Between Castaways and Traders: Cannibal-Cum-Crusoe in Sumatra and the Andaman Islands

Abstract

Ted Motohashi’s “Between Castaways and Traders: Cannibal-cum-Crusoe in Sumatra and Andaman Islands” looks at the discourse of cannibalism as a mediator between the travelers/traders and the native populations, by investigating testimonials of their encounters in Sumatra and the Andaman Islands from the seventeenth century onwards. Not only the European travelers but also the natives required the cannibal discourse to be activated in order to mutually establish a humanly recognizable relationship between the alien races. This reciprocity is also the key to read Crusoe’s tale as a castaway who must develop a vital relationship with Friday and his fellow/enemy cannibals as his double self/other. In the local context of Sumatra and the Andaman Islands, as the real contact between the traveler and the native became more frequent and wide-ranging, the discourse of cannibalism inevitably lost its principal aim, when the stable relationship among the three parties—foreigners, local potentates, and interior inhabitants—collapsed, but some discourses of cannibalism prevailed from the early modern period well into the late nineteenth century in the area where the royal family monopolized the mediator role. The colonial power relationship between the two European rivals in the region—the Dutch and the English—determined the degree of prevalence for the discourse of cannibalism, in a manner similar to the rivalry between the Spanish and the English in Robinson Crusoe. As far as the traders-turned-castaways like so many Crusoes in Asia were concerned, the discourse of cannibalism was a useful, even an empowering, means of identity construction for those who propagated it in their own specific local context.