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Humboldt and the Monkeys: On the Friend‐Food Distinction
Author(s) -
Buhanan Kurt
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
the german quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.11
H-Index - 10
eISSN - 1756-1183
pISSN - 0016-8831
DOI - 10.1111/gequ.10220
Subject(s) - ideology , the imaginary , cannibalism , narrative , scholarship , indigenous , representation (politics) , sociology , aesthetics , history , literature , psychoanalysis , politics , philosophy , art , political science , psychology , law , biology , ecology , larva
In this essay, I argue that the image of cannibalism in Alexander von Humboldt's Personal Narrative operates as a multistable image, an ideologically charged biopicture. The argument proceeds through three stages: first, I contextualize the cannibal as a stock image in Western thought, one that Humboldt inherits even before his journey to South America. Second, I examine this over‐determined image, a veritable fixation in the European imaginary, against the claim advanced in recent Humboldt scholarship that he “took the novel step” of asking the cannibals to speak for themselves. Finally, I propose a reading of Humboldt's image of cannibalism as a politically charged picture of social relations, which simultaneously resists and reproduces the ideologically structured representation of indigenous peoples that Humboldt attempts to subvert.

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