This is a past event
A (Dis)entangled History of Early Modern Cannibalism: Theory and Practice in Global History
To download the full programme click here.
Please note that the previous date of the event was Wednesday 4 November 2020, 5 pm, due to unforeseen circumstances we have to postpone the event indefinitely. The new date wil be up on the website soon.
Michael Tworek (Harvard and Vancouver)
A (Dis)entangled History of Early Modern Cannibalism: Theory and Practice in Global History
This presentation explores the history of cannibalism as both a disputed anthropophagic practice and a cultural reference point across the early modern world. Through a rich multi-lingual and visual source base, I trace how the reception of Indigenous Tapuya endo-cannibalism in Brazil travelled across the Atlantic through Europe and Africa to East Asia. The idea of Tapuya cannibalism crossed some linguistic borders, stopped at others, and interacted unevenly with ideas about “cannibal countries” in Polish, Ottoman, west African, Arabic, and Chinese sources. This trajectory challenges the historiographical consensus that places European conquest at the centre of discourse around cannibalism. By tracing how this discourse did and did not travel around the globe (with a special emphasis on the experience of Polish travellers), this presentation offers a concrete approach to writing about an early modern world characterized by intermittent connectedness. I suggest that such an approach, dubbed here (dis)entangled history, can bridge the artificial historiographical divide between those arguing for histories of global connections and those pushing for histories of disintegration.
- Speaker
- Michael Tworek