Our Man on the Inside: Cannibalism in William Seabrook's Jungle Ways

Abstract

In Jungle Ways (1931), travel writer, adventurer and self-identified cannibal William Seabrook describes in detail his direct personal participation in West African cannibalism. Though he later reveals this to have been a fabrication, the ‘truth’, narrated in his end-of-life memoir, is perhaps even more shocking than the account in Jungle Ways. The story of Seabrook's transgressive meal takes several competing forms. As a book, it was an example of best-selling popular participatory anthropology, and in serial form in Ladies Home Journal, the story was incorporated into mainstream mass culture. However, seen by dissident surrealists Michael Leiris and George Bataille as an evocative fantasy, Seabrook's narrative of transgression seems to mark a rupture in colonial ideology of dominant European culture. The subject of this article is the metaphoric potential of the ‘cannibal’ and the potential use and disturbance of the cannibal myth in early twentieth-century popular and avant-garde cultures. Jungle Ways represents a popular culture repetition of the myth of the man-eater, as identified by William Arens. Seabrook's seeming resistance to the conventional distinctions between savage and civilized, the side of the narrative which appealed to surrealists, actually reveals the self-generating, or self-defeating, logic of the myth.