"We are all cannibals": Kurtz, Falk e “the unspeakable rites”

Although in our imagination cannibalism represents the extreme experience that pushes our sense of being human to its limit, anthropophagy is not a unitary phenomenon but varies both in its cultural content and in its symbolic meaning. However, it has also been said that what in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries was called cannibalism was only a British discourse about the practice of cannibalism. That is, anthropophagy was considered as synonymous with being savage and the idea of cannibalism was applied to justify brutal colonialist practices. This article analyses references to cannibalism in Heart of Darkness and “Falk”, two Conradian tales where cannibalism – far from being a characteristic of a particular ethnic group – is a human possibility which is not used to define unavoidable and reassuring cultural differences between civilized and savage, colonizer and colonized, but as an unstable, porous and permeable border between human and non-human.