The Man-Eating Myth Reconsidered

by C. R. Hallpike (August 2018)

Cannibals Preparing Their Victims, Francisco Goya, 1800-1808

 

 

 

The reason this book caused such a ruckus when it was released, is not just the fact that it made anthropologists look as disreputable as phrenologists: charlatans, shysters and hucksters practicing a crank pseudo-science. Among the highly educated, it’s fashionable to ridicule the bumpkins and yokels for being gullible enough to buy into astrology, creationism and other forms of nonsense. But as W. Arens proved with “The Man-Eating Myth”, the intelligentsia is just as easily fooled as what Mencken called “the booboisie” [1] and that in many cases, “PhD” means “piled high and deep”.

 

 

Before we go any further, however, it is very striking that Arens never makes any attempt to explain why the refusal to eat human flesh must apparently be such a powerful and universal human imperative that cannibalism has never existed anywhere as an accepted social practice. He simply assumes it to be self-evident. One might be unwilling to believe, in principle, that any society could possibly have institutionalised incest between mothers and sons, or the eating of human faeces, for example. But in primitive societies (small-scale, face-to-face, non-literate, with subsistence economies) especially, meat is highly prized particularly by those dependent on agriculture because they can only eat it relatively seldom. Since people in many such societies are willing to eat stinking meat, why is it inconceivable for them to eat fresh human meat, especially of enemies killed in battle? Indeed, symbolic cannibalism is quite familiar to Christians when they take the sacraments of Christ’s Body and Blood. Arens’s unwillingness to believe in the very possibility of cannibalism as an institution appears, in fact, to be his own ethnocentric Western prejudice.

 

Leaving this brand of literature behind, and examining instead the production of professional anthropologists, the problems change but the situation still remains perplexing. From all corners of the globe the reports come in that a specific group of people an anthropologist has lived among were cannibals long ago, until pacification, just recently or only yesterday. The reader is engulfed by a stream of past tenses denoting varying removes in time, indicating a demise of custom some time before the researcher took up residence upon the scene (35-6).

 

The anthropologist Klaus-Friedrich Koch, for example, supplies copious details of cannibalism among the Jale of West New Guinea (Irian Jaya), such as:

 

Cannibalism is an integral part of a particular kind of war. The Jale distinguish between a wim war and a soli war. Only soli warfare ideally features anthropophagic revenge. While a wim war always ends within a few years and may last only for a day or two, a soli war usually endures for a much longer time and may extend over the period of a generation . . . Wim warfare occurs between two or more wards of the same village, between two segments of the same ward living temporarily at different localities such as garden hamlets, or between two or more villages in the same district or adjacent districts. Soli wars, on the other hand, are usually waged between two villages separated by a wide river or by a mountain ridge, a geographic condition that puts them in different districts or regions. Informants repeatedly stated the maxim that ‘people whose face is known should not be eaten’. In practice immunity from anthropophagic vengeance derives from the nature and relative frequency of affinal links between two villages (Koch 1974: 79-80).

 

Arens, however, simply dismisses all Koch’s research as the result of missionary propaganda, since he cannot claim to have witnessed cannibalism himself (Aren 1979: 98) but fails to ask himself the next and perfectly obvious question “Where, then, did Koch get all this stuff about cannibalism—did he just make it all up?” Obviously he didn’t, and got it from his informants as he makes abundantly clear in his book but it would be inconvenient for Arens to admit this since, as we have noted, it is one of the themes of his book that accounts of cannibalism are inherently hostile and derogatory lies told about other peoples, and not about one’s own.

 

While the initiation ceremony was in progress the Gane men made an attack. The Goilala seized their weapons and chased the Gane. There was a big battle. Aima Kamo speared Kog Kanumia Konoina, and Aima Kovio also speared him, and Koupa Teva axed him, as did Orou Keruvu, and Mo Kimani, chief of Watagoipa. Everyone came and chopped him to pieces. The Tawuni and Kataipa, valavala [allies] of the Goilala, were invited to take the bits home to eat. Kolalo Kioketairi (who had a twisted lip because he had cut his mouth while removing human flesh from a bone) cut off Kog Kanumia’s head and took it to Dimanibi singing a song. [Then the storyteller retraces his steps to give some further details.]

 

 . . . the Tawuni and Kataipa took away their pork [given by the Goilala to celebrate the victory] with Kog Kanumia of Gane’s body. They dismembered Kog at the Kovelaiam bridge over the Kataipa river, and made a big oven [an earth oven with hot stones], in which they cooked the pork and Kog Kanumia at the same time. Kolalo tied a vine to Kog Kanumia’s head and held it over the fire to singe off the hair [pigs similarly have their hair singed off before cooking], then cooked it in the oven. When it was taken out, he skinned the face and feasted on the white flesh beneath. After this the Tawuni and Kataipa went back to their places. (Hallpike 1977:213).

 

In the same way as these accounts of cannibalism from native informants, anthropologists have had to rely on the people’s recollection of other aspects of their life and culture that were suppressed or had died out, like warfare or exposing corpses to rot, or initiation ceremonies, but should it be assumed that native informants were lying or mistaken about all these as well? It seems a curiously disrespectful attitude to indigenous peoples to dismiss all their recollections of their own past as unreliable. The Tauade used to be one of the most violent societies on record, and my informants gave me copious accounts of all manner of warfare and mayhem, which were supported by government records but, during the two years I lived with them, I never witnessed a single homicide apart from an accident or even a physical assault, let alone a battle, yet these are all highly observable phenomena nonetheless.

 

So the reason that so many anthropologists’ accounts of societies in Papua New Guinea mention cannibalism is not because they had ‘become the victims of their own sensationalism and poor scholarship’, but because their informants told them a great deal about it. By contrast, a survey of the historic literature and modern ethnography of the Cushitic-speaking peoples of the Horn of Africa, which include the Konso, reveals virtually nothing on the subject of cannibalism, except one or two vague references in the earlier literature. This is not because anthropologists working in this area were more objective than those working in New Guinea, but simply because there was probably little or no cannibalism in the Horn of Africa.

 

follows [2]:

 

not exist, would be to find cases where the evidence for it seemed to be the strongest, and then try to demonstrate that in fact this so-called evidence is fabricated or otherwise too weak to prove the case. If the strongest cases fail to demonstrate the existence of cannibalism, then it is a reasonable inference that weaker cases are likely to fail as well, even if we cannot examine all of them.

 

There are many eye-witness account of Fijian cannibalism from the nineteenth century, of which one of the best known is that of William Endicott (1923) based on his experiences in March 1831, as third mate of the Glide. [3] He describes going on shore after hearing that the nearby village are celebrating the arrival of three enemy corpses, killed in a recent battle, and which had been brought back to be eaten (bakola). One of the bodies was given to a neighbouring village but the other two were prepared for the oven:

 

The heads of both savages being now taken off, they next cut off the right hand and the left foot, right elbow and left knee, and so in like manner until all the limbs separated from the body (see Sahlins 1983: 81-2 for confirmation of this ritual practice) . . . [After a special piece was cut from the chest for the King] . . . The entrails and vitals were then taken out and cleansed for cooking. But I shall not here particularise. The scene is too revolting. The flesh was then cut through the ribs to the spine of the back which was broken, thus the body was separated into two pieces. This was truly a sickening sight. I saw after they had cut through the ribs of the stoutest man, a savage jump upon the back, on end of which rested upon the ground, and the other was held in the hands and rested upon the knees of another savage, three times before he succeeded in breaking it. This ended the dissection of the bodies. (Endicott 1923: 62) [A fire-pit had been dug about 6 feet in diameter and one and a half deep, and lined with stones, and a large fire made in it, into which small stones were placed.]

 

 . . . as the bodies are cut to pieces they are thrown upon the fire, which after being thoroughly singed are scraped while hot by the savages, who sit around the fire for this purpose. The skin by this process is made perfectly white, this being the manner in which they dress their hogs, and other animal food.’ (ibid, 63).

 

 

The stones which had been placed upon the fire were now removed, the oven cleaned out, the flesh carefully and very neatly wrapped in fresh plantain leaves and placed in it. The hot stones were also wrapped in leaves and placed among the flesh, and after it was all deposited in the oven, it was covered up two or three inches with the same kind of leaves, and the whole covered up with earth of sufficient depth to retain the heat (ibid., 63-4).

 

Not everyone believed this and other accounts, and Sahlins comments:

 

Faced by a similar incredulity, another British captain, Erskine of HMS Havannah, was compelled to preface his discussion of Fijian cannibalism by lengthy quotations from eyewitness reports of earlier European visitors. These include accounts from the voyage of the Astrolabe (1838), the US Exploring Expedition (1840), and from the missionary-ethnographer John Hunt (1840). Erskine also prints in full the narrative of John Jackson, a seaman resident in Fiji from 1840 to 1842, which contains three detailed descriptions of cannibal feasts (pp. 411-477). (Sahlins 1979)

 

There are many other eye-witness accounts of Fijian cannibalism from the nineteenth century, of which Sahlins mentions, in particular:

 

Sahlins gives a general description of how cannibalistic symbolism permeated the whole Fijian way of life. It was expressed in

 

Not all cannibalism, by any means, was so bound up in the culture’s religious and social life and could be quite perfunctory. Mr. William Mariner was a young captain’s clerk who was captured by the Tongans in 1806 when they seized his ship and killed most of the crew. He became a favourite of King Finow, learnt the language, and was a close and very intelligent observer of Tongan life until he managed to escape in 1810. On his return to London he was befriended by a physician, Dr. John Martin, who published an account of his experiences. During one of the many wars in which Mariner was involved, he made the following observation on cannibalism:

 

 

Mariner also witnessed a second instance of cannibalism. Sixty men had been killed in a siege of fortress by King Finow and, after they had been dedicated to various local gods, the nine or ten bodies belonging to the enemy

 

Despite the initial circumstances of his capture, Mariner established very friendly relations with the Tongans, whom he clearly liked, and was an intelligent, well-qualified and fair-minded observer. Modern anthropologists are quite justified in accepting his evidence, particularly as it is supported by many other observers of the period.

 

Another good test of Arens’s scholarship is his analysis of accounts of cannibalism in South America, in the course of which he gives close attention to a book published in 1557 by Hans Staden, a sixteenth-century German sailor and therefore a prime target for Arens’s ridicule.

 

. . . Hans Staden [was] an extraordinary fellow who visited the South American coast in the mid-sixteenth century as a common seaman on a Portuguese trading ship. Through a series of misfortunes, including shipwreck, he was soon captured by the Tupinamba Indians. As a result of his ill luck, the Tupinamba have come down to us today as man-eaters par excellence (22).

 

Aren’s most serious charge against Staden is that he had little or no command of the Tupi language which, if true, would completely discredit his account of them:

 

Donald Forsyth, a leading authority on Brazilian ethnohistory, comments:

 

It is actually obvious from Staden’s own account that he understood Tupi perfectly well from the beginning:

 

For example, on the very day of his capture he explained (Staden 1928:65): “The savages asked me whether their enemies the Tuppin Ikins had been there that year to take the birds during the nesting season. I told them [emphasis added] that the Tuppin Ikins had been there, but they proposed to visit the island to see for themselves . . . ” If Staden did not speak Tupi at the time of his capture, then there is no way that he could have told them anything, since it is hardly likely that his captors spoke German or Portuguese (ibid., 21).

 

Arens is also entirely mistaken when he claims that the Tupi would have had to understand German when responding to Staden’s singing of a psalm.

 

Arens also refers to

 

ad hominem attack on Staden tells us much more about Arens’s prejudices than about Staden’s.

 

Finally, Arens tries to argue that later authors who at first sight appear to confirm Staden’s account of cannibalistic ceremonies were in fact simply plagiarising him. Forsyth, however, dismisses the claim of plagiarism entirely:

 

Arens’s (1979: 28-30) whole argument is based on the similarities in the accounts of Staden, Lery (1974: 196), Thevet (1971: 61-63), Knivet (1906: 222), and Casas (1971: 68) with respect to the verbal exchange between the victim and executioner before an enemy was killed, cooked, and eaten. His argument is as follows:

 

In his chapter on killing and eating the victim, Staden supplies some further Indian dialogue which he translates for his readers. He states that the Indian who is about to slay the prisoner says to him: “I am he that will kill you, since you and yours have slain and eaten many of my friends.” The prisoner replies: “When I am dead I shall still have many to avenge my death” [Staden 1928: 161]. Dismissing the linguistic barrier momentarily . . . the presentation of the actual words of the characters lends an aura of authenticity to the events. However, if similar phrases begin make their appearance in the accounts of others who put themselves forward eyewitnesses to similar deeds, then the credibility of the confirmation process diminishes (Arens 1979: 28-29). Arens cites the other authors to show the similar phraseology used in describing the execution scene. Hence his whole case for plagiarism is similarities in two sentences in works that are book length in most instances (see Riviere 1980: 204).

 

As it turns out, however, when even these two sentences are examined in the context of what we know about the cannibalistic rites themselves, and about how and when the accounts were produced, Arens’s argument evaporates. An example from our own literate society should suffice to show why this is so. If several different observers wrote a description of the Pledge of Allegiance ceremony, which takes place daily in schools all over the nation, we should hardly be surprised to find considerable similarity, since what is said is an essential element in the ceremony. But according to Arens’s logic, we would have to conclude that the writers were all copying one another. But the Pledge of Allegiance is not a random event in the daily activities of American school-children. It is, rather, a ritual charged with symbolic meaning. In such a ritual the repetition of behavior and utterance is an integral part of the ceremony . . . The verbal exchanges cited by Arens between executioner and victim were not simply random babblings, but highly ritualized exchanges constrained by custom and belief at the very climax of the ceremony, as virtually all of the accounts make patently clear . . . (Forsyth 1985: 27-8).

 

Forsyth also points out that Arens ignores a wealth of Jesuit sources that provide eye-witness accounts of cannibalism, the confiscation of cooked (and preserved) human flesh from the Indians (so that they would not eat it), the confiscation of bodies from Indians who were about to eat them, or persuading them to bury the bodies rather than eating them—in one case after the body was already roasted and, in another, the successful rescue of prisoners before they could be killed and eaten:

 

Just as Forsyth claims that Arens ignores a wide range of original sources, particularly those of the Jesuits, Neil Whitehead (1984) also documents Arens’s similar failure to consult Jesuit sources with regard to the separate issue of Carib cannibalism.

 

When a person died and his body had rotted in the tseetsi [a raised basket] or in the ground, the bones were taken by his relatives and washed in a stream. The skull in particular was washed out with water introduced through the foramen magnum, with which the remains of the brain were flushed away. The children of the deceased are said to have drunk this water (Hallpike 1977: 158).

 

Arens, however, is forced to be just as dismissive of endo-cannibalism as he is of cannibalism in general and occupies many pages in particular trying to discredit the accounts of this practice among the Fore of New Guinea, which became world-famous through its association with two Nobel Prize winners. Most people would probably consider the Fore case a major obstacle to his theory, and Arens’s attempts to dismiss it are excellent examples of the quality of his research. Patrol reports in the Fore area from the early 1950s onwards began describing a disease that became known as kuru. Its symptoms were trembling, difficulty in walking and co-ordination, mood changes, and slurred speech, leading to unconsciousness and death usually within a year or less from the first symptoms appearing. (The word kuru itself referred to the casuarina tree, whose quivering leaves were seen by the Fore as similar to that of the victims’ limbs.) The American physician Carleton Gajdusek happened to be in the area and was told about the disease by Dr Vincent Zigas. The anthropologist Ronald Berndt had already studied it, and considered it psycho-somatic, but Gajdusek came to the firm conclusion that it was entirely physical in origin, and in 1957 Gajdusek and Zigas published a paper claiming that it was a newly discovered neurological disease.

 

When a body was considered for human consumption, none of it was discarded except the bitter gall bladder. In the deceased’s old sugarcane garden, maternal kin dismembered the corpse with a bamboo knife and stone axe. They first removed hands and feet, then cut open the arms and legs to strip the muscles. Opening the chest and belly, they avoided rupturing the gall bladder, whose bitter content would ruin the meat. After severing the head, they fractured the skull to remove the brain. Meat, viscera, and brain were all eaten. Marrow was sucked from cracked bones, and sometimes the pulverized bones themselves were cooked and eaten with green vegetables. (Lindenbaum 2013:224)

 

They also found that

 

Some elderly men rarely ate human flesh, and small children residing with their mothers ate what their mothers gave them. Youths, who were initiated around the age of ten, moved to the men’s house, where they began to observe the cultural practices and dietary taboos that defined masculinity. Consuming the dead was considered appropriate for adult women but not men, who feared the pollution and physical depletion associated with eating a corpse. The epidemiological information provided by Gajdusek and Zigas in 1957—that kuru occurred among women, children of both sexes, and a few elderly men—seemed to match perfectly the Fore rules for human consumption (Lindenbaum 2015: 104-5).

 

Which it did. To cut a long story short, Gajdusek was joined in his research by Stanley Prusiner, a biologist who, like Gajdusek, received the Nobel Prize. The genetic basis of kuru had been rejected, and Gajdusek had shown that the disease could be transmitted to primates exposed to infected material, which suggested to him that the disease was carried by a slow virus. Prusiner, however, showed that kuru was actually caused by prions, an abnormal type of protein, which contain no genetic material, and was a spongiform encephalitis in the same family as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The point about prions was that, whereas a slow virus would allow kuru to be spread simply by contact, prions required the actual consumption of brain matter, and the obvious occasions for this were the Fore mortuary ceremonies in which the women ate the brains of the deceased. With the demise of cannibalism the incidence of kuru fell steadily over the years, and by 1982 there were very few deaths, and the sex ratios were now equal (Lipersky 2013: Fig. 4, 476). The disease is currently considered extinct.

 

With regard to the transmission of the disease, which by 1979 had been accepted as related to the Creutzfeldt-Jakob family, he remarks that no one has suggested that such diseases “are transmitted in the western world by cannibalism. However, such a hypothesis presents no problem when the affected population is the inhabitants of the New Guinea highlands. This is consistent with the general theoretical tone of much of the anthropological literature on this area, which effectively diminishes the cultural achievements of the inhabitants” (112). With regard to the initial appearance of the disease he says, “Surprisingly enough, no one has seriously considered the idea that the presence of Europeans in the area was responsible for the outbreak of the epidemic at the turn of the century. The arrival of the first two Europeans in 1932 does not deny the possible entry of the disease years before through indirect means and intermediaries” (113). He also points out the important social changes that have occurred since European contact, such as the disuse of the men’s house and men moving into live with their wives and children: “In the light of the obvious cultural rearrangements and new experiences, it is odd that scientific researchers have seized on a correlation between something which was never seen and another phenomenon studied and measured so meticulously” (113).

 

Arens’s hilarity at the racist idea of Creutzfeld-Jacob disease being transmitted by cannibalism turned out to be misplaced, however, since it was cattle cannibalism in the form of brain and spinal cord matter from diseased animals being included in cattle feed that led, a few years later, to the spread of BSE in Britain. Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or Mad Cow Disease, was a prion disease that also infected a number of humans in the form of vCJD, variant Creutztfeldt-Jakob Disease, as a result of eating this meat and led to a ban on the export of British beef in 1996.

 

Gajdusek’s subsequent criminal conviction related to boys of a different people from the Fore and had nothing whatever to do with his kuru research, and therefore provides Arens with no grounds for doubting it, smugly or otherwise. Arens, of course, as we might expect, makes no reference in his article to Prusiner’s work and the crucial association of brain-matter with prions which was conclusive support for the cannibalistic thesis, and by 1997 had been well-established.

 

I leave it to my readers to decide if they find these various arguments of Arens even a remotely adequate response to the facts presented on Fore cannibalism. Shirley Lindenbaum comments that “Although discredited today, the denial of cannibalism was kept alive during the 1980s and 1990s by a generational shift in the human sciences, glossed as postmodernism, which studied metaphor and representation, providing new life for the idea that cannibalism was nothing more than a colonizing trope and stratagem, a calumny used by colonizers to justify their predatory behaviour” (Lindenbaum 2015: 108).

 

 

It all follows a familiar American pattern of enterprising social science journalism: Professor X puts out some outrageous theory, such as the Nazis really didn’t kill the Jews, human civilization comes from another planet, or there is no such thing as cannibalism. Since facts are plainly against him, X’s main argument consists of the expression, in the highest moral tones, of his own disregard for all available evidence to the contrary. He rises instead to the more elevated analytical plane of ad hominem attack on the authors of the primary sources and those credulous enough to believe them. All this provokes Y and Z to issue a rejoinder, such as this one. X now becomes “the controversial Professor X” and his book is respectfully reviewed by non-professionals in Time, Newsweek, and The New Yorker. There follow appearances on radio, TV, and in the columns of the daily newspapers (Sahlins 1979).

 

Notes

1. ^ The class of stupid, ignorant people.

 

2. ^ For Cook’s actual Journal entry see J.C. Beaglehole, ed., 1969. The Voyage of the Resolution and Adventure 1772-1775 (Cambridge: The University Press for the Hakluyt Society), pp. 292-293.

 

3. ^ But Sahlins also explains that the authorship of this account might have been mistakenly attributed to Endicott:

It could be that Endicott indeed did not see the event, insofar as he may well not be the author of the contested text. The original of that text, reprinted and signed by Endicott as an appendix to his book, is an article that appeared in The Danvers Courier newspaper on 16 August 1845, under the byline ‘By an Eye Witness’. The Peabody Museum, where the article is archived, apparently attributes it to a different member of the Glide’s crew, Henry Fowler (of Danvers) with whose papers it is included (Fowler, PMB 225). Indeed, a simple ‘F’ is inscribed at the bottom of the original newspaper article (Sahlins 2003: 3, n.3)  But whether Endicott or Fowler provided the actual account, it is confirmed by other members of the Glide’s crew.

 

 

References

Arens, W. 1997, ‘Man is off the menu’, Times Higher Education, 1310, 16.

 

Arens, W. 2003. ‘Cannibalism reconsidered’, Anthropology Today, 19(5), 18-19.

 

Beaglehole, J.C. 1974. The Life of Captain James Cook. Stanford University Press.

 

Endicott, W. 1923. Wrecked Among Cannibals in the Fijis. Salem, Massachusetts: Marine Research Society.

 

Forsyth, D. 1983. ‘The beginnings of Brazilian anthropology: Jesuits and Tupinamba cannibalism’, Journal of Anthropological Research, 39(2), 147-78.

 

Forsyth, D. 1985. ‘Three cheers for Hans Staden: the case for Brazilian cannibalism’, Ethnohistory, 32(1), 17-36.

 

Hallpike, C.R. 1977. Bloodshed and Vengeance in the Papuan Mountains. The generation of conflict in Tauade society. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

 

Hallpike, C.R. 2008. The Konso of Ethiopia. A study of the values of an East-Cushitic people. 2^nd ed. Bloomington, Indiana: AuthorHouse.

 

Jennings, W. 2004. ‘The debate over kai tangata (Maori cannibalism): new perspectives from the correspondence of the Marists’, Journal of the Polynesian Society, 120(2), 129-47.

 

Koch, K-F. 1974. War and Peace in Jalemo. The management of conflict in Highland New Guinea. Harvard University Press.

 

Lindenbaum, S. 2013. Kuru Sorcery. Disease and Danger in the New Guinea Highlands. 2nd Ed. Colorado: Paradigm Publishers.

 

Lindenbaum, S. 2015. ‘An annotated history of Kuru’, Medical Anthropology Theory, 2(1), 95-126

 

Liperski, P.P. 2013. ‘Kuru: a journey back in time from Papua New Guinea to the Neanderthals’ extinction’, Pathogens, 2(3), 472-505.

 

Prusiner S.B., Gajdusek D.C., Alpers M.P. 1982. ‘Kuru with incubation periods exceeding two decades’,  Ann. Neurol. 12

 

Sahlins, M. 1979. ‘Cannibalism: An Exchange’, with W.Arens, New York Review of Books, March 22.

 

Sahlins, M. 2003. Artificially maintained controversies. Global warming and Fijian cannibalism’, Anthropology Today, 19(6), 3-5.

 

Wagner, R. 1967. The Curse of Souw. Chicago University Press.

 

Whitehead, N.L. 1984. ‘Carib cannibalism: the historical evidence’, Journal de la Société des Américanistes, 70, 69-87

 

 

 

_______________________________________
Do We Need God To Be Good? (2017), Ethical Thought in Increasingly Complex Societies: Social Structure and Moral Development (2016), On Primitive Society: and other forbidden topics (2011), and How We Got Here: Bows and Arrows to the Space Age (2008).
 

NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast