# Cannibals in 21st Century Brazil **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [April 5, 2007, 11:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cannibals-in-21st-century-brazil/398913 "2007-04-05T23:12:18Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![essell](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/34f0e0/32.png) [@essell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/essell)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2007, 11:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cannibals-in-21st-century-brazil/398913/1 "2007-04-05T23:12:18Z")
Lets have a little multiculturalism. My english SiL lives in Spain where she met a nice Argentinian. They’re planning on taking a visit back to his home land and taking a coach trip to Brazil, roughly a six day round trip, plus any days spent in Brazil. My SiL has been warned that cannibals in the jungles are a real and present danger by her SO. As he’s from Argentina this reeks to me of rumor / urban legend. Somthing that Argentinians say about Brazil. But the Boyfriend says he’s personally seen “Beware the Cannibals” road signs in the country. I’ve asked her to snag me one if possible coz that’d look very cool mounted on the wall outside my house. That’ll keep those dam kids from playing near the car. Oh, the actual question is: Is it true? I wasn’t aware there was any **proper** evidence for cannibalism in Brazil even in the past, let alone today. ---
**Author:** ![Duck\_Duck\_Goose](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/50afbb/32.png) [@Duck\_Duck\_Goose](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Duck_Duck_Goose)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2007, 11:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cannibals-in-21st-century-brazil/398913/2 "2007-04-05T23:25:52Z")
There is, or was, a Brazilian Indian tribe called the Wari who purportedly indulged in the ritual consumption of their dead relatives. A Vanderbilt professor of anthropology has written a book about it. > **[Home - University of Texas Press](https://utpress.utexas.edu)** [http://www.vanderbilt.edu/exploration/news/news\_cannibalism.htm](http://www.vanderbilt.edu/exploration/news/news_cannibalism.htm) ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2007, 12:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cannibals-in-21st-century-brazil/398913/3 "2007-04-06T00:03:54Z")
> [@essell](#): > > But the Boyfriend says he’s personally seen “Beware the Cannibals” road signs in the country. I’ve asked her to snag me one if possible coz that’d look very cool mounted on the wall outside my house. That’ll keep those dam kids from playing near the car. Maybe that’s the same reason the Brazilian jungle inhabitants put up the road signs? “That’ll keep those damn tourists from pestering us on their stupid tours!” 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Arnold\_Winkelried](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Arnold\_Winkelried](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Arnold_Winkelried)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2007, 12:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cannibals-in-21st-century-brazil/398913/4 "2007-04-06T00:51:35Z")
Cecil Adams has pooh-poohed the whole idea [Is there really such a thing as cannibalism? (23-Sep-1988)](http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_054.html) but there’s no mention in the straight dope column of Brazil or the Wari tribe that Duck Duck Goose brought up. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2007, 3:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cannibals-in-21st-century-brazil/398913/5 "2007-04-06T03:00:55Z")
[QUOTE=essell] My SiL has been warned that cannibals in the jungles are a real and present danger by her SO. [/quote] This, as it stands, is complete bullshit. Most indigeneous groups in Amazonia these days are in direct or indirect contact with outsiders. There may be a few small family groups that still avoid outside contact (among the Waorani, for example) but the idea that the jungles are frequented by large numbers of lawless tribespeople out of government control is ridiculous. If outsiders were being regularly murdered, let alone eaten, there certainly would be a lot of attention paid to it by the government. > [@](#): > > As he’s from Argentina this reeks to me of rumor / urban legend. Somthing that Argentinians say about Brazil. But the Boyfriend says he’s personally seen “Beware the Cannibals” road signs in the country. I’ve asked her to snag me one if possible coz that’d look very cool mounted on the wall outside my house. That’ll keep those dam kids from playing near the car. If such signs exist, they are akin to those saying “Jackalope Crossing” in Wyoming. > [@](#): > > Oh, the actual question is: Is it true? I wasn’t aware there was any **proper** evidence for cannibalism in Brazil even in the past, let alone today. Certainly some groups in the early days of colonization like the Tupinamba were accused of cannibalism. [This article](http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jwh/17.1/martel.html) discusses some of these early accounts and concludes that the question of whether or not the Tupinamba were cannibals remains open. I am not sure what the status of the evidence is on Amazonian groups. (The Tupinamba were on the east coast, not Amazonian.) [QUOTE=Arnold Winkelried] Cecil Adams has pooh-poohed the whole idea Is there really such a thing as cannibalism? (23-Sep-1988) [/QUOTE] I wouldn’t say that Cecil exactly “pooh-poohed the whole idea” of cannibalism. At the end of the column he states: > [@](#): > > 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. Arens, I think, greatly overstated the case against cannibalism. Certainly it occurred in some areas such as the Pacific Islands and elsewhere. However, Arens was probably right in that the frequency may have been exaggerated. The link above has this to say about Arens and the Tupinamba: > [@](#): > > Controversy over the historical practice of cannibalism by Native Americans has occasionally flared up in academia since William Arens’s 1979 Man-Eating Myth questioned the evidence on cultural anthropophagy and turned the ethnographic gaze upon the Western obsession with cannibals. Among the questionable evidence, Arens challenged the veracity of Hans Staden’s 1557 narrative of captivity with the cannibalistic Tupinamba of Brazil. . . . Other scholars, frustrated in their desire to recover lost cultures in these European texts—among them real cannibals—have been zealous in defending the cannibal against this “crazed revisionism.” In his 1997 Cannibals, Frank Lestringant called Arens a “sensation-hungry journalist” and indicted such scholarship for its “misrepresentations of the Other.” The most commonly cited repudiation of Arens’s argument, Donald W.Forsyth’s 1985 “Three Cheers for Hans Staden: The Case for Brazilian Cannibalism” used Staden’s narrative to respond point by point to Arens’s sometimes sloppy critique.