourist reminiscences, it was also doctrinal with a harder ideological edge when deployed as a strategy of dispossession. In arguing this, this paper builds on a healthy body of scholarship on the relationship between representation and colonization in the Pacific region by such notable scholars as Bernard Smith, Margaret Jolly, Bronwen Douglas, and Nicholas Thomas.Footnote ¹³ As they have explored, Cannibalism was a key dimension of this wider discursive regime that racially profiled the Pacific as effectively as the “knitted-together strength” of any Orientalism.Footnote ¹⁴ It marked the islands like surveyors' pegs as available for exploitation while also implying the paradigms of colonialism's moral commerce. The significance of this goes beyond a history of colonialism in the tiny islands of Fiji. In a contemporary context where Cannibalism still has currency, it may yet alert us to the lingering dynamics of relations of power derived from a colonial era.

DISCOVERING COLONIES AND CHARTING THE LAWLESS FRONTIER

From the Anthropophagi of the classics to the witches, wild men, wild women, and peripheral monsters of the Middle Ages, man-eating has a distinguished history in Europe of marking cultural, social, and religious distance.Footnote ¹⁵ As Peter Hulme, Hugh Honour, and others have explored, following 1492 and Columbus' “discovery” of the man-eating Caribs—from whom the word “cannibal” eventually derived—Europe's expansion would provide a new language and new sites for these old devices.Footnote ¹⁶ As generic ideas of man-eating evolved into Cannibalism, they mutually permeated the iconography of Europe's colonization of the New World and, with other such emblematic savagery as human sacrifice, was integrated into such emergent colonial ideologies as the Law of Nations. As the sixteenth-century soul-searching of Spanish defenders of Amerindian rights would find, although Native Americans were deserving of natural justice, pre-emptive war via which conquest of sovereignty and territory could be claimed was legal when waged against a people known to live against the Laws of Nature. Anthropophagy, particularly of the cannibalistic variety known to exist amongst natives, was the ultimate unnatural act, and being systemic it condemned entire societies to legitimated and legal conquest.Footnote ¹⁷

The historical significance of Cannibalism's etymology is not that branding enemies or victims as man-eaters was something peculiarly colonial. Rather it emphasizes the distinctiveness of Cannibalism itself, as a brand of otherness or man-eating that was deeply entwined with and historically defined by colonial expansion. Discoveries of it signaled and shaped forthcoming conquest in spatial and later racial ways, which converged with the harder sophistry of colonialism's legal and moral footwork. In this first section I consider this process as it unfolded in Fiji. My purpose is not to question or even comment on the empirical existence of anthropophagic practices or rituals amongst Fijians of the early colonial period. Rather, in exploring the importation with early explorers, missionaries, and travelers of a colonially derived readiness to find the exotic and bizarre, including Cannibalism, I trace the opening up of a colonial space. In public portrayals, Cannibalism advertised availability, suitability, and to some extent inevitability. On a cruder level, it justified colonial activity and highlighted the necessity of the civilizing mission. As such, Cannibalism was reified as a presence that charted the borders of a Pacific frontier, and governed moral and legal standards more conducive to colonial profit making.

The first accounts in Europe of Fijian Cannibalism arrived with Cook's best-selling accounts of his explorations in the South Pacific. On his third voyage in 1784, while in Tonga, he wrote of a place he was told about, “Feejee,” which was “undiscovered” where: “[People] … are addicted, like those of New Zealand, of eating their enemies, whom they kill in battle. We were satisfied that this was not a misrepresentation for we met with several Feejeean people at Tongataboo and on inquiry of them, they did not deny the charge.”Footnote ¹⁸ By Cook's third voyage the Pacific's fame in Europe was partly driven by its exoticism, which in turn was symbolized by frequent assertions regarding the presence of Cannibalism. This is reflected in the European readiness to accept the reality of Cook's accounts and often-careful speculations. In 1795, for example, the newly formed London Missionary Society (LMS) set out to this “new world” which “hath lately opened to our view … [where] savage nature still feasts on the flesh of its prisoners.”Footnote ¹⁹ The following year the LMS ship the Duff struck a reef in Fiji's northeastern islands, and when the crew spied Fijians on beaches of a nearby island, they imagined the islanders “dancing round [them], while [they] roasted on large fires,” for they knew, “The Feejees were cannibals of a fierce disposition.”Footnote ²⁰ Apart from illustrating the openness of European audiences to accounts of the exotic and bizarre in new worlds, the readiness with which Cannibalism came to be normalized in many accounts of the Pacific and Fiji reminds us that descriptions did not simply feed an innocent curiosity. They also formed part of a critical colonial process of “cultural cartography.”Footnote ²¹

While much of our scholarly attention to Cannibalism has recently focused on its role in marking ethnographic difference, it is worth noting this process was also spatial. Place and practice were mutually imbricated in ways that were spatially produced by a range of colonialism's moral and legal doctrines. This is most readily observable in missionary and travelers' texts as they approached the islands. For the shipwrecked in the 1840s, the sight of the islands threatened “almost certain death, as [their inhabitants] had the character of being cannibals,” while first sight of land for the United States Exploring Expedition in 1845 put Wilkes in mind “of the well-known fact, that they were the abode of a savage, ferocious, and treacherous race of cannibals.”Footnote ²² These descriptions established distance in tandem with a range of strategies. The coral reefs for example, which “strongly fortified” the islands, and consisted of uncharted death traps for ships and “sunken rock and sand banks [that made them] an ocean labyrinth of unusual intricacy,” both marked distance and a kind of permeable border to be transgressed in pursuit of the calm lagoons and tropical paradise beyond.Footnote ²³ Moreover, on arrival in the sheltered lagoons, travelers opportunistically elaborated the beauty and utility of the islands as a canvas on which the vista of cannibalism could materialize in stark contrast. As Reverend Lawry put it in 1850, “the” Fijian “inhabits some of the most lovely and fertile spots upon the globe … and yet he is the most habitual and ferocious cannibal.”Footnote ²⁴

Cannibal discourses dovetailed neatly with related imperial doctrines that spoke to the availability of lands for conquest, and thereby flagged a range of providential and moral imperatives naturalizing colonial intrusion. As H. H. Britton, who lived in Fiji for two years, said it in 1883, one “could not but wonder that a country which seemed suited by nature to be the abode of the highest forms of civilisation should be inhabited by a race of … the most debased and hopeless savages.”Footnote ²⁵ Indeed, from the earliest accounts of Fiji, descriptions of “so lovely a part of God's creation [being] daily and hourly sullied by deeds of … unparalleled depravity” were typical, and readily marked distance from the mills of industrializing Britain.Footnote ²⁶ Representations of Fiji as a paradise wasted on savage cannibals must have resonated in a wider imperial world dominated mid-century by a harsh utilitarianism, where “waste” was a key that was unlocking hitherto respected customary land ownership throughout Britain and the common law colonies.Footnote ²⁷ Cannibalism in this sense concentrated wider imperatives for colonial intrusion, at the center of which was race.

In the accounts just noted, Cannibalism operated as something of a shorthand for ascending European theories and taxonomies of racial difference by which the Pacific was spatially ranked. From the 1830s, following Dumont d'Urville's lasting ethnographic division of the Pacific into Melanesia and Polynesia, the spatial positioning of Fiji offered opportunities to amateur anthropologists to rank and compare. Fiji's position in relation to Polynesia, although now considered more ambiguous, in the nineteenth century was frequently highlighted in ways that emphasized overtly gendered and racialized contrasts between noble and ignoble savagery: between (semi-savage) brown Polynesians and (ultra-savage) black Melanesians. As Cook had noted from as early as the eighteenth century, Fijians in Tonga “were of a colour that was a full shade darker than that of the inhabitants of the Friendly Islands,” and settler Mary Wallis later added that Fijians were “dark in every sense of the word.”Footnote ²⁸ This darkness formed the basis for a wider recognition that Fijians were of a “totally different race from the Tongans or the Samoans, and … very much the inferior,” which situated them on an implied taxonomic scale that Wilkes described as being “somewhat like that observable between a well-bred gentleman and a boor.”Footnote ²⁹ As such, Fijians were frequently described as living in the “deepest moral degradation and despotic bondage,” being “unrivalled as a disgrace to mankind,” constituting “the most barbarous and hateful of human beings,” and being “the most barbarous and savage race now existing upon the globe.”Footnote ³⁰ Hence, while reference to Fijian Cannibalism in public accounts signified a wider racial profile, in a colonial context, such racialization helped to map colonial space.

From the late 1850s the Fiji islands became increasingly popular as refueling sites for trans-Pacific traffic, and as the gateway to Melanesia and the Pacific's Cannibal Isles. As a result Fiji featured prominently in proliferating representations of the Pacific where Cannibalism frequently stood in as evidence for strangeness, distance and separation from the civilized world. At other times, the relationship was reversed and distance established the plausibility of cannibal claims. More importantly, this geographical distance also marked a physical and conceptual frontier zone in which the possibilities for transgression and taboo opened up.Footnote ³¹ While Cannibalism was not the only thing that writers, painters, exhibiters, or photographers evoked, it provided the underlying typology of the savagery that writers described and ranked, and the backdrop for colonial activity. As if to underscore this, in contrast to the represented ritualism of the lighter-skinned Polynesian Pacific, cannibalism in Fiji was represented as a normalized, systemic, and casual practice of the everyday, and as constantly observable through every sensory perception. On hearing the lali (Fijian drum), for example, traveler John Erskine wrote of its “hollow sound … [bearing] across the water to Viwa the intelligence that a cargo of human victims had arrived in Bau”; and Lt. Pollard heard “a drum beating a tap-a-tap, tap-tap, tap-a-tap, tap-tap, which Mr. Calvert told [him] was the death drum, which they always beat at a cannibal feast.”Footnote ³² Cannibalism was also encountered in scent, or “that peculiar barbarous odour” of cannibals, or in inadvertently close encounters.Footnote ³³ On being given portions of pork for example, Erskine's crew, “having some suspicion that all was not right, had thrown it over-board” convinced it was human flesh, and at a feast where turtle was prepared, Jackson received food from his Fijian hosts in “several packages” amongst which “was one package of human flesh [which looked] something darker and the fat yellower than the turtle. [He] threw them all away.” Labor recruiter John Gaggin, too, showed similar scrutiny when he “had a good look before the pig was cut up, to satisfy [himself] it was … not a baked boy or girl.”Footnote ³⁴ Although evoked through imagination, suspicions, or expectation, these were recorded as encounters with Cannibalism nevertheless.

The varying empirical standards considered satisfactory in adventure and missionary accounts highlight the way in which Cannibalism in Fiji was unquestioningly omnipresent, as a practice that exceeded any cultural or ritualistic specificity, and merely the banal logic for a social system built to satisfy desires for human flesh. C. F. Gordon Cumming, for example, stated that any human being “was looked upon only in the light of so much beef”; St. Alfred Johnston was told it had been common for chiefs to order the death of “some man or woman that he considered … good for cooking”; and Wilkes wrote that Fijians will “banquet on the flesh of their dearest friends.”Footnote ³⁵ Not simply the practice of chiefs, warriors were said to carry snacks of human flesh on the warpath, while laborers were said to build a lovo (ground oven) at “about noon … [in which they would lay] their dead bodies, human, if they have any for eating, if not, hogs, and also potatoes and yams.”Footnote ³⁶ Neither was Cannibalism represented as being the exclusive practice of adults. A string of missionary texts mutually informed by the reverend John Hunt, for example, reported that children were systematically educated and socialized in Cannibalism, and parents rubbed “human flesh over the lips of their little children, and put a portion into the infant's mouth, that it may be nourished by its juice and trained in the practice of cannibalism.”Footnote ³⁷

If Cannibalism was frequently represented as the unremarkable scenery of the everyday in Fiji, at other times it was described in scenes of unusual frenzy. One of the most elaborate descriptions of a cannibal feast, by William Endicott, for example, described an aftermath: “As the light of day shown into the hut; it revealed a sight seldom witnessed by civilised man. Around the hut sat sixty or seventy cannibals, more frightful than ever if possible, their paint being rubbed together in many instances, gave their bodies such an appearance as for a moment to lead me to doubt that they were human beings. Before one savage lay a human head, save that part which could be released from it, the lower jaw; which would be in possession of another.”Footnote ³⁸

Seen through the half-light of dawn the scene was eerily calm but whispered of the preceding frenzy elsewhere elaborated in “limbtearing” moments of excess.Footnote ³⁹ Endicott reported another feast, for example, where a “savage,” stole one of the heads of bodies in the process of being prepared for an oven. He “took the head in his lap and after combing the hair from the top of it with his fingers picked out the pieces of the skull which was broken by the war club and commenced eating the brains.” Reverend Lawry, too, described a feast where, “instead of waiting till their ovens were hot, and baking the bodies … [feasters] fell to, cutting off slices, and roasting small portions for immediate use.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Of all cannibals, the chiefs were frequently painted as the most depraved. In the dark days before his redemptive conversion to Christianity, Ratu Seru Cakobau for example, was said to have cut out a chief's tongue, “which he devoured raw, talking and joking with the mutilated chief at the same time.”Footnote ⁴¹ So too, the “King of Rewa,” another convert and later ally of Cakobau was also reported as having once “directed that [his servant] should be compelled to eat her own flesh, or die.”

Redemption from depravity offered to Fijian society by the arrival of Christ and capital which often narrativized accounts of excess, was not always the sole message. In addition, the rumors, hearsay, and seafaring yarns complemented the existing myth-models in Europe that frequented Victorian horror genres.Footnote ⁴² They entertained a purchasing public. But the analytical concern here lies with exploring the interrelationship between this industry of spectacle, and the intensifying colonial context. How did tales of the fantastic translate into the knowledge system that shaped colonialism's structural annexation of the islands? And what, if any function did the extremity of such accounts serve beyond compelling and celebrating missionary activity and supplying an enduringly commodified spectacle? Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, those who produced Cannibalism for reading and viewing audiences did so from a range of perspectives and with a range of motivations. Catering for different audiences, some were scientific, others missionary-driven, and others still emanated from a colonial adventuring tradition. Their common link, however, is that all contributed to a publicly available, often commodified discourse in which serious scientific or ethnographic accounts were conflated with undisguised fantasy in a hegemonic tradition of representation. What we may observe is the reification of a fact—Cannibalism—whose function we may then go on to view in the historical formation of colonial frontiers.

The proliferation of Cannibalism during the nineteenth century was inseparable from the emergence and commercialization of a colonial frontier. There, shifting relations between indigenous Fijians and newcomers were complex and both overshadowed by the might of Empire and underpinned by carefully coded sanctions for violence and coercion. Until the 1870s Fiji was a colonial frontier that in official, missionary and settler accounts was positioned beyond the reach of the Rule of Law.Footnote ⁴³ As Forbes put it, it was the “Texas” of the South Seas and the capital, Levuka, was a frontier town at the center of a trans-Pacific trade governed by seemingly random principles of lawless justice, retribution, and “club law.”Footnote ⁴⁴ In 1900, John Gaggin captured this in his evocative reminiscence of Levuka, a Paris of the South Seas armed to the hilt, where,

Cannibalism set the moral tone for the prowling violence of colonial frontiers so evocatively related in Gaggin's scene. In the event of erupting tensions between a Fijian majority and a vulnerable but powerful minority of settlers, Fiji's status as a land of cannibals nudged the islands beyond the frontier, limiting any recourse to legal (or moral) frameworks other than the punitive rules of frontier justice. The period of the late 1860s through to the initial suppression of the interior in 1876 was one such period of repetitive eruptions of tension. During this time disputes revolved around land, planter access to cheap labor, and the intricacies of the administration of civil justice. But they also drew on deeper issues regarding colonialism's justifiability and mitigating taxonomies of both violence and race. In all cases, Cannibalism was a doctrine that informed settlers and the “official minds” of colonial administration, and shaped the terms of colonialism's underlying moral commerce.Footnote ⁴⁶ In turn, the context of conflict breathed life and form into evolving Cannibalism.

DISCIPLINE AND THE PROSE OF CANNIBALISM

The ubiquity that laced discourses on Fijian Cannibalism was primarily a thing of popular culture—of cartoons, postcards, travel books, missionary tracts, the paraphernalia of armchair anthropology, and traveling freak shows and exhibits. In contrast, the private correspondence of colonialism's official mind did not reference Cannibalism as an everyday administrative fact. But while it disappeared from colonialism's administrative archives as an everyday fact, evocations of Cannibalism persisted in the company of colonial conflict. As I argue below, in the colonial archive produced by the British Foreign and Colonial Offices and the Cakobau government, referencing Cannibalism was strategic and both colonial powers and Fijians cashed in on the currency it held within the wider moral commerce of a civilizing mission. Cannibalism and savagery tended to appear as a flag that signaled both progress and rebellion, and the accompanying imperatives for suspending normative moral and judicial standards. Hence beyond the crude colonial functions served by Cannibalism in public discourses, it also contributed a narrative doctrine, a prose that was every bit as penetrative of colonial mindsets as such doctrines of European ascendancy as the fatal impact, or manifest destiny. It provided a ready symbolism and convenience for colonialism's ideological apparatus, which in shorthand mediated the moral authority of justice and violence. The period from the late 1860s cotton boom to the 1876 suppression of the western interior of Vitilevu exemplifies this, through a time when power flowed in complex directions between and across the heterogeneous communities of indigenous Fijians and colonial newcomers.

Colonialism arrived in earnest in Fiji in the 1860s when, in the context of a civil war-driven cotton drought in the United States, settlers from both the Australian colonies and the United States looked to the Pacific and Queensland as potentially lucrative sites of tropical production.Footnote ⁴⁷ Newcomers arrived in Fiji with voracious appetites for land and labor, and under dubious circumstances took up large tracts of land for plantations throughout the islands and particularly in the most fertile coastal plains of Vitilevu. For labor, planters relied on people imported and indentured from elsewhere in the western Pacific, and from the 1860s the western Pacific labor trade supplied tens of thousands of indentured men and women to planters in Fiji, Queensland, and New Caledonia.Footnote ⁴⁸ After Fiji became a crown colony, plantation labor would be supplied by indentured laborers from India, but in the 1860s planters looked not only to other Pacific islands, but to the mountainous interior of Vitilevu—the Colo provinces. The people of these regions, however, persistently resisted the encroachments of missionaries, planters, and their Bauan sponsors led by the then paramount chief of Bau, Ratu Cakobau. In 1867, the Levuka-based missionary Thomas Baker was killed at Navatusila on a failed mission to the interior.Footnote ⁴⁹ As the first European casualty, his death conveniently marks the point from which existing hostilities between the interior and coastal peoples in Fiji began to be explicitly appropriated by and overlaid with colonial interests.Footnote ⁵⁰

From 1867 until Cession in 1874, a number of Fijian villages allied to Bau, as well as European planters, their families, and their workers were attacked and killed in hit-and-run raids on districts that were at that time remote from Levuka. These included the expulsion of settlers from the Rewa River region in 1868, the killings of Rodney Burt and his family on his Ba plantation in 1869, planters Macintosh and Spiers in the Rewa district in 1871, and William Burns and his family on their Ba plantation in 1873. In all cases the guilt for the raids was assumed to lie with members of the interior communities who were widely characterized at the time as the Kai Colo, the most savage of Fiji's cannibals.Footnote ⁵¹ Those that killed Rodney Burt were reported by Diapea in his published adventures as having set “about killing and devouring his horses, pigs and half-caste child.”Footnote ⁵² In the cases of Macintosh and Spiers, Forbes published in 1875 that their bodies had been cut into morsels, wrapped in banana-leaves, and sent as presents to surrounding chiefs for a “hideous feast.” In the case of Burns, his wife, children, and laborers, Forbes also wrote that they were “treated with every indignity, and at length cut into small pieces and eaten” to the all-night rhythm of the “cannibal drums.”Footnote ⁵³

Retaliatory raids to avenge the deaths of white planters and discipline the unruly Kai Colo frequently followed. Settlers, their laborers, and occasionally British Navy ships undertook a number of punitive raids organized by the three volunteer rifle corps of Rewa, Levuka, and Ba. These were characterized by shows of indiscriminate violence and force that, although discussed openly in the Fiji Times and other colonial press as “nigger shooting” expeditions, were rarely specified through the naming of victims or the quantification of their alleged crimes.Footnote ⁵⁴ But massacres were occasionally reported. In 1873 in the district of Ra, a massacre conducted by European planters and their Viwan allies attacked the rebellious village of Nakorowaiwai resulting in varied reports of between 157 and 300 deaths.Footnote ⁵⁵ Many of these conflicts were sparked by the contested land alienations for European settlement and the recruitment of labor that accompanied the cotton boom. But, as Martha Kaplan has astutely argued, they also mapped on to the older political machinations of the Bauan district and its allies.Footnote ⁵⁶ Amidst the seething uncertainty, Ratu Cakobau with administrative support from a faction of settlers declared his ascendancy in 1871 as Tui Viti, (king of Fiji) and declared the islands an independent kingdom. While Ratu Cakobau sought and eventually gained the support of a number of the chiefs from key regions in eastern Fiji, including the Tongan Màafu in the Lau province, he and his administration were unsuccessful in gaining the willing support of all Fijian chiefs, nor of a majority of white settlers in the islands. Settlers' rejection of Ratu Cakobau as a cannibal king, and his administration as unjustified in exerting jurisdiction over free white settlers, was cemented in 1872 when Britain refused to acknowledge the kingdom. For their part indigenous chiefs and villagers of the central regions of Vitilevu also rejected the Cakobau government along with, and perhaps as representative of, planters' assertions of exclusive and private ownership of their land.

While land and labor issues shaped the surface tension in Fiji, underlying concerns had regard to the imposition of sovereignty over competing interests new and old. The wider question governing the sale and use of land for example, or the source and treatment of black labor, was the question of law and jurisdiction and the source of settlers' rights to buy and defend land on the one hand, and Fijian landowners' abilities to prevent and limit alienation on the other. Hence, more common in Fiji than punitive raids were demonstrations of vigilante justice by the planters' protection societies, such as the briefly named “Ku Klux,” the rifle corps, and the British Subjects Mutual Protection Society. These were designed primarily to make judicial chaos and “lynch law” of the unpopular constitutional government of the Cakobau kingdom and to resist the equality before the courts of whites and Fijians.Footnote ⁵⁷ This period of embraced legal chaos was short-lived, but it brought to the surface for the British Foreign Office the absence of any jurisdictional basis on which to regulate the behavior of British subjects in the Pacific. It tangibly manifested, in other words, the “frontier” status of Fiji, which like much of the western Pacific, was considered by imperial Law Officers to be beyond the reach and capability of the Rule of Law.Footnote ⁵⁸ While a host of Fijian laws and customs existed in the islands as the potential basis for colonial relations, Cannibalism and the taxonomies it implied ensured the conceptual impossibility of its recognition. Fiji was therefore created, administratively, legally, and physically as empty space, or as a colonial frontier.Footnote ⁵⁹

By 1873, a complete loss of control over white settlers seemed to loom imminent amidst intensifying unrest in Levuka and other planter districts. In response, the Cakobau administration sought and secured the annexation of the islands to the British Empire in 1874 without the consensus of all Fijian chiefs. The Deed of Cession, which sealed annexation, was initially negotiated between Ratu Cakobau and the Governor of New South Wales, Sir Hercules Robinson, and only over subsequent months was it ratified by a number of other chiefs.Footnote ⁶⁰ One of the first orders of concern for the new administration was to secure the consent or subjugation from Fiji's chiefs and people, and while this was largely achieved, it was not without dissent. In January 1875, five months before the arrival of the first governor, Sir Arthur Hamilton Gordon, representatives of the Colo province brokered a peace with the Crown and undertook ceremonies symbolizing the requisite renunciation of heathenism and cannibalism, and the opposing acceptance of Christianity. In the administrative archive therefore, Cannibalism became emblematically synonymous with opposition to colonial rule.

The peace was fleeting. Throughout the early months of 1875 Fiji and the interior were hit by a devastating epidemic of measles that spread rapidly and lethally through populations never before exposed. An estimated forty thousand Fijians died within a few months.Footnote ⁶¹ Because the virus was communicated throughout the islands by the roving meetings that sought ratification of the Deed of Cession, the devastation of the epidemic became irrevocably tied for Fijians and settlers alike to the formalization of colonial annexation. In the years that followed, powerful rumors emerged that the chiefs had been cursed or deliberately infected by settlers or the Crown to suppress resistance to colonial rule, to empty the land, and to create a population of landless laborers.Footnote ⁶²

Whatever the truth of the rumors, the epidemic crippled villages and communities throughout Fiji, and fuelled rather than suppressed the ongoing resistance to colonization that had simmered in the interior and western districts since 1867. The conviction precipitated a widespread renunciation of Christianity, through a symbolic casting off of Christian symbols of loin clothes and shaved heads. Throughout the highlands groups rebelled and renewed raids on lowland Christian villages and plantations. Anxious to not only suppress rebellion, but to do so in a way that asserted the order and discipline of the Rule of Law, Gordon stayed true to his reputation in the Colonial Office and exerted tough colonial rule.Footnote ⁶³ In 1876 he unleashed an invasion of the interior under cover of martial law, which lasted months and ended with a decisive suppression of rebellious communities and leaders. Swift and brutal, Gordon's “Little War” razed villages, emptied lands, executed leaders and chiefs, and exiled large numbers of people to labor camps and plantations on other islands.Footnote ⁶⁴ But as both colonial forces and insurgent groups seemed to implicitly acknowledge, this was also a war fought at the level of symbols as much as territory, where Christianity seemed to have the resonance for rebels that Cannibalism had for colonial forces.

In the face of the banal ubiquity of Cannibalism in published travel writings and missionary publications, the administrative and private communications generated by colonial officials and settlers during the turbulent era of 1867–1876 were starkly sober and marked by a relative disengagement with it as an empirical activity. Although Cannibalism matched conversion in its symbolic resonance, the day to day of archives rarely referred to empirical acts of cannibalism. For example, the Native Ordinances introduced by Gordon in 1878 to govern and regulate the minutiae of the domestic and civil lives of indigenous Fijians, made no reference to it. This despite outlawing adultery, regulating the lighting of fires, paying of taxes, planting of plantations, deference to Chiefs, and the observation of taboo on Sundays.Footnote ⁶⁵ Moreover, in the reports of the trials of the thirty-five arrested leaders of the Colo rebellion in 1875, tried under martial law for murder and cannibalism, only murder was defended and prosecuted as an empirical crime in the courts. Amongst the many rebels that were reported as having confessed to committing murders in their pursuit of rebellion, only one defendant, Onesavi, was reported as testifying to his own Cannibalism. When he did, he did so vaguely and as part of a general boast about his fearsome reputation.Footnote ⁶⁶ Finally with reference to the murder of the Burns family in 1872, who Litton Forbes reported were cut into pieces and eaten to the rhythm of the lali, the private communications of Burns himself and other settlers in the area mentioned Cannibalism only rarely. The anxious and private letters that Burns wrote to the British consul and Cakobau government in the months before he died, for example, show that he feared eviction from his plantation by landowners, but the prospect of being eaten was not raised.Footnote ⁶⁷ When referring to the deaths of Spiers and Macintosh, and requesting action to defuse the tensions surrounding his plantation, Burns expressed fear of unseen assailants, and worried about assaults and injuries rather than being killed or eaten. Cannibalism only emerged in retellings of his death, as a type of literary punctuation testifying to its horror. In the diaries of Edwin J. Turpin, a nearby settler who attended the punitive raids to avenge Burns' death, and who visited the murder site soon after they had occurred, Cannibalism defined the attack although no evidence of Cannibalism was found. That is, he wrote about avenging the cannibalization of Burns and his family, even as he described finding their bodies left, uneaten, where they had fallen.Footnote ⁶⁸

In the cases mentioned above Cannibalism signified something more than anthropophagy. Throughout the records for the period 1867–1876, the topics of land, labor, law, and violence swirled in discussions that sought to clarify the moral integrity and legitimacy of colonial ventures in Fiji. In this context Cannibalism rarely featured in the private archive, and when it did it provided a tempering narrative for violence and justice. As was pointed out by key members of the British Subjects Mutual Protection Society in 1872–1873, in frontier (or interchangeably “cannibal”) areas, the Rule of Law by definition did not extend, and British subjects were within their rights and obligations to practice violence as self-protection. A circularity emerged. While interchangeable accusations of Cannibalism and savagery served to prove the excesses of Fijian resistance to colonial order, in turn the stated need for vigilante raids, indiscriminate shooting expeditions, and later, martial law, against Fijian landowners, in turn proved the presence of Cannibal savagery that exceeded the limits of colonial rule. When the Fiji Times reported a settler “collision with the natives” in Rewa during which the Rewa Rifle Corps shot “one or two” and captured another, for example, the paper described the Rewa district as one “whose natives are not of the most peaceable, and who are backed up by the savages of the interior.”Footnote ⁶⁹ The statement referenced a wider equation. While natives could be restless, Cannibal savages rebelled, and extra-judicial violence operated accordingly. This trend of defining the moral and legal legitimacy of lawless and punitive raids through references to Cannibalism and savagery was repeated after 1874 during the suppression of the interior. When questions were later raised in London about Gordon's use of excessive force within the legal space of martial law, he and his commissioners made judicious use of Cannibalism. Throughout his correspondence reporting the Colo Wars to the Colonial Office, Gordon called the interior “Devil country,” the people “cannibal tribes,” and Kai Colo, rebellious villages “cannibal towns,” and rebellious acts “murder” and “cannibalism” irrespective of whether or not deaths were involved, or whether the bodies were recoverable.

The inherent linking of Fijian behavior that resisted colonial order with Cannibalism was more significant than simply providing a cause for the use of force. For the ongoing resistance of the interior and outlying districts to the creeping incursions of white planters was racialized when framed as Cannibalism, club law, or the desires of savages. As I argued earlier, Cannibalism and attached ethnographic discourses frequently signified Fijians' place in racialized taxonomies as having an intellectual capacity equal to that of “ordinary English school-boys from fifteen to seventeen.”Footnote ⁷⁰ That such taxonomies rendered rebellion racial rather than political is more apparent in reverse when the successes of colonialism's civilizing mission were reported. A breathtaking contrast existed for example in the ways Fijians were represented from within the yoke of colonialism as: “the kindest and best-hearted native race in the world.”Footnote ⁷¹ Missionary celebrations painted the renunciation of cannibalism as having checked “the reign of passion … [of having begun] to think, [and having allowed] reason to have a place in their conduct of life.”Footnote ⁷² While Cannibalism was very obviously tied to justifications for colonial force therefore, its absence or potential also played a subtler role in signifying and necessitating an ongoing colonial presence. As the Pall Mall Budget warned (or promised) in its report on Britain's latest colonial appropriation of 1874, “It is not impossible that the man-eating instinct might be awakened even among some of the Christian tribes.”Footnote ⁷³ Indeed, as late as 1907 adventurer and travel writer Beatrice Grimshaw speculated “The Fijian of to-day, freed from the white control and example that have moulded his life, would spring back like an unstrung bow to the thoughts and ways of his fathers.”Footnote ⁷⁴

The racialization of Cannibalism rendered it a perpetual, instinctual, and determining justification for colonial rule. Moreover when Cannibalism was used to describe Fijian resistance, it turned it into a backslide or atavistic reflex, effectively draining political content. The contingent relationship between cannibals and rebellion was, after all, inherent. Simply by being cannibals (reborn or otherwise), Fijians rebelled against order, rationality, civilization, and humanity. Hence the lali, while called the death drum and the cannibal drum, was also called “the drum of rebellion.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Because rebellion and disaffection were referenced in colonial literature in truncated terms as reverting to savagery and Cannibalism, colonization as an historical force was also minimized. In this sense, it resembled a prose of counter-insurgency, and in the colonial archive tended only to appear in what Ranajit Guha might describe as the secondary phases of reporting rebellion and the discipline that followed.Footnote ⁷⁶

The lack of empirical, administrative, and legal engagement with Cannibalism in the colonial archive only incidentally questions the reality of the practice. A far more salient point is the emergence of the discourse at the pointy end of acts of colonial dispossession or discipline within and without British jurisdiction. For settlers and administrators alike, evoking Cannibalism was a strategy that referenced a doctrine as established, self-evident, and self-explanatory as wider imperial doctrines like the fatal impact. Evoking Cannibalism, in other words, was a political activity used by settlers, missionaries, and governors alike in the deployment of colonialism's moral arsenal and related modes of violence. British, American, and Australian discourses conceptually equated the acceptance of Christianity with renouncing Cannibalism and heathenism, and throughout colonial discourses the renunciation or suppression of the two interchangeable practices was framed as submission to the new rule. As Gordon expressed it in 1876 at the execution of the Colo leaders, Fijians, “must be peaceable, … they must not murder … cannibalism must cease, and … they must obey the few orders I should give them, and … if they failed to do so, punishment, and terrible punishment, would follow.”Footnote ⁷⁷

But if Cannibalism was a political position in direct opposition to the colonial discipline of Christ or the Rule of Law, it was available to both Fijians and settlers. During this period of transition in the late 1860s and early 1870s, engaging discourses of Cannibalism and a radical heathenism emerged in parts of Fiji as an indigenous political strategy amidst the multi-directional negotiations of power between white settlers and Fijians. In the early decades of colonial contact, the Fijian confederacies of Bau, Lau, and those of the northern and western districts of the main island Vitilevu had integrated colonial newcomers into existing power struggles. Historians David Routledge and Martha Kaplan have explored in some detail the various conflicts between the Bau district, led by Ratu Seru Cakobau, and surrounding confederacies where alliances with traders, missionaries, or planters could and often did tip the balance in favor of Cakobau.Footnote ⁷⁸ By the 1870s, as Indigenous power struggles were overlaid with the alliances and divisions of a developing colonial society, it was clear to Fijian leaders and chiefs that Christianity and conversion (from Cannibalism) were a powerful currency in attracting European allies. Whether they were the product of genuine belief, political strategy, or a mixture of both, Cakobau and other leaders such as the Tongan Màafu of Lau generally timed their conversions to extract maximum political value. Gordon's later insistence that acquiescence to British sovereignty after 1874 be accompanied by the symbolic renunciation of Cannibalism and embracement of Christianity would only further embed the inherent symbolism.

In arguing that Cannibalism, conversion, and Christianity were discourses that provided a means of communicating political positions of insurgency or collaboration, it is also important to note that Cannibalism was not the exclusive language of rebellion. Indeed, if the colonial archive alone is indicative, negotiations of colonial relations between Fijians and newcomers were a diverse mix of asserting, adopting, and re-inventing Indigenous and colonial frames of reference and meaning. During the late 1860s and 1870s, by far the most significant point of conflict in Fiji was that over land between traditional landowners and their chiefly representatives, and settlers who increasingly sought to establish factual and legal exclusive possession of plantation land. The archives of both the Cakobau and later colonial governments are full of private letters and accounts, in Fijian and English, from landowners and settlers, claiming competing rights to land. Amongst Fijian landowners, the strategies of resisting settler claims ranged widely between physical acts of sabotage and refusals of settler claims to exclusive possession (such as the destruction of fencing and property, competitive planting, or attacks on stock);Footnote ⁷⁹ to the adoption and adaptation of settler languages of ownership and possession (such as alternative fencing or physical occupation).Footnote ⁸⁰ In other words, there is a clear archival record in Fiji that shows that the establishment of colonial power was a process not simply of physical negotiation and conflict. In addition, this negotiation was facilitated by discursive exchanges, where Fijian landowners and political leaders sought to assert and resist in a language the colonial world could readily understand. Cannibalism, like conversion, Christianity, and capital, was an integral element of this discursive universe.

Cannibalism and Christianity since mid-century in Fiji had become a valuable currency that Fijian leaders used in trading influence with colonial settlers, traders, and missionaries, particularly once key leaders like Ma'afu and Ratu Cakobau converted. This trade in conversion also meant that its renunciation, which was discursively constructed as being interchangeable with Cannibalism, was a key dynamic during the Colo war, with a symbolism that is somewhat reflected in local names for the period of conflict discussed here. Today, locals describe the period from 1867 to 1876 as na gauna ni valu (time of war), and Gordon's Little War as na i valu ni lotu (the war of the church).Footnote ⁸¹ Moreover, the rise in the late 1870s and 1880s of a radical and rebellious Christianity in the suppressed regions of the interior, known as the Navosavakadua movement, indicates that the complex political language that gave meaning to colonialism's opposite poles of Cannibalism and Christianity was not extinguished in 1875.Footnote ⁸² Fijians continued to adapt and deploy colonial discourses of Cannibalism and its other—Christianity—as a prose of both resistance and acceptance throughout the colonial era.

Cannibal discourses interacted with colonial relations to codify racialized shifts in moral currency and taxonomized violence. Moreover, colonial conflict fed back into discursive representations, heightening its “limbtearing” excesses and vacating colonial relations of the limits imposed by law. There is a point about this discussion that takes us beyond simply saying that Cannibalism was widely used in frontier contexts as a justification for the use of violence, terror, or displays of force. By racializing rebellion, colonial discipline and administration of justice also appropriated the violence of representation, producing Cannibals wherever rebels were violently suppressed. Frontier justice and indiscriminate or excessive military force reconfigured rebellion as simply club law and Cannibalism in a moral commerce where, as Gordon put it during the Colo wars, teaching Cannibals must be sharp and shocking for they “must feel the terrors of the law.”Footnote ⁸³ But ultimately the Cannibalism that emerged from Fiji during the colonial period, the discursive fact that became reified during this time, was one produced by a colonial encounter to which both newcomer and Indigenous peoples constructively contributed. While Cannibalism in public genres of the nineteenth-century manners-and-customs industry produced available colonial space, in the private archive too, Cannibalism frequently articulated the dialogue of negotiation, of consent and acquiescence, between the colonial administration and Indigenous leaders. Cannibalism became a political tool for colonized and colonizer alike, and as such might be fruitfully read as a prose, in Guha's terms, of both insurgency and counter-insurgency.Footnote ⁸⁴ In this sense, it seems futile to debate whether or not accounts of other peoples' Cannibalism are historically verifiable or mythical.

POST-COLONIES AND THE ENDURANCE OF CANNIBALISM

In every decade of the second half of the twentieth century, Cannibalism has appeared in the present tense in the western Pacific. In 1958, just twelve years before Fiji received formal independence, the self-professed first history of Cannibalism by Garry Hogg, provided a comprehensive survey from ancient Greece to twentieth-century Melanesia. He promised that in Fiji, “It is likely that, away from the coastline, in the fastnesses of the mountains, cannibalism is still practiced at the present day.”Footnote ⁸⁵ In addition, controversy continues over whether texts such as those considered in this paper can be taken at face value to provide reliable ethnographic information in the absence of a comprehensive interrogation of the context in which they were produced. Four years after Arens published The Man-Eating Myth, Marshall Sahlins wrote back with “Raw Women, Cooked Men, and Other ‘Great Things’ of the Fiji Islands.” As he put it, through “a kind of dialogue between myth and practice, [he] … tried to explicate the cultural sense of cannibalism in traditional Fiji.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Lamenting the passing of time, he regretted that he was not able to analyze “why excited chiefs have been known to eat parts of the victim raw or underdone … [or why] morsels of the cooked victim are pressed against the lips of sucking babes, and the raw genitals are hung upon the sacred tree, shrine of the god.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Written in the present tense, this reference to oft-repeated horror clips of the nineteenth century as though recorded in the present, keeps this discourse alive. But the question this raises, and which may progress debate is not merely whether this is empirically verifiable. Rather, given Cannibalism's history, do we transmit its colonial function into a post-colonial present when we recapitulate the discourse so ahistorically?

From the 1990s to the present Cannibalism has persisted throughout the western Pacific as a commodified memory. In Fiji tourists can buy “Cannibal café” tee shirts and imitation cannibal forks, tour guides still relay tales of cannibal exploits such as the tragedy of Baker, eaten boots and all by the de-politicized cannibals of the interior. Scraps of leather, apparently the soles of Baker's boots, are displayed at the National Museum in Suva, complete with teeth marks. In short, for the willing visitor, Fiji like the rest of Melanesia can still be a “Cannibal Tour.” Elsewhere in the western Pacific's cannibal isles, more extreme cannibal tourism is currently enjoying a surge in popularity. In West Papua tourists are promised authentic “stone age” and “first contact” tours or “cannibal sex holidays” in the troubled Asmat and Korowai regions of the Indonesian province, where cannibals are said to still live amidst a naturalized military presence.Footnote ⁸⁸ Here too, Cannibalism enjoys a mediating role between West Papuans such as the Korowai and a policing and military presence.Footnote ⁸⁹

In many cases present-day Cannibalism draws on the same authority as its nineteenth-century counterparts. The essential problem with this is not that it is, empirically speaking, right or wrong to say that Pacific Islanders engage or engaged in cultural anthropophagy. Rather, this wider context of promoted Cannibalism is perpetuating a discourse that enabled and was enabled by political, economic, and physical acts of colonization. The genealogical depth of Cannibalism's entwinement with acts of colonial conquest, moreover, ensures that irrespective of indigenous appropriations of the discourse, it tends to be understood in traditional ways, and to therefore transmit colonial messages to receiving audiences. As we have seen with the case study of Fiji, Cannibalism was a racial profile that while being framed as a cultural practice susceptible to civilizing missions was also taken to be indicative of an underlying and deterministic inferiority. Cannibalism was framed as a deep state of savagery, and to be a Cannibal was to be ranked ethnographically in both space and time. As we have seen, when “natives” adopted and adapted these discourses for their own purposes, it was constructed and treated as an atavism, a step out of time, and a symbol of not just inferiority but primitiveness. Spatially it placed Cannibals in a legal and moral sense, as much as a geographical one, beyond the frontiers. If this was the functionality of Cannibalism in the colonial past, it says volumes about its currency in the nominally post-colonial present.

As we have seen in the case of Fiji, Cannibalism continued well into the period of the British colonial administration and beyond, and it was granted a perpetual lease on life by its atavistic link to rebellion, resistance, or the breached paradigms of colonial order. In post-colonial times the colonial order of the past arguably finds expression as economic development, structural adjustment, good governance, and critiques of Melanesia's “failed states.” Here, a wider primitivism arguably provides the deeper logic for ongoing assumptions that independent Pacific nations are unviable and incapable of governing their own affairs due to inherent inabilities, rather than historical and made conditions. Cannibal lands are still haunted by overt acts of colonial penetration or more subtle neo-colonial activity, and the continued resonance of Cannibalism arguably buttresses the structural body of the colonial past. West Papua again offers a prime example. When in 1995 the Indonesian military was reported as being sent “to establish contact with a newly discovered, tree-dwelling tribe of cannibals,” the presence of the military ensured that colonial conquest remained the silent partner of this quest for Cannibalism.Footnote ⁹⁰

To return to Obeyesekere's notion of the complex dialogue, it is an often overlooked aspect of Cannibalism's past that Europe did not have a monopoly on it, and that indigenous peoples have not only accessed and contributed to the wider discourse, but we have developed our own discourses in private. However, while agency may well be exercised when designated Cannibals cash in on an ever-present fascination in their assumed savagery, this agency is exerted within established and enduring parameters. These parameters are defined by the historical entwinement with colonialism of Cannibalism's discursive evolution, and the official and unofficial violence perpetrated in its name. Hence today as in the past, these render such weapons of the weak somewhat self-defeating. Because Cannibalism so effortlessly transmits the racialized relations of power between colonized and colonizer that formed its historical basis, its deployment today can be as disempowering as it was in the Colo regions of the 1870s. For ultimately, cannibal lands were sites of horror that remained on the frontiers of acceptability. There, extremes of violence and control were primed for commission and ultimately absorbed and obscured from view by their powerful discursive context.