Consuming images: Representations of cannibalism on the Amazonian frontier

This article examines how information about cannibalism was treated during the pacification of the Wari' Indians in Brazil in 1956-62. Recent academic critiques have emphasized that colonial agents promulgate self-serving images of cannibal savagery to justify the subjugation of native peoples. The Wari' case illustrates this point, but it also reveals other, more complex responses. Horror, disgust, and an emphasis on primitive Otherness were part of Brazilian public discourses about Wari' cannibalism, but so were empathy, cultural relativism, and an emphasis on the humanity of the cannibals. Some of the strangest efforts to keep Wari' from being stereotyped as savages came from the Protestant missionaries, Catholic clergy, and government officials most closely involved in pacifying them. Brazilian journalists exploited the news, bur responded to pressures to downplay exploitative sensationalism by framing their stories in the language of ethnography and anthropological perspectives of cultural relativism. This story sounds a cautionary note about tendencies to represent the agents of colonialism as one-dimensional figures unswervingly dedicated to highlighting the symbolic distance between themselves and those they colonized. [cannibalism, representation, colonialism, intercultural encounters, South American Indians].