Lévi-Strauss wrote that “we are all cannibals.” Eating the other is a way to identify and commune with them. Drawing from research on Italian Freemasonry, an esoteric society that since the Enlightenment has pursued fraternity and equality while remaining highly exclusive, Mahmud explores the consumption of racial difference as a liberal value. This analysis centers on an ethnographic tale: a white Freemason woman’s childhood memory of her first encounter with a Black man, whom she mistook for chocolate. Told in the context of an international Masonic convention, her story served to teach white Freemasons how to cultivate a proper taste for the other. Reading it against the backdrop of Italian colonialism and consumer culture, Mahmud traces the tropes of cannibalism, first contact myths, and racial humor that the story deploys but also subverts. Ultimately, this childish parable of racial appetite imparts serious lessons about friendship and cosmopolitanism, while also illustrating the limits of liberal humanist imaginaries of alterity.

Speaker

Lilith Mahmud is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University, and her work focuses on feminist and European studies. She is the author of The Brotherhood of Freemason Sisters (University of Chicago Press, 2014), winner of the William A. Douglass Prize by the Society for the Anthropology of Europe. She has also published on gender, race, migration, secrecy, liberalism, and the Right. Prof. Mahmud serves on the editorial board of American Ethnologist and was previously Book Review Editor for American Anthropologist.

Please email [email protected] to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.