Island Carib cannibalism

Abstract

In The Man-Eating Myth , William Arens questions the existence of customary 4 'as an accepted practice for any time or place (1979: 9). He finds no satisfactory documentation or sustained ethnography of and cannot isolate a single reliable complete first-hand account by an anthropologist of cannibalism (1979: 181). Institutional is a myth, he concludes; one which anthropologists, missionaries, explorers, and travellers alike have perpetuated. His skepticism has been received reluctantly but there have been few rigorous examinations of the evidence (Brady 1982). One classic man-eater group he discusses is the Island Carib of the Lesser Antilles, the second New World culture encountered by the Spanish and source of the word cannibal. This paper provides a detailed review of the basis for Island Carib and therefore a test of Arens's thesis in this region. To sort out the problem of Island Carib cannibalism, I examine the difficulties surrounding the issue, the skeptical literature preceding Arens, and the actual ethnohistorical data and its modern presentation, and I suggest reasons for the prevailing uncritical acceptance of the idea of cannibalism1. Were the Island Caribs cannibals or were they not? Many authors accepted the simplicity of this reductionistic question and relied upon select, but prevalent European judgments for an affirmative answer (Borome 1966, Bradford 1973, Jesse 1963, Joyce 1916, Loeb 1923, Morison, 1942, 197 1 , 1974, Ross 1970,

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