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Much recent postcolonial translation theory has focussed upon the appropriative, predatory nature of colonial translation operations. Colonial translation renders the colonized culture and, by extension, colonial subjects ‘transparent’. Colonial translations ‘represent’ and thereby ‘comprehend’, ‘contain’ and by extension dominate the subaltern subject (Mufti 2016: 103-6; Niranjana 1992: 185-6). Such interpretations of translation place it within an economy of epistemic capture that is confirmed by another set of metaphors conceptualizing translation as predatory extraction—in other words, as the real economic motive of colonization that mere ‘epistemic violence’ (Spivak 1999: 277) serves to underpin and legitimize. The extractive metaphorics are displayed openly in the figures of translation deployed by George Steiner (1975: 297-8). In a now-famous, perhaps even infamous passage, he describes translation as an invasive, ‘penetrative’ operation:

After trust comes aggression. The second move of the translator is incursive and extractive … The translator invades, extracts, and brings home … Certain texts or genres have been exhausted by translation … others have been negated by transfiguration, by an act of appropriative penetration and transfer in excess of the original, more ordered, more aesthetically pleasing.

The general dynamic of extraction of raw materials followed by exportation and overseas refinement characterized colonial conquest from the very outset (Marx 1976: 915; Galeano 1997), and continues on today in what is known as the Global South ‘resources curse’ (Auty 1993; Humphreys, Sachs and Stiglitz, eds 2007; Wenzel 2006). It also functions at the level of culture when the ‘raw material’ of testimonies by ‘native informants’ or other cultural artefacts are exported to Europe where they are refined into Eurocentric theories of the non-European Other (anthropology, postcolonial literary studies, postcolonial theory, etc.) (Ahmad 1992: 45). Translation is a crucial component in this neo-colonial economy of cultural extraction and expropriation.

In response to such colonial practices and late-colonial metaphors of predatory, expropriative translation, a countervailing paradigm of resistant translation emerges in the Global South. Like much postcolonial writing (Tymoczko 1999), this contestatory translative method figures as a way of ‘writing back’ (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 1989). Bassnett and Trivedi (1999: 4) summarize:

in this post-colonial period … it is unsurprising to find radical concepts of translation emerging from India, from Latin America, from Canada, from Ireland—in short, from former colonies around the world that challenge established European norms about what translation is and what it signifies.

Radical concepts of translation in the postcolonial tradition have included Bandia’s (2014) ‘translation as reparation’ in which the translation of African oral traditions into Europhone languages constituted an attempt to rectify the destructive inroads of European cultural imperialism and ‘epistemic violence’; or the ‘rough translation’ proposed by (Niranjana 1992: 185) as a counterweight to the fallacious, even coercive ‘transparency’ created by domesticating European translations of non-European works. This tension between imperialist and resistant, between colonialist and ‘postcolonial’ (often avant la lettre, see Hall 1996) modes of translation is summarized by Vincente Rafael (1988: 213):

For the Spaniards, translation was always a matter of reducing the native language and culture to accessible objects for and subjects of divine and imperial intervention. For the Tagalogs [of the Philippines], translation was a process less of internalizing colonial-Christian conventions than of evading their totalizing grip by repeatedly marking the differences between their language and interests and those of the Spaniards.

The topos that most strikingly embodies—quite literally, in this case!—the mode of resistant, ‘postcolonial’ counter-translation (Ramakrishna 2014) was that of cannibalism. Re-appropriating the marker of savagery that Europe had long implemented to distinguish itself out from its Others, theorists such as de Campos mobilized the topos of ‘cannibalism’ as a boldly self-assertive denominator of cultural confidence. ‘Cannibalism’ was read against the hegemonic (Western) grain to denote a mode of appropriating an Other that one respects and whose power one wishes to engorge. Following this aggressive counter-assimilation, ‘translation’ in the broadest sense was imagined as reversing the vector of appropriation, boldly seizing the cultural goods of Euro-America and retooling them for indigenous needs. Translation, here, falls under the rubric of Haraldo de Campos’ (1981: 11-12; 1986: 44) notion of a ‘devoração crítica do legado cultural universel’ [‘critical devoration of the universal cultural heritage’]. De Campos notes maliciously, ‘Todo passado que nos é “outro” merece ser negado. Vale dizer: merece ser comido, devorado’ [‘Any past which is an “other” for us deserves to be negated. We could say that it deserves to be eaten, devoured’].

But despite the cultural and political exuberance of such paradigms, they run the risk of merely reversing the vector of power and thereby of mirroring the colonial translation paradigm without fundamentally changing its contours. I posit that it is more interesting to re-examine the very notion of cannibalism itself. Cannibalism—assimilation of the Other into the Self—is understood by theories with a strong link to the Global South not as an act of atavistic barbarism, but as a way of mimetically capturing the world in the moment of engorging it (Taussig 1993). Mimesis in this sense is not a replication of the object but a way of becoming the object. Identificatory appropriation, rather than distanced replication, occurs in the act of eating as the barrier between the subject and the object disappears. Cannibalism thus offers a fundamentally different model of translation to colonial notions of translation. European translation was mobilized to appropriate cultural goods belonging to the Other, but by the same token to demonstrate the unbridgeable cultural chasm between the primitive Other and the translating, civilizing, European Self. Translation as eating, by contrast, generates a different set of topoi. Eating brings Self and Other closer to one another in an act of assimilative fusion. Colonial translation was also assimilative, but it assimilated cultural goods, while casting aside their human (native) makers, except as secondary helpmates (as in the typically anonymous ‘native informant’). Cultural good where appropriated in order to exclude the cultural Other. By contrast, in the tropes of translation as eating, the cultural topography of distance gives way to the translative topography of proximity, perhaps even promiscuity. One ingests the Other to attain, via corporeal similarity, indeed intimacy, the powers of the Other. It is if, to make a false-friend-based code-switching pun, one becomes the Other, in dem man den Anderen bekommt [receiving the Other as one might receive the host]. Cannibal translation, in this rendition, erodes the differences between self and other, spirit and flesh, word and non-word, and even, if its logic is followed far enough, between the human and the nonhuman.

Heavily overladen by the semantics of colonization and cultural imperialism, cannibalism remains a taboo word within our repertoire of cultural operations. Yet it might provide a neat shorthand for the ubiquitous contact zone of mutually transformative interaction that this book sees as a universal mode of generativity. Cannibalism does not reinscribe cultural difference while merely reversing the cultural hierarchy, as it might seem at first glance. Rather, cannibalism stresses similarity, continuity, the continuum of life and its exuberant call to other life. A ‘metaphysics of predation’ (Lévi-Strauss qtd in Viveiros de Castro 2014: 144), it will transpire below, generates a shift of perspective in which selfhood is defined by intentionality, which in turn can only be formulated in terms of an ingestive, transformative interaction. But that ingestion takes places under the sign of life, and is driven by the pull of one life towards another and by their constant reciprocal transformation. It is driven by what Coetzee has called ‘appetancy’ (Coetzee 2003: 192). Cannibalism does not occur under the regime of death and defeat, even though one may eat one’s enemies after vanquishing them; rather, it occurs under a regime of life and its perpetuation via transformative multiplicity. Cannibal translation happens between specific elements on a contiguous continuum of the multiplicity of life and marks the transformative interstices at which those elements meet. The cannibal translator is a shaman, one who presides over and participates in such rites of transformation.

Under the sign of cannibalism, I turn now, in order to give more substance to the alternative that I am posing to Kohn’s very hesitant and tentative shifting of the provincial boundaries of human language, to another reach of anthropological thought. In what follows, I meditate upon two theories that might be of help in seeking ways of thinking about language that are more open to its natural exterior: the symmetrical anthropology conceptualized by Eduardo Vivieros de Castro and the extroverted animism proposed by Tim Ingold.