Honor Eating: Frank Lestringant, Michel de Montaigne, and the Physics of Symbolic Exchange

At first glance, Frank Lestringant’s Cannibals (first published in French in 1994) appears to belong to the tradition of what Michel de Certeau called “heterology,” or the study of writing about “the Other.”¹ Lestringant’s text takes the reader from the origin of the idea of New World cannibalism in the journals of Christopher Columbus to the mid-nineteenth-century perspectives of writers such as Jules Verne and Gustav Flaubert. Central to Lestringant’s study, as it is to de Certeau’s, is Montaigne’s essay “Of the Cannibals,” in which, according to de Certeau, a key instability lies in the use of the words “savage,”