I feel like a yahoo for even asking these questions, but I have to ask.
Are there currently any tribes of indigenous people in the rainforests of the Amazon who practice cannibalism on a regular basis? It doesn’t matter if this is done ritually or simply as a part of their regular diet.
If there currently are no such tribes, have there been in the past?
If there have been cannibal tribes in that region in the past, how long ago was it? Did cannibalism persist into the first half of the twentieth century, and if so, did it persist into the second half as well?
How widespread has cannibalism been among the indigenous peoples of that region?
Have I been snookered by a big, fat racist lie? Don’t spare my feelings. If I have, don’t hold back. Lay it on me.
That doesn’t really answer any of the specifics of the OP. While I might agree that the incidence of cannibalism has been exaggerated somewhat in the past, Aren’s thesis that it has never taken place anywhere routinely is flat out bonkers. Cannibalism is well attested to among the Aztecs and in the South Pacific, for starters.
I don’t believe the Amazon was a real hotbed of cannibalism, but it certain occurred among certain tribes there. In Keep the River on Your Right, the amateur anthropologist Tomas Scheebaum gives a first hand account of cannibalism (in which he participated) by an Amazon tribe in the 1950s.
And just because a tribe aren’t actual cannibals doesn’t mean they aren’t murderous trophy hunters of any outsiders. Small consolation that they aren’t going to eat you.
I am not sure that Tomas Schneebaum is exactly what I would call a trusted source. Even though the book is fascinating, poetic, highly unusual, and deeply felt, and he undoubtedly did live with an Amazonian tribe, it’s closer to a gay Carlos Casteneda fantasy of Amazonia, not anthropology per se.
As I said, Schneebaum was not a professional anthropologist. That does not make his eyewitness testimony to cannibalism false. In the film of the same name based on his book, IIRC they interviewed members of the tribe he had stayed with (now settled and “civilized”), and they verified that they had formerly been cannibals.
Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer with Darwin of evolution by natural selection, and a reliable observer, had this to say in A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro (pp. 498-499):
Henry Walter Bates, Wallace’s sometime companion and another reliable observer, said this in The Naturalist on the River Amazons:
There are also well-known accounts by Hans Staden, a German ship-wrecked in Brazil in the 1500s, of cannibalism among the Tupinambas (not actually Amazonian, but at least South American).
[QUOTE=The Straight Dope]
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.
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Well, I guess not… My Fearful Ordeal ! I was a Teenage Cannibal Victim !
[QUOTE=Cecil]
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.
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This is very much a distortion of the actual case. While it is possible there were occasional allegations of cannibalism against many groups, the reputation for cannibalism varied drastically between different groups.
In the Caribbean, the Arawaks, who inhabited the largest and richest islands, were not generally regarded as cannibals. The Caribs (whose name in fact is the origin of cannibal) in contrast had a fearsome reputation as cannibals. But the Caribs at the time were confined to the Lesser Antilles. Why should the Spanish tag the Caribs, who inhabited tiny islands, as cannibals, while not doing so with the Arawaks, who had much more desirable territories?
Likewise on the mainland. If anything, the Inca Empire was even larger and richer than that of the Aztecs. But the Aztecs were considered cannibals, while the Incas were not. If the Spanish only accused indigenous people of cannibalism for political reasons, why didn’t they do so in the case of the Inca? Or any one of a number of other groups. To the best of my knowledge, the Spanish never made any allegation of cannibalism against groups in Panama, despite their possession of large amounts of gold.
Count me as one with the “sharply divided” opinion. I’ve mentioned before my time in the Fore valley in the late '60s, and Kuru was not the only indication that cannibalism still happened.
Anyway, that article came before Mad Cow Disease had such a salutary effect on general education. In the early '70s, many people thought that the Kuru/Cannibalism link was a myth, part of the larger cannibilism myth. Consequently, they scoffed at my Mother for suggesting that Brain Dura Transplants and pituitary extract represented a potential health risk.
By the 80’s, the general medical profession had ean epedemic of iatrogenic CJK /CJD, and by the '90s the general population had learned that you can actually get ‘infectious’ brain desease by eating meat, so suddenly the Kuru/Cannibalism link didn’t seem so strange and exotic.
I recall reading once that some lower animal (maybe Planaria) could be taught to run a maze, and then the educated planaria were ground up and fed to untrained Planaria, who learned more quickly. If this is true, it could be that Darwinian selection could favor cannibalism.
I don’t even think the reaction was as “sharply divided” as Cecil suggests. As far as I know most anthropologists accept that cannibalism occurred regularly in some groups. It’s a long way from saying that the incidence of cannibalism has been exaggerated to agreeing with Arens’ idea that it was virtually non-existent.
