Cannibal Culture
Notes on Deborah Root's 'Cannibal Culture: Art, Difference, and the Commodification of the Other'
“It is strange, we believe we have conquered Algeria, but Algeria has conquered us”- Theophile Gautier (1845)
Today I present to you, ‘Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation and the Commodification of the Other’ by Deborah Root, which was published in 1996. Besides the references to new age magic and the millennium, the book remains very relevant to current discourses about appropriation and the commodification of culture. Overall, an insightful book, but I feel like it could have gone into greater depth in some areas and avoided the rather shaky ground that is overreliance on metaphor.
Othering people and cultures
Root begins the book with a focus on the Aztec empire and continually returns to them and their clash with the Spanish forces, as a way to express how the outsider is presented. This concept is of the us versus them: we are normal but they are not, they are violent, cannibalistic and barbaric. The Aztecs, like other cultures that had their land, wealth and culture taken, were deemed primitive and ferocious, therefore giving the takers a reason for doing so, thus justifying their actions. In this way, Root argues, we use the outsider to displace our own ferocity. The actions of the coloniser were seen justified, and even lesser in violence, that the those that were colonised.
It was this dichotomy that was needed for the coloniser to see themselves in relation to others, with civilised Europe separated by an ocean to the barbarians of Mexico.
This extends to the metaphor of consumption that ties the narrative together.
Images of barabarians include ideas of excess consumption, of cannibalism and hoarding and human sacrifice. Sometimes these are true, as Root highlights the Aztec practice of sacrificing members of the population to the gods. However, she says this was seen as a justified way to balance the forces of the world. And she even goes as far so as to say that those who were being sacrificed would likely accept their fate as they were aiding the whole community, with their sacrifice stopping the gods’ desire for greater loss. Personally, I think that this is a bit of a generalisation as I doubt that all them would have shrugged their shoulders and calmly allowed themselves to be killed.
Root draws parallels between this much misunderstood cultural practice and how whole communities, whole cultures, were wiped-out as sacrifices for the coloniser’s need for consumption. A massacre. She frames this as the consumption of the bodies themselves via violence, but I think it makes more sense to emphasize their need for the metaphorical consumption of objects. Most notably, gold. I recently read Todorov’s ‘The Conquest of America,’ which says about how the Aztecs were puzzled at the Spanish arrivals’ desire for gold that they tried to think of why they would want to so much gold, with one idea being that they ate it. This they found very strange as they, personally, identified gold with excrement.
Anyway, by projecting their own behaviors of consumption onto others, colonisers are able to forge an identity for both themselves and this other group- one can’t exist without the other. These dichotomies being of violent and peaceful, primitive and civilised. Furthermore, I suppose there are parallels to be drawn between how colonial identities were also formed through the wealth and control that the act of colonisation gave, with these inter-related identities not being able to exist without the other.
Justifying colonisation
I have referred to those who were colonised as cultures, but they weren’t seen as such at the time. Those ‘primitive’ nations outside of Europe were identified by the land they lived on- the land that could be taken- therefore they were a part of the natural world and, in this way, cultureless. In this way, the coloniser could lay claim to the land they occupied and the objects that made up their religion, practice and lifestyle were seen as too primitive to be a fully-formed culture.
These ideas of primitivism extend to the present day.
Root highlights how collectors justified their hoards, specifically drawing the reader’s attention to a quote from Stephen Weil of “Our great Western collections have themselves become cultural artefacts. Arching above once-individual cultures, there is today a collective cultural patrimony that has been formed by the flow, mingle and merge of history…. What’s at art’s stake has become our heritage, too.”
Weil was writing in response to a shiva figure that was removed from a temple in Southern India in the 1970s and sold. A legal battle followed that ended with the returning of the object, which angered Weil, and his response angered me.
Opening with “Our great Western collections,” joins the reader in community of takers that I for one don’t want to be a part of. This is paired with a rhetoric of greatness, as if the West as a whole forms a vast collection that echoes rhetoric of colonial power. We have, apparently, transcended the need to for individual cultures, which have been replaced by the overarching Western empire that is put in contrast to the primitive “once-individual cultures” that have been, to use Root’s phrase, consumed, by this empire. Echoing previous justifications of colonialisation, Weil points out that this concentration of power and artefacts is all part of the “flow, mingle and merge of history,” suggesting that it was inevitable. And now this history of colonisation is “our heritage,” and should be celebrated by keeping these stolen objects and, in fact, stealing more as this shiva figure was stolen and sold in the 1970s, at the time when Weil was writing.
Commodification
These stolen objects, as well as the colonised cultures themselves, are then turned into sellable objects for further consumption. This time the consumers in question are the general public, who can participate in the legacy of colonialism via consumption of mass reproduction of other cultures. In this process, cultures are simplified, reducing the meaning that these objects have to easily identifiable markers, which usually work as a series of contrast to our own.
For example, Asia is associated with the sublimity and mystery, as well as with opulence. The association of opulence specifically highlights the wealth that these countries offered, such as China’s jade and silk. Whilst never colonised by the West, there is still this formation of stereotypes and cultural appropriation that portray the coloniser’s use of exoticism in characterizing countries as a series of differences to their own culture.
Root argues that artistic and cultural movements in the 19th and 20th centuries championed non-western cultures due to pessimism about their own Western cultures and the direction is was moving in, which was away from the authenticity they sought. People began turning to other cultures in search of this ever-allusive ‘authenticity’. Which is quite ironic actually, as the idea of the culture that they were getting was through objects, traded and sold for consumption in West. And mere objects, I would argue, portray only a superficial image of a culture, especially ones that are products of a commodified culture.
This superficial understanding is intertwined with simplification and aestheticization. Which, in turn, reinforces the stereotypes that justify colonisation, and cultural and racial hierarchy.
Root notes how “an aestheticised taste for cultures outside our own allows us to move beyond our everyday reality and experience something else without ever having to question our cultural assumptions.” Our experience of another culture is informed by our own society’s colonial imagination, without ever having to question the morality of this act.
Expanding on the quote from Theophile Gautier’s quote at the beginning: “It is strange, we believe we have conquered Algeria, but Algeria has conquered us…they have adopted all Oriental habits, so superior is primitive life to our so-called civilisation. If this goes on, France will son be Mahometan and we shall see the white domes of mosques rounding themselves on our horizons. … We should indeed like to live to see the day.”
This plays with the themes and messages of Root’s text: this idea of cultural superiority and its use to justify colonisation; the commodification of colonised cultures; the enjoyment we take in comparing others with ourselves, with them as either a threat or a means of escapism.
Overall, Roots book was very good and I recommend reading if you want to know more as these thoughts and ideas are just what I took from it.
Questions to consider:
How does Gautier’s quote present the cultural appropriation of Algeria?
What other ways has colonialism been justified?
What are the other effects of the commodification of culture?
Currently reading: Saving Agnes by Rachel Cusk
Random recommendation: Holy Moly by IVE