Kelly L.Watson,<i>Insatiable appetites: imperial encounters with cannibals in the North Atlantic world</i>

Insatiable appetites: imperial encounters with cannibals in the North Atlantic world, by Kelly L. Watson, New York & London, New York University Press, 2015, xiv + 239 pp., $40.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-8147-6347-6This book addresses the way that Europeans travelled to the Americas carrying the assumptions derived from classical authors that barbarians were likely to be cannibals or Amazons. They sought and found these categories among those they encountered, recognising them in local native societies, first in the Caribbean and then the Americas. Cannibals (the very word seemingly derived from Carib) constituted the colonial other for many Europeans. Although the author acknowledges the extent of anthropological debate and fieldwork that followed William Arens' blank denial of the existence of cannibalism, it is not her purpose to explore the issue of myth and reality with regard to the accounts of colonial observers. Despite the fact that both historical accounts and modern fieldwork have established patterns of cannibalism in some American native cultures, this study concentrates on the different purposes to which accounts of these practices were put in the Spanish, French and British empires before 1800. Kelly Watson promises a new interpretation of this process in that she places at the centre of the colonial discourses the gendered character of both the imagery and the narratives of cannibals and cannibalism. Stories of peoples who captured young men, castrated and then reared them to be eaten later, were accompanied by accounts of islands of women who would invite chosen cannibals to father their children. Here, the myths of the cannibal Scythians and the one-breasted Amazons found in Herodotus were replicated in reports from across the Atlantic. Beginning from the first encounters in the Caribbean, the study moves to the Meso-American experiences, the French Jesuit accounts of Canada and North America, and England's northern colonies. All this is well done, with the different perspectives of Spanish conquistadors, French Jesuit missionaries, and the more disparate and thin accounts by British settlers, captured in war or engaged in ethnic cleansing of native peoples, contrasted.Watson's promise to deliver a gendered analysis of these discourses stresses the mixture of masculinity and racism in some of these accounts. White men were struck with self-doubt and fears (almost Freudian fears of castration, real and symbolic). They were afraid of being unmanned by both sexually insatiable women and castrating cannibals - a double impotence: this was a fear of western weakness rather than an assertion of superiority. Even if they could withstand torture, they could still be corrupted, as Joseph Conrad's Kurtz was, by savages they could not resist, unable to reject the heart of darkness of the Other in themselves. This seems to be the core particularly of Amerigo Vespucci's fascination with native Americans and of some Jesuit accounts. What emerges most strongly is the sexual obsessions of the conquerors. In the Spanish narratives in particular, allegations of cannibalism were compounded by sodomy and mass human sacrifice - and all justified conquest and conversion. But native women remained a constant focus of fascination. Through the bodies of women the conquistadors negotiated their understanding of both sexuality and cannibalism. …

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