Cannibals, Christians, and the Ethnographic Imagination: Montaigne and his Contemporaries
Wednesday, November 18, room 9-A at 5 pm
The discovery of the New World raised among several myths the association of Caribs [or “Canibs”] anthropophage cultures with definitions o representations of “barbarism” in support of the presumed superiority of European cultures. Prof. John J. Martin will explore French humanist Michel de Montaigne critiques in his in his Essays (1580) and reports of European travelers to the New World to draw what we might call the ethnographic imagination of early modern Europe.