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One question that always stymies us--that is, why cannot people eat people?
Zhu Yu
1.
Rumors of cannibalism began to circulate over the internet during the early months of last year (2001), typically accompanied by graphic photos of a Chinese man calmly chewing on what appears to be a dismembered human fetus (see Figure 1), together with sensational commentary along the lines of:
What u are going to witness here is a fact, don't get scared !" It's Taiwan's hottest food..." In Taiwan, dead babies or fetuses could be bought at $50 to $70 from hospitals to meet the high demand for grilled and barbecued babies ... What a sad state of affairs!! ("Fetus")
2.
These internet rumors began to achieve a modicum of legitimacy in mid-March, when the small Malaysian tabloid Warta Perdana fed a growing international controversy in reporting that a certain Taiwanese restaurant was serving a dish consisting of the baked flesh of human fetuses. The story eventually precipitated such an uproar that the CIA and Scotland Yard ultimately got involved to try to sort things out.
3.
While these allegations of cannibalism were, at a literal level, apocryphal, they are nevertheless quite instructive. The rumors themselves, together with the morbid transnational fascination that fed them and allowed them to grow, are interesting for two reasons. First, these rumors did not spring up in a vacuum, but rather they are implicitly in dialogue with a rich and multifaceted discursive tradition of cannibalism in modern, and premodern, China. And, second, cannibalism itself occupies a rather curious position in our own (Western) cultural imagination, and the challenge of how to read cannibalism cross-culturally has important implications for the broader question of what is at stake, and at risk, in cross-cultural reading and criticism in general.
4.
Cannibalism is a curious thing. In modern Western culture, cannibalism enjoys a virtually unparalleled hold on the popular imagination as an act of primal social violence. It is frequently held up as an almost unthinkable transgression of the social and moral codes which make us who we are.1 At the same time, however, this nearly unthinkable act has consistently, and somewhat paradoxically, proved to be all-too-thinkable, as evidenced both by the abundance of cultural representations