'If you're gonna dine with the cannibals': becoming meat, becoming-animal

This thesis examines human cannibalism and its mutable nexus with anthropocentrism, the conviction of human supremacism, an orthodoxy usually taken as axiomatic in most scholarly and popular discourses. The question this thesis asks is why the majority of humans find the killing and eating of some animals, principally herbivores, unremarkable and inculpable, while killing and particularly eating other animals, especially humans, is reflexively condemned as repulsive and taboo? Cannibalism has always been an important part of the theme of monstrosity, acting as a warning against the savagery of older cultures as well as the human unconscious. In recent decades, there has been a renaissance of interest in the topic, particularly in film, television and new media, which I have named, for the purposes of this discussion, “cannibal media cultures”. The thesis explores the early written history of cannibalism and the changing nature of the taboo as a background to a critical study of human cannibalism in the contemporary period through a close and critical study of cannibal media cultures, and what they reveal about changing attitudes to the cannibal taboo, the corrosive effects of anthropocentrism and the ethics of eating the other. If, as science has been demonstrating since Darwin, the line between humans and other animals is a fragile one, and human flesh is just as edible as any other, then the taboo must fill functions that have nothing to do with what the ethics of eating but rather uphold the power structure and nature of carnivorous, patriarchal, violent “civilisation” and what it means to be deemed properly “human”. This thesis proposes that the contemporary taboo on cannibalism is closely aligned with anthropocentrism, the philosophical view that the human (particularly the male) is superior to all other species, and what Derrida called “carnivorous virility”, a key facet of “meat culture”, which bolsters anthropocentrism by eating the “other”. This nexus is ch