Our Man on the Inside: Cannibalism in William Seabrook's Jungle Ways

Abstract

In Jungle Ways (1931), travel writer, adventurer and self-identified cannibal William Seabrook describes in detail his direct personal participation in West African cannibalism. Though he later reveals this to have been a fabrication, the ‘truth’, narrated in his end-of-life memoir, is perhaps even more shocking than the account in Jungle Ways. The story of Seabrook's transgressive meal takes several competing forms. As a book, it was an example of best-selling popular participatory anthropology, and in serial form in Ladies Home Journal, the story was incorporated into mainstream mass culture. However, seen by dissident surrealists Michael Leiris and George Bataille as an evocative fantasy, Seabrook's narrative of transgression seems to mark a rupture in colonial ideology of dominant European culture. The subject of this article is the metaphoric potential of the ‘cannibal’ and the potential use and disturbance of the cannibal myth in early twentieth-century popular and avant-garde cultures. Jungle Ways represents a popular culture repetition of the myth of the man-eater, as identified by William Arens. Seabrook's seeming resistance to the conventional distinctions between savage and civilized, the side of the narrative which appealed to surrealists, actually reveals the self-generating, or self-defeating, logic of the myth.

Notes

¹ William Seabrook, No Hiding Place, Philadelphia, Pa.: J. Lippincott, 1942, p 286.

² William Seabrook, Jungle Ways, London: George G. Harrap and Co., 1931, p 187–88.

³ ‘William Seabrook’, in Karen Lane Rood (ed), American Writers in Paris, 1920–1939, Detroit, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 1980, pp 352–53.

⁴ See Stella Bowen, Drawn From Life, London: Collins, 1941 and Marjorie Worthington, The Strange World of Willie Seabrook, New York, N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966.

⁵ Petrine Archer-Straw, Negrophilia: Avant-garde Paris and Black Culture of the 1920s, London: Thames and Hudson, 2000.

⁶ In William Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy, New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1979.

⁷ Steven Gregory, ‘Voodoo, Ethnography, and the American Occupation of Haiti’, in Dialectical Anthropology: Essays in Honor of Stanley Diamond: Vol 2, Gainesville: University Florida Press, 1992, pp 169–207, pp 169–170.

⁸ Seabrook, Jungle Ways, p 50.

⁹ Susan Zeiger has offered a fascinating account of Seabrook's relationship with magic in an unpublished presentation, ‘Magic Islands, Jungle Ways: William Seabrook, Popular Primitivism, and the Imperial Imagination’, Invited Talk, American Literature and Cultures Workshop, University of Chicago, May 2010.

¹⁰ See Gananath Obeyesekere, Cannibal Talk: The Man-eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005, for a discussion of the relation between ‘orientalism’ and ‘savagism’.

¹¹ Seabrook, Jungle Ways, pp 245–46.

¹² William Soskin, ‘Books on Our Table’, New York Times, 3 April 1931, p 21.

¹³ Percy Hutchison, ‘Magic and Cannibalism in the African Jungle’, The New York Times, 5 April 1931, p 59.

¹⁴ Theodore Hall, ‘No End of Books’, The Washington Post, 16 November 1934, p 9.

¹⁵ EJ Dingwell, [Review of Jungle Ways], Man, 31, 1931, p 200.

¹⁶ Franklin Frazier, [Review of Jungle Ways], The American Journal of Sociology, 38(3), 1932, p 502.

¹⁷ Sterling Brown, ‘Negro Character as Seen by White Authors’, The Journal of Negro Education, 2(2), 1933, pp 179–203.

¹⁸ Arens, The Man-Eating Myth, pp 170–71.

¹⁹ In Francis Baker, Peter Hulme and Margret Iverson (eds), Cannibalism and the Colonial World, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998, p 54.

²⁰ Seabrook, Jungle Ways, p 167.

²¹ Seabrook, No Hiding Place, pp 305–10.

²² For some of the representative debates, see Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993; James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988; Catalin Avramescu, An Intellectual History of Cannibalism, Alistair Ian Blyth (trans), Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009; Geoffrey Sanborn, ‘The Missed Encounter: Cannibalism and the Literary Critic’, in Kristen Guest (ed), Eating Their Words: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Cultural Identity, Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2001, pp 187–204; Rebecca Weaver-Hightower, Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals and Fantasies of Conquest, Minneapolis and London: Minnesota UP, 2007; Jeff Berglund, Cannibal Fictions: American Explorations of Colonialism, Race, Gender and Sexuality, Wisconsin: Wisconsin University Press, 2006; Shirley Lindenbaum, ‘Thinking about Cannibalism’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 33, 2004, pp 75–98; Jennifer Brown, Cannibalism in Literature and Film, New York, N.Y.: Palgrave McMillan, 2013.

²³ Peter Hulme, ‘Introduction: The Cannibal Scene’, in Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margret Iverson (eds), Cannibalism and the Colonial World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp 1–39, p 17.

²⁴ Arens, Man-Eating Myth, p 183–84.

²⁵ Johannes Fabian, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, pp 221–23.

²⁶ Obeyesekere, Cannibal Talk, p 18.

²⁷ Seabrook, Jungle Ways, pp 131–32.

²⁸ Seabrook, Jungle Ways, p 14.

²⁹ Steven Gregory, ‘Voodoo, Ethnography, and the American Occupation of Haiti’, p 169; for another discussion of Seabrook's liminality, see James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture.

³⁰ Maggie Kilgour, ‘The Function of Cannibalism at the Present Time’, in Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margret Iverson (eds), Cannibalism and the Colonial World, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998, pp 238–50, p 244; by the same author, see also From Communion to Cannibalism.

³¹ Priscilla Walton, Our Cannibals, Ourselves, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005, pp 6–7.

³² See, for example, Archer-Straw, Negrophilia and Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives, Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1990; Sieglinde Lemke, Primitivist Modernism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998; Michael North, Dialect of Modernism: Race Language and Twentieth-century Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994; Carol Sweeney, From Fetish to Subject, Westport, Conn. and London: Praeger, 2004; Robin Hackett, Sapphic Primitivism: Productions of Race, Class, and Sexuality in Key Works of Modern Fiction, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004.

³³ Simon Gikandi, ‘Africa and the Epiphany of Modernism’, in Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel (eds), Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, and Modernity, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005, pp 31–50, p 34, p 46.

³⁴ Tom Harrisson, Savage Civilizations, New York, N.Y.: Victor Gollancz, 1933.

³⁵ Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of Cannibals’, in Montaigne: Selected Essays, Charles Cotton-W. Hazlitt (trans), New York, N.Y.: The Modern Library, 1949, pp 74–89.

³⁶ Rod Edmond, ‘Tom Harrisson in the New Hebrides and Bolton’, in Peter Hulme and Russell McDougall (eds), Writing, Travel, and Empire: In the Margins of Anthropology, London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007, pp 198–220, p 199, p 201, p 210, p 216. Edmonds does not mention Seabrook, but the parallels with Harrisson are striking.

³⁷ Graham Greene, Journey Without Maps, London: Heinemann, 1936.

³⁸ Amar Acheraïou, Rethinking Postcolonialism: Colonialist Discourse in Modern Literature and the Legacy of Classical Writers, Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2008, p 194.

³⁹ Jon Heggelund, ‘Modernism, Africa and the Myth of Continents’, in Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (eds), Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces, London and New York: Routledge, 2005, pp 43–53, p 47.

⁴⁰ Gikandi, ‘Africa and the Epiphany of Modernism’, p 46.

⁴¹ Fabian, Out of Our Minds, p 226.

⁴² Gikandi, ‘Africa and the Epiphany of Modernism’, p 44.

⁴³ Seabrook, Jungle Ways, p 135, p 133.

⁴⁴ Acheraïou, Rethinking Postcolonialism, p 190.

⁴⁵ Seabrook, Jungle Ways.

⁴⁶ Seabrook, Jungle Ways, p 167.

⁴⁷ Seabrook, Jungle Ways, p 168–9.

⁴⁸ Seabrook, Jungle Ways, p 169.

⁴⁹ Seabrook, Jungle Ways, p 166.

⁵⁰ Seabrook, Jungle Ways, p 180.

⁵¹ Seabrook, Jungle Ways, p 180.

⁵² Seabrook, Jungle Ways, p 180.

⁵³ Seabrook, Jungle Ways, p 185.

⁵⁴ Fabian, Out of Our Minds, p 221.

⁵⁵ Seabrook, Jungle Ways, p 188.

⁵⁶ Edmond, ‘Tom Harrisson in the New Hebrides and Bolton’, p 211.

⁵⁷ Seabrook, Jungle Ways, p 189.

⁵⁸ Seabrook, Jungle Ways, p 185.

⁵⁹ Michel de Certeau, ‘Montaigne's “Of Cannibals”: the Savage “I”’, in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, Brian Massumi (trans), Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, pp 67–79.

⁶⁰ Walton, Our Cannibals, Ourselves, p 4.

⁶¹ De Certeau, “Montaigne's ‘Of Cannibals’”, p 76.

⁶² De Certeau, “Montaigne's ‘Of Cannibals’”, p 74.

⁶³ De Certeau, ‘Montaigne's “Of Cannibals”’, p 70.

⁶⁴ Kilgour, ‘The Function of Cannibalism at the Present Time’, p 243, p 246.

⁶⁵ Vincent Crapanzano, Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004, p 145, p 147.

⁶⁶ Georges Bataille, ‘The College of Sociology’, in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, Allan Stoekl (ed and trans), Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1985, pp 246–57, p 250.

⁶⁷ Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sexuality (1957), Mary Dalwood (trans), San Francisco, Ca.: City Lights Publishers, 1986, p 38.

⁶⁸ See Crapanzano, Imaginative Horizons.

⁶⁹ Maryline Lukacher, Maternal Fictions: Stendhal, Sand, Rachilde, and Bataille, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994, p 169, p 170, p 171.

⁷⁰ Seabrook, No Hiding Place, p 313.

⁷¹ Georges Bataille, ‘The Modern Spirit and the Play of Transpositions’, in Dawn Ades and Simon Baker (eds), Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents, Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (trans), Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2006, pp 240–43, p 240.

⁷² Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, New York and London: Routledge, 1995.

⁷³ Edmond, ‘Tom Harrisson in the New Hebrides and Bolton’, p 215.

⁷⁴ See also Acheraïou, Rethinking Postcolonialism, p 185, on Firestone Corporation in Sierra Leone.

⁷⁵ Jennifer Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies Home Journal, Gender and the Promise of Consumer Culture, New York and London: Routledge, 1995; Lisa Belicka Keränen, ‘“Girls Who Came to Pieces”: Women, Cosmetics and Advertising in Ladies Home Journal 1900–1920’, in Carol Stabile (ed), Turning the Century, Oxford: Westview Press, 2000, pp 142–165.

⁷⁶ Diane McGee, Writing the Meal: Dinner in the Fiction of early Twentieth-Century Women Writers, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001, p 30.

⁷⁷ Seabrook, No Hiding Place, p 310, p 306.

⁷⁸ Worthington, The Strange World of Willie Seabrook, 1966, p 56.

⁷⁹ Worthington, The Strange World of Willie Seabrook, 1966, p 56.

⁸⁰ Walton, Our Cannibals, Ourselves, p 4.

⁸¹ Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 1988, pp 169–70.

⁸² Quoted in Archer-Straw, Negrophilia, p 142.

⁸³ Gikandi, ‘Africa and the Epiphany of Modernism’, p 32.

⁸⁴ Paul Woods (ed), Varieties of Modernism, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004, p 55, p 59.