Is there really such a thing as cannibalism?
Cecil did point out the distinction of “survival” cannibalism as opposed to other kinds. But I thought it was pretty well established that many peoples (such as the New Guinea natives mentioned) practiced “funerary” cannibalism: disposing of the bodies of relatives and loved ones by eating them. The “contact with corpses during funeral preparations” sounds weasley to me.
And what about that guy who appeared on the Mike Douglas show years ago claiming to have witnessed cannibilism, and even tried it himself? He shocked the audience especially when he said it tasted like pork. Apparently someone made a movie about this guy.
If you’re willing to wade through a lengthy side-debate on HIV/AIDS and such I earlier had to say a couple of things I know about the questioning of kuru &/or cannibaism in this thread a year ago.
To expand a bit on the Great One’s prose, there seem to be three types of genuine cannibalism:
The would-be number four, where human beings are a normal food item, is the one that doesn’t actually exist, despite zillions of stories to the contrary. A lot of cannibal folklore contains the idea that once you *do * eat human flesh, you can’t get enough of it. And the idea that humans taste like pork is common, and probably not that far-fetched: humans and pigs have similar diets, so “pork” is a more likely analogy than “beef” or “chicken.”
Sure it does, or did. There is ample historical evidence for routine cannibalism in the Pacific, including New Zealand and Fiji, as well as among the Aztec.
All the evidence I have seen for Polynesia indicates ritual cannibalism rather than eating people just like any other meat. The fact that Fijians had special utensils for eating people suggests this, but I’m not enough of an expert here to insist.
I certainly stand corrected on the Aztecs. I checked Edgerton’s Sick Societies, and though he implies a ritual origin, the situation he describes is pretty routine. They ate only prisoners of war, but there was a pretty constant flow and they were consumed in quantity by the upper classes.
Thanks for the correction.
The allegations of polynesian, Aztek and Congo basin cannibalism all fit another category I’ve read references to: what might be termed “protein shortage” cannibalism. That is, the peoples in question had access to plentiful starchy foods but desperately little protein. Anything to this?
Not necessarily… Non-cannibals have been known to have special utensils for a variety of foods (oyster forks, crab-crackers, etc). Now, if the special utensils have some obvious ceremonial significance, rather than just a functional difference of form, that might signify something.
One group I studied while getting my Anthroplogy degree was the Yanomamo, who engage in funerary cannibalism. They cremate their dead, then mix the ashes into a liquid (I can’t recall if it is their version of beer or soup), and eat the result.
If you’re interested we tossed this idea around a bit in this thread. There doesn’t seem to be any real doubt that nutritional cannibalism was widely practices in New Zealand and New Guinea. I don’t have enough knowledge to comment on Fiji, but canibalism in the two former cases was in no way ritualistic. It was simply practiced as a way of obtaining food. Even the people involved were quite open about that.
The practice was taken to the extreme in New Zeland where people were actually kept as food animals.
i think that society should learn to accept canabilism. i mean weve gone as far to kill almost every animal for food today. even though in america we find it horrible to eat cats, and dogs it still happens. In the animal kingdom we see everday animlas eating their own kind, and it is perfectly acceptable. we have evolved to the point that we are denying our natural animalistic instinct to survive. this is something that i think if we dont learn to embrace and accept, will ultimately be our kinds downfall.
Nah, never mind the moral problems, it would be asking for all sorts of prion-based trouble. If eating cows that have eaten rendered cow are a problem, imagine how much worse giving diseases a direct route back into humans would be.
The problem is that your argument hinges on needing to resort to cannibalism in order to survive. This isn’t the case in most places. As such any argument that non-cannibals are “denying [their] natural animalistic instinct to survive” is fatally flawed.
Cannibals in most modern societies wouldnltbe doing it in response to a will to survive. They would simply be doing it because it is pleasurable.
exactly! almost everything we do, we do it with an intent of pleasure, and survival in one way or another. why do we sleep? because it makes us feel good, and if we dont we will die. why do we eat? because it taste good, and if not we will die. the will to survive is directly connected to pleasure in one way or another. mans most primitive desire is that of living.
society today has evolved to the point that the will to survive is almost frowned upon. Why on earth are people killing themselves? they are denying their instinct to survive, because society has turned us into metro slobs.
my point is not that we desperatly need to resort to cannibilism to survive, but that we should. we should return to our primitive ways, and accept it.
No, it isn’t. That is why people so often find things that would allow them to survive unpleasant. That applies whether we are discussing cannibalism or killing a burglar or undergoing heart surgery or quitting smoking. All those things are necessary for survival sometimes, yet all of them are unpleasant for most people.
Your claim that the will to survive is directly connected to pleasure in one way or another is clearly untrue.
That’s a meaningless and unprovable bit of nonsense.
Bollocks.
Can you provide any evidence that the suicide rate is or ever has been lower amongst any other societies?
If you can’t of course then this is yet more baseless nonsense
Which nicely rounds out thepost by being baselss nonsense derived from falsehoods and baseless nonsense.
Very interesting, can you recommend some literature detailing this practice?
There’s the film Soylent Kiwi. I won’t give away the shocking conclusion… 
This whole thread reminds me of something I had wondered but never researched, free time being a rare commodity these days.
When people talk of the Crusades, one topic that is frequently brought up is how the Crusaders ate the corpses of Muslim babies. This has always struck me as the sort of story that a soldier might have told for the purpose of either striking fear into the enemy or giving the folks back home some sort of bizarre ghoulish thrill. Is there any evidence that this tale was factual? If so, would that count as ritual cannibalism?
(Please, please, please don’t let this lead to the thread’s becoming Pit-worthy.)
RR
The will to survive leads to a desire to eat. And lo and behold, people, even in our modern society, do eat. If there is nothing else available to eat, then the desire to eat will lead to cannibalism. And lo and behold, in times and places of great famine, people do indeed eat other people.
But in what way would the survival drive lead to people eating other people even when there are other food sources around? If anything, the drive for survival should, under ordinary conditions, lead to people doing everything they can to discourage cannibalism, because nobody who wants to survive wants to be butchered for someone else’s plate. And lo and behold, people do actually do all they can to discourage cannibalism.
I just went to a course on the subject. https://www.weasydney.nsw.edu.au/default2.htm
The main things I learned that are relevant to the issue are
1/ Funerary cannibalism was reasonably widespread. We were shown examples from South America, the Caribbean and the South Pacific.
2/ Recent genetic studies have shown that Funerary cannibalism may have been very widespread in the past re http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s938896.htm
3/ Survival Cannibalism is only practiced by Western Cultures. eg Have you ever heard of cannibalism in Africa during the famines of the last 30 years?
In fact a lot of primitive cultures are convinced that the western cultures are the cannibals. Kirk Hoffman our tutor for the session gave a great example. Recently Americans have been adopting babies from Guatemala and one particular Indian group made the startling claim that the American couples were taking the babies to eat. It turns out that several hundred years ago a Spanish expedition broke down in the area and the Spanish thinking themselves alone and without hope resorted to Survival Cannibalism to live. Of course they weren’t alone, the local Indians were watching and they were horrified at what occurred. In fact the story became part of their oral tradition and so when ‘whites’ started turning up wanting their babies, they could think of only one reason why - we eat people. In another example we were shown pictures from the Volga in 1921 where due to famine and a particularly cold winter 5 million people died and Survival Cannibalism was very common (We were shown pictures of ice boxes full of human body parts.)
4/ In the West we have used Cannibalism in medicine. Mummy was a medieval medicine originally made from crushed Egyptian Mummies (this is where the word comes from) and when these became too expensive morgues starting drying and selling corpses for this use, Also people would go to executions to get fresh blood etc for cures. Gordon-Grube wrote. “It was the prerogative of executioners to sell the blood of decapitated criminals.” Warm blood was thought especially helpful for epilepsy… http://whyfiles.org/164cannibal/5.html
So I have to disagree with this column.
Funerary cannibalism was reasonably common. It is true that revenge cannibalism was at lot rarer than reported and so few westerners were ever eaten - at least by the tribesmen!
It seems that if want to find a cannibal look to the western cultures.