Cannibals and Orchids: Cannibalism and the Sensory Imagination of Papua New Guinea

Ilaria Vanni

doi:10.5130/csr.v18i1.1860

Abstract

This article examines Leona Miller’s book Cannibal and Orchids (1941) as an example of how place, in this case Papua New Guinea (PNG), is imagined according to a particular sensorium. It follows the ‘sensory turn in anthropology’ and the studies developed in the last two decades that take the senses as their object of enquiry. This body of theory is mobilised to analyse Miller’s biographical narrative recounting how PNG is imagined, represented and produced in terms of a disarray of the (Western) senses, coalescing in the trope of cannibalism. This article argues that the experience of PNG as the place of otherness is narrated both in terms of the author’s sensory displacement and of the indigenous sensorium as abject.

Highlights

Over the Christmas lunch table my father-‐in-‐law related events that happened in the 1960s, when he worked for the Australian Government in the process of de-‐ colonisation in Papua New Guinea
My father-‐in-‐law was in charge of overseeing land rights claims in the Gazelle Peninsula, New Britain
My father-‐in-‐law investigated the nature of and reasons for the claim, and was told this story: In the time before the Germans, the Gazelle Peninsula used to be scattered with house tambaran, men’s houses, each of them marking the possession of a plot of land

Summary

Introduction

Over the Christmas lunch table my father-‐in-‐law related events that happened in the 1960s, when he worked for the Australian Government in the process of de-‐ colonisation in Papua New Guinea. Rather I will consider this cannibal narrative as rhetorical device, as an allegory of the experience of sensory overload and displacement in the Papua New Guinea jungle.

Results

Conclusion