From “The Straight Dope (classics)”, a critical look at cannibalism (which just so happens to intersect with the idea of sociopolitical motivations for embroidered meme propagation:
Dear Cecil:
I was just reading about those boat people in Southeast Asia who had to resort to cannibalism to survive and it reminded me of something I heard once. Is it true that cannibalism was outlawed because people developed laughing sickness afterward and died by literally busting a gut? –Listener, Dick Whittington show, KIEV radio, Los Angeles
Cecil replies:
Let’s take this step-by-step. Number one, forget about laughing sickness. It’s possible to die laughing, a topic I have addressed in the past, but that’s not the disease you allegedly get from people eating. Most likely you’re thinking of kuru, a fatal neurological ailment characterized by trembling. From 1957 to 1977 kuru was epidemic among certain New Guinea tribes and was suspected of being contracted by eating human flesh. But cannibalism had been outlawed long before.
The question you should have asked, if you don’t mind my saying so, is whether cannibalism (or anthropophagy, as we intellectual snobs like to call it) occurs on a systematic basis at all. In a 1979 book called The Man-Eating Myth, anthropologist William Arens argues that cannibalism is the equivalent of an urban legend: lots of researchers say they’ve heard about it, but hardly anybody has actually seen it happen.
Arens does not deny the occurrence of cannibalism in survival situations, as with the boat people or those guys whose plane crashed in the Andes in 1972. But he says there is no proof it has ever taken place anywhere routinely. Most accounts by early explorers are so larded with patent nonsense that no credence can be placed in them. Reports by contemporary anthropologists, which rely heavily on hearsay, aren’t much better.
What is common, Arens believes, is not cannibalism but belief in cannibalism, spurred by the mixture of horror and fascination man eating has always inspired. Many cultures have built up a considerable mythology around cannibalism–consider the Christian notion of consuming the body and blood of Christ. Explorers and anthropologists heard non-Western versions of such legends and made the mistake of taking them literally.
In some cases, I should point out, the mistake was no accident. Stories about cannibalism in the Caribbean spread in part because Spanish kings allowed only cannibal tribes to be enslaved. Naturally this inspired the conquistadors to declare just about every inhabitant of the New World guilty.
Cannibalism stories arise for a variety of reasons. A people may accuse its enemies of cannibalism (and often incest) to demonstrate its superiority: we’re civilized, they’re savages. One recalls accusations that Jews drank the blood of Christians; many Africans today believe Europeans drink blood. A tribe may confess to having practiced cannibalism in the indefinite past as a way of saying, look how far we’ve come. In the African equivalent of witchcraft trials, a few unlucky souls might confess to cannibalism under torture just as women here and in Europe confessed to sorcery.
Even prehistoric cannibalism cannot be regarded as a sure thing. A number of archaeologists have reported finding human bones showing the cut marks and breakage characteristic of food refuse, but these may represent isolated instances of survival cannibalism. There is little evidence to suggest that man eating was customary in the Stone Age.
In the scientific community reaction to Arens’s book has been sharply divided. A few people liken him to the nuts who claim the mass slaughter of Jews and others during World War II never happened. But the more common view is that while routine cannibalism may not be entirely unknown, its frequency has probably been greatly exaggerated. Many now believe, for instance, that New Guinea natives are not cannibals and that kuru is spread by contact with corpses during funeral preparations, although there is still some argument about this. Cannibalism may yet join witchcraft on the dustheap of history.
[My emphasis]
I am one of those who believes that survival cannibalism, bluster, attempts to distinguish cultural (and so “political”) superiority, and the innate human revulsion to the practice, are all largely responsible for the myth of systematic cannibalism.
Well, that and a series of really cool movies that came out of the late seventies and early eighties—most of them Italian (like, for instance, Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust), which were presented in “documentary form.” But I digress.
In short, I believe, with Adams, that cannibalism as an official practice is to a large extent an historical urban legend.
Still, it is interesting to place cannibalism into the same category as the Jewish blood libel—a way to doggedly divide ideological opinion about identity groups. On the one hand, those who dismiss the Jewish blood libel as the nonsense it is have the tendency, at times, to extrapolate from the historical perpetuation of this libel, the idea that, having been proven not to be monsters, Jews must necessarily be saints. And of course, those who continue to propagate the stories of Jews baking cakes with the blood of Palestinian babies, will necessarily perpetuate the idea of Jews as sneaky monsters posing as historical victims.
The truth, of course, lies in between—and takes place at the level of the individual: for instance, just as not every person who died in the holocaust was a saint (though s/he was a victim, and no one deserved that fate), it is doubtless the case that cultural memetics constructed to demonize the Other are what lay the ground work for genocide.
Which is yet another reason to avoid identity politics altogether and advocate consistently for the western liberal idea of the primacy of the individual. Because it is far less likely for one identity group to wage war on what they see to be disparate human beings than it is for them to wage war against an identity group to which they can ascribe common characteristics that they can then demonize, and the necessary eradication of which they can subsequently rationalize.
Mr. Goldstein, when you die, I would like to eat your brains. They will give me power, ideally a LOT of power, considering… well, they’re YOUR brains.
I pass on your liver though.
Do these studies take into account the cookery of “Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”? Would that incident, perhaps, be the origin of the newspaper industry’s hankering after the flesh and blood of the famous?
HCT
The various peoples of Mexico (Aztecs (Mexica), Mixtecs, Acolhua etc.) didn’t just kill their sacrifices, they ate them too. The various parts would be apportioned to those who most deserved them for whatever characteristics the Aztecs thought they had.
For instance, they would give the brains to wise men, the sexual organs to young, married couples, etc. On special, holy days, when there could be many thousands of sacrifices, the slaves would even get the leftovers.
Also, my argument about how we didn’t steal the land from the American Indians usually includes the part about how they killed the people here before them, and then ate them.
Cannibalism was very common in North America before the Europeans started showing up and killing everybody. But at least we didn’t eat them.
I must patriotically dissent, Messr Goldstein. You say that cannibalism did not exist systematically, but that it happened during survival situations. Well, the collolary to that is how often did survival situations occur. And the answer is probably—often, if not systematic in itself.
In tribal societies, a third of the men will die due to war: if you fight battles three or four times a year over forty years, even if no one gets hurt in the majority of battles, it adds up to a huge toll. And the same way with seasons, the vast majority of seasons could be plentiful, food-laden.
But one bad season, or food plague like a potato famine, and the tribe can starve en masse: Other tribes control the surrounding areas, and an especially fertile generation could tip the numbers into deficits. It doesn’t have to happen often, but it will happen, especially as tribes typically lack sophisticated farming methods, much less food reserves to even out the bad times. If it happens once in a lifetime, it still happens and makes a major impact.
A couple of critiques. One, my position is essentially Malthusian and vulnerable to the many critiques of Malthus, like Europe’s unforeseen demographic glut. Two, the potato famine showed that widespread cannibalism is not inevitable, migration and war can also reduce the stress. But then again, North Koreans are probably eating themselves, like the Ukrainians did during the Soviet’s collectivisations. And Easter Island would be a good example of where a population might rapidly fall off enough that disaster, war, and murder might result.
And the Spanish found islands, and those Caribs were likely very near the maximum number of people that could survive there. One bad season, and you might have to eat the rich, so to speak. And lets not forget the Aztecs. They murdered tens of thousands at their temples and made, ahem, use of their bodies. The proof of cannibalism, in a systematic way, lies right there in Mexica, if nowhere else.
Damnit, Veeshir, beat me to the Aztecs!
Veeshir is correct. Cannabalism was institutionalized by the Aztecs.
The Aztecs did not keep livestock.
They used sacrifice byproducts (the heart and the blood belonged to the god or gods) for additional protein in their diet.
They are reported to have slaughtered 25,000 humans from a neighboring tribe in the space of three days.
One must concieve of an assemblyline proceedure of some sort.
A lot of cannibalism was ritualistic, rather than a source of nutrition. The Aztecs did this, as noted above. The idea of eating your enemy is the ultimate sign of contempt, as well as showing that you have no fear of them. Ironically, eating the body of a hero may be the ultimate sign of approval.
However, eating other people is a losing strategy for nutrition. If you’re eating members of your own tribe, then your numbers are bound to dwindle, to say nothing of the social awkwardness of the situation.
If you’re eating your enemies, warfare becomes not only mandatory, but particularly brutal. Odds are, you’re going to wipe them out, or they’re going to wipe you out. Either way, it isn’t sustainable.
Now, off to lunch. Ah, fava beans!
The Nahuatl was the name of the tribe.
Archeologists have also found human bones scraped out for the marrow, and sorts of aztec “recipes” for cooking human parts.
Veeshir is right, and this is one of those cases where that know-it-all Cecil Adams is wrong. Cannibalism is well attested from parts of New Guinea (anthropologist Michael Rockefeller was one celebrity dinner guest), and the Maori were big fans of “long pig.” Jared Diamond has a whole slew of references in Collapse. (I don’t want to argue about his thesis, just the occurrence of cannibalism.)
Another cannibal group were the Anasazi in the American southwest. There was an excellent study of the subject called Man Corn, which is where Bobby Hill got the term in a hilarious episode of King of the Hill dealing with PC views of Native Americans.
T/W: This topic gives a whole new meaning to the phrase, “Big Mac attack.”
By the way: FOODIST!!!!!
sw: entire. I can’t believe I ate the entire …
Having just read Mary Roach’s Stiff – The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers she quotes from the artist Diego Rivera’s Memoir My Art, My Life:
Those of us who undertook the experiment pooled our money to purchase cadavers from the city morgue, choosing the bodies of persons who had died of violence—who had been freshly killed and were not diseased or senile. We lived on this cannibal diet for two months and everyone’s health improved.
Author Roach does make a passing comment that he could have just made this up. But adds that art students at the time were commonly required to take anatomy classes and may have become interested in cannibalism out of curiosity.
For the record, I considered citing the Aztecs—and Mr Dahmer—as representatives of various outliers. The point being that cannibalism as a widespread practice of early man—or of multiple cultures—has been greatly exaggerated.
The Moche (so-named) people of South America ceremonially drank the blood and ate the flesh of prisoners over many generations. Their largest temple was adjacent to a “disposal pit” containing legions of skeletons whose flesh had been scraped from their bones. Depictions of these “feasts” appear in recovered artwork, urns and such, but local archaologists are squeamish about describing it.
IIRC there are a number of fairly reliable historical accounts of small- to medium-sized groups of people who regularly consumed human flesh, though brains seems to have been the meal of choice and frequently it was more ceremonial than dietary. I don’t think it’s an “urban legend” but I don’t think any major culture has ever had a popular (as in “everybody does it”) cannibalism thing going.
There’s substantial evidence that a number of Celtic groups in the British Isles and Europe ate human brains and kept the cracked skulls as trophies. Probably because of health issues, the groups were not dominant or long-lasting.
That and the fact that it’s icky.
TW: How does one season a human brain anyway?
The epidemic of kuru has been pretty clearly traced to cannibalism in my view. The tradition was that women and children ate the organs including the brain which contained the highest concentration of prions which is the transmitting agent.
No problem. Just eat <a href=”http://www.eathufu.com/home.asp” target=”_blank”>HuFu. All the flavor of Long Pork without the nasty moral dilemmas.
Whoops. Forgot to close my link.
HuFu
TW: The data was there, just not the formatting.
Dunno, but if they are anything like pork brains they sure as hell don’t need salt.
TW: thinking-> Yes, it was quite clouded at the time of purchase.
Urban Legend indeed. And it doesn’t stop there. What about the fava beans? Nobody really eats THOSE either. They’re hideous! I don’t care HOW good the human liver is OR the chianti is.
So Jeff what do those palestinian babies taste like anyway? Just asking…In case I get in what one of those survival cannibalism situations.
I don’t want to make any accusations I can’t prove, but the next time you find yourself in a hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant with a cackling crone behind the register and four identical mongoloid waiters, don’t order the pork.
Trust me on this. Just don’t. Might want to stay away from the chicken as well.
Alan W. Eckert relates a grisly incident of cannibalism in his book Wilderness Empire. A group of Ottawa returning from the defeat of General Braddock’s army with a group of prisoners in tow grew hungry along the way. No need to spend time hunting, they had meat on the hoof with them. The details are too gruesome to relate.
Is this an instance of survival cannibalism? It was summertime, and there couldn’t have been any shortage of game.
Merovign, having just come from such a place I find your comment offensive
Watch out, folks. This is the opening of another front in the meme war.
There are many fantasy uses for a time machine, but after many years of thought I have settled on two: first, give Karl Marx a Russian Colt and a supply of ammunition and transport him to the 1924 Party Congrss of the Soviet Union; and, second, to kidnap Jacques Rousseua as an infant and deliver him to a tribe of New Guinea highlanders for adoption.
Elites, autocrats, and wannabees in both categories love Rousseauvianism and the Noble Savage notion, and extend it whenever possible—consider, for instance, “cultural imperialism.” The reason, of course, is that it excuses their greed and selfishness as well as rationalizing their failures. If the Noble Savage is the ideal, and any disturbance of such a culture is an affront to Humanity, they themselves, already ensconced comfortably at the top of the heap, are confirmed in their places, and any failures of theirs to allow advances in living conditions etc. are rationalized as preserving the Nobility of the Common Man.
If the Savage is clearly not Noble—as they clearly were not, as anyone who has had to interact with them knows well—if, for instance, they were cannibals, well, the Common Man might look at that and go “Eeuw! That ain’t what I want to be!” This is frustrating. Tenure is at stake.
Therefore every occasion should be taken to play up the Nobility of the Savage and downplay any evidence of practices amongst the Savages which might be considered less than noble. Endemic warfare, for instance. (The Amerinds had better and cheaper technology, and more familiarity with it, than the European colonizers. If they hadn’t characteristically regarded the tribe over the hill as just another target for occasional raids, they would have been able to combine and boot the white folks off the continent. Handily.) Torture to death considered as afternoon amusement for the kiddies. Slavery. Self-mutilation. Mutilation and crippling as practical joke (screamingly funny, ha ha). And, of course, cannibalism.
The goal, as always, is to get Western civilization (with the U.S. as exemplar) to give up its vile (=nonSocialist) practices and hand over to the truly noble management of the USSR. Since there isn’t a USSR any more the goal is somewhat problematic, but the program is running on intertia and automatic pilot now, and fortunately for its initiates a substitute has appeared that echoes the “we intend to conquer the world, and anybody who says different is an imperialist” basis. Ah, familiarity. Comfort.
Look for the professariat to be chanting this notion in unison within, say, three months or so. The declaration of TRVTH has been made, and unless the opposition is uncommonly strenuous any contrary evidence will simply feed the memory hole.
Regards,
Ric
tw: analysis. This may be overstating the case, but it’s good to see the AI on track.
Ric, the real question is, did you try the pork? Was it… unusually tasty?
Not to be pedantic, but Nahuatl was the name of their language, not their ‘tribe’. They were the Mexica, most of the peoples in the region around what is now Mexico City spoke Nahuatl.
I don’t like using the word ‘tribe’ in reference to the cultures in pre-Columbus Mexico because, aside from the cannibalism, they were at least as civilized as the Europeans at the time (I think more). The Europeans practiced human sacrifice too, they just called it The Inquisition, or Witch-Burnings.
For a great book about pre-Columbian through Post Cortez Mexico, read “Aztec” by Jennings. It’s nearly pornographic, but very good. His books are meticulously researched and I have not found any serious errors in his facts. Obviously, the characters, except for the rulers of the largest nationalities, are made up, but it’s a very good read. I won’t watch anything on the History Channel about them since they insist on calling Motecuzoma, “Montezuma”.
Except for Donner Party like stuff, I would agree that cannibalism was more ritual than for sustenance, but it was very wide-spread in many cultures. To eat your enemy is the ultimate victory. As I said, the ‘Aztecs’ ate their sacrifices, but they ate the parts that were supposed to help them. The rest went to the slaves (who were happy to get any meat) or to the zoo animals.
If you only eat your own kind, you don’t get enough nutrients, so cannibalism is anti-evolutionary. That’s why carnivores won’t eat their own kind, I assume. The ones with that inclination died off because they were too weak to be viable. Ditto human tribes who used cannibalism as sustenance, they would have been easy pickings for their neighbors who were angry that their family memebers kept getting eaten.
Merovign, I always eat the pork. Carnitas—mmm. Eat beef in the United States, Canada, Argentina, or Brazil. Elsewhere choose pork, chicken, or lamb/mutton (I don’t care for the latter).
Veeshir, I think the difference is a matter of attitude. For Europeans human sacrifices have been, since historical times, out of the ordinary, special occasions. For the other societies you mention they were routine, everyday practices, part of religious ritual to be sure but “normal” rather than extraordinary spectaculars. Thinking of something as “unusual” yields a shorter chain of rationalizations to get to “unacceptable”.
Regards,
Ric
Veeshir, there are some pretty alarming gaps between comparing the Inquisition to the Mexica sacrifices, not least that the Christian “Hounds of God” inquisitors did not eat their offerings. Comparing the Inquisition to Stalinist purges is better, but still there is considerable daylight between them. In both cases, the Inquisition and purges served a goal-oriented purpose, to be rid of Moors or Jews, or problems in the dictatorship of the People. They weren’t habitual matters.
It’s like the recent History Channel special on cannibalism, where the lurid details of the Mexicas was one segment. The others? The Donner party and the old “pound of Flesh” found in European apothecaries. See, Europeans were cannibals, same as the natives. Ahem.
I was more writing from the Mexican Indians perspective.
But I still don’t see the difference between the Catholic Church officially sanctioning the murder of people and human sacrifice. They claimed to be doing it for their god, indeed, they claimed their god demanded it. I would suggest that the difference is semantic. It was habitual if short-lived.
I don’t think that they really believed that their god demanded it, I just think they were greedy, (they got to keep the property of those killed), really twistedly sick and/or really got off on the feeling of power over their fellow human beings.
Of course, the Spanish Inquisition was far worse than the Papal one so the Mexican Indians got to look at the worst one.
The History Channel is nearly useless as an information source. Unless you already know the subject matter, you have no idea which part is true and which is feel-good propaganda. It’s pop-history. They could have brought up Druids and Baalists, as both of these human-sacrificers were also supposed ritual-cannibals.
One thing to get things riled up at the end of a long thread, the protagonist in that book “Aztec” mentions something casually that really upsets the Spanish monks interrogating him. He says he’s counted and the Spanish have more gods than he used to.
If you count a god as somebody you pray to who performs a miracle, then he’s right. The Catholics have a saint you’re supposed to pray to for every facet of life.
That’s one hysterical observation sure to offend.
But not in the Catholic tradition. Technically, any Catholic priest can perform certain rites reserved for certain Gods, such as forgiveness of sins during confession. Does that mean that there are hundreds of thousands of Gods in Catholicism. No, of course not. But it sounds snarky to do so.
The Virgin Mary and the Saints have the ear of God in Catholic tradition, but their power derives from God alone, just as the immaculate conception wasn’t Mary’s super-duper cloning uterus or the Fantastic ~300 Saints with Superpowers. Just the same as Macuilxochitl lacks divine qualities that the Lord of Hosts possesses.
And that’s where the equivalence breaks down: In Spain, it was a special order of priest, the inquisitors, and they killed as much for politics as religion (the Moors [Muslims] and Jews whom may have sided with them). I don’t have to defend it, and I’m certainly not, but that is the stuff of old fashioned war like Caesar wiping out the Hellevati, and policing the Aedui, Averni [he killed 2-3 million, btw, and Rome’s pantheon was different from the Gauls].
In the New World, the Catholic priests were certainly not gentle, but sacrifice was never a part of the sacrement. When the genocide was finished, they stopped. This was not much removed from the ancient world. The ancient world was brutal. But even so, there is a world of difference between the evil of the Aztecs and the Old world slaughter, just as the Holocaust stands out among the banal slaughter of men.
Mon, Jan 24 2005 5:05 pm
Here is what I posted on alt.folklore.urban on 2005/01/25
Version: 0.4.1 of the alt.folklore.urban FAQ includes entries on cannibalism.
In the news today [i.e. 2005/01/25]:
New findings change thinking on human sacrifices . . .
Sunday, January 23, 2005 Posted: 5:07 PM EST (2207 GMT)
MEXICO CITY (AP)—It has long been a matter of contention: Was the Aztec and Mayan practice of human sacrifice as widespread and horrifying as the history books say? Or did the Spanish conquerors overstate it to make the Indians look primitive? . . .
For decades, many researchers believed Spanish accounts from the 16th and 17th centuries were biased to denigrate Indian cultures. Others argued that sacrifices were largely confined to captured warriors, while still others conceded the Aztecs were bloody, but believed the Maya were less so.
“We now have the physical evidence to corroborate the written and pictorial record,” archaeologist Leonardo Lopez Lujan said. “Some ‘pro-Indian’ currents had always denied this had happened. They said the texts must be lying.” . . .
But there is no longer as much doubt about the nature of the killings. Indian pictorial texts known as “codices,” as well as Spanish accounts from the time, quote Indians describing multiple forms of human sacrifice. . .
The dig turned up other clues to support descriptions of sacrifices in the Magliabecchi codex, a pictorial account painted between 1600 and 1650 that includes human body parts stuffed into cooking dishes, and people sitting around eating, as the god of death looks on.
“We have found cooking dishes just like that,” said archaeologist Luis Manuel Gamboa. “And, next to some full skeletons, we found some incomplete, segmented human bones.” . . .
For Lopez Lujan, confirmation has come in the form of advanced chemical tests on the stucco floors of Aztec temples, which were found to have been soaked with iron, albumen and genetic material consistent with human blood.
“It’s now a question of quantity,” said Lopez Lujan, who thinks the Spaniards—and Indian picture-book scribes working under their control—exaggerated the number of sacrifice victims, claiming in one case that 80,400 people were sacrificed at a temple inauguration in 1487. “We’re not finding anywhere near that … even if we added some zeros,” Lopez Lujan said.
Researchers have largely discarded the old theory that sacrifice and cannibalism were motivated by a protein shortage in the Aztec diet, though some still believe it may have been a method of population control. . .
========================
The FAQ entry begins by citing W. Arens “The Man-eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy” (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979)and goes on to state that Arens showed “(quite successfully)” that the belief cannibalism was common in many cultures had been uncritically accepted, and careful examination of the evidence showed that it was very weak. Arens suggested that NO culture had EVER had culturally-approved cannibalism. The FAQ conceeds that “Since then
careful archaeological work has strongly suggested that at least some cultures have had more than incidental cannibalism, but that it certainly was much less common that previously believed.”
I am not (Thank God) a professional anthropologist, but every article I have seen on this subject in the 26 years since Arens book was published has adduced forensic evidence of human sacrifice or cannibalism. I doubt that Arens can be taken as much more than the first PC/Multi-Culti provocature anymore. The FAQ entry needs to be re-written by somebody who can give it a firmer basis in science.
god….. you are all crazy, doctorates and all, havent you seen the movie apocolypto yet? mel gibsons word is the word of god….