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The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (Galaxy Books)

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It is a common argument of politically correct rationalists to reduce real cultural difference to ethnocentric Othering by the West. While I cannot speak for Obeyesekere's attempt debunk cannibalism in the Pacific, I will say that Arens argument against widespread cannibalism among the ancient Tupi-Guarani is completely illegitimate. Arens argues that the only real historical source for Tupi-Guarani cannibalism is Hans Staden (1928), a German seaman allegedly captured by the Tupinambi and kept as a captive to be killed and eaten. Staden escaped his captors, and subsequently published an account of his experiences. Arens argues that Staden's account is bogus, and then argues that other remaining accounts--he lists Andre Thevet, Casas, and Jean de Lery--were simply copied from Staden's original. To argue such a thing is to willfully overlook numerous other sources. Just to give an idea of the sources that Arens did not address, I'll list the bibliography that Forsyth published in The Journal of Anthropological Research. There are eyewitness accounts from Jesuit on the following:

(1) cannibalism (Anchieta 1933:216; Navarro 1956:182-83, 282)
(2) the confiscation of cooked (and preserved) human flesh from the Indians, so that they would not eat it (Anchieta 1957:200; Lourenqo 1958:468);
(3) the confiscation of bodies from Indians who were about to eat them, or persuading them to bury the bodies rather than eating them (Anchieta 1933:154; Nobrega 1931:92; Blasquez 1957:388; Navarro 1956:282), in one case after the body was already roasted (V. Rodrigues 1956:307-9);
(4) the successful rescue of prisoners before they could be killed and eaten (Anchieta 1933:32-33; Lourengo 1958:468; Pereira 1931:288), or, failing this, the attempt to baptize the victim before the execution (Anchieta 1933:155-56; Nobrega 1931:109; Navarro 1956:279; Blasquez 1957:386-88; Fernandes 1931:485), either with the consent of the victim and his executioners or by subterfuge (Anchieta 1933:153; Lourengo 1956:517-18; Correia 1957:67; Blasquez 1957:388);
(5) continual complaints about Indians participating in cannibalistic ceremonies after being baptized and promising not to do so (Anchieta 1933:46, 79, 166; 1957:194; Nobrega 1931:106, 157, 160; Brots 1956: 274-75).
(6) Tupians contracting smallpox from eating an infected Portuguese soldier (P. Rodrigues 1938:515).

Of course, Europeans were hardly unbiased in their depictions of Amerindian cultures. That is not what Arens is arguing. To believe Arens is to believe in a well-organized conspiracy among Jesuits and explorers from different countries over a hundred years to accuse Tupi-Guarani peoples (but not Ge) of cannibalism.

In this controversial work William Arens claims that cannibalism is just a creation of prejudice. According to him there is no evidence supporting the wide-spread belief that cannibalism has been a socially accepted practice in certain cultures. As years have gone by, lots of evidence has surfaced. For most scholars of archaeology and anthropology there is no question about whether anthropophagy has existed or not: All around the world there have been societies in which cannibalism has been a commonplace ritual practice. Many other types of cultural phenomena are supported by far thinner body of evidence. Denial of the existence of cannibalism seems to be a post-colonial psychological coping mechanism -- similar to regularly emerging refusal of the holocaust.

In 90s Arens has had to slighten his strict opinions in order to maintain any academical credibility, although he still has not taken back his claim that there is no systematical, widely practiced cannibalism in any culture -- nor has probably ever been.

Arens' arguments are interesting and the book may most certainly open eyes for colonial structures of meaning. However, it should be recognised that the theory is partly outdated.

'The Man-eating Myth' was very much a book of its time when it was published in 1979, starting with the faux-common man authorship by 'W. Arens,' as if the professor was just another anonymous cog in the machine.

The agenda was to whitewash 'savages' from the charge -- implicitly, the western colonialist charge -- of cannibalism. This was the era when Iron Eyes Cody was the symbol of the idea that Indians lived a life in balance with nature before the evil Europeans arrived with their deadly indoor plumbling.

Even in 1979, this approach required a lot of overlooking. The very first book of reportage, the 'Histories' of Herodotus, included a relation (second-hand, to be sure) of ritual funerary cannibalism. Subsequently, there were plenty of other reports, of varying reliability, of cannibalism.

Arens contended these were all made up, that 'cannibal' was a term every group applied to the people 'on the other side of the hill' the way bloggers label everyone they dislike a 'fascist' or a 'racist.'

There was a grain of truth, a small one, in this assertion. People do unfairly label outgroups cannibals. But it was a logical error to assert, as Arens did, that because some claims of cannibalism were fake, all were.

To support his argument, he set a bizarre standard of proof: to be believed, such a charge would have to be validated by a professional anthropologist. The arrogance of this standard was amusing in 1979, embarrassing by the 1990s.

Science marches on. Tim White, in 'Prehistoric Cannibalism,' used bones from the Mancos site to develop a rigorous set of standards for assessing whether bones had been processed for food. As it turns out, they have been, throughout the Four Corners area of the American Southwest.

The sites prove that, from time to time, the whole population of a village was murdered and eaten. Not merely ritually eaten, as the Polynesians (among others) did to acquire the strength of an enemy, but for nutrition. The Indians went to a lot of trouble to extract the last bit of grease from their meat.

What the Mancos site does not tell us is who ate whom, under what circumstances or how often. It is just barely possible that the Mancos and similar sites are unusual examples of emergency (often called survival) cannibalism.

If Arens' position is read strictly, it could perhaps be argued that his contention has not been disproven. He admitted, grudgingly, that there were some instances of cannibalism, but he made these out to be exceptional and rare.

It's true that the Four Corners sites do not prove regular consumption of human meat, but only because it appears that the eaters ate everybody, leaving no 'stock' to grow and fatten for future meals.

Had Arens had a simpler goal, just to debunk a large body of dubious claims of cannibalism, his book would have been unexceptionable. It was his general claims that got attention in the 1980s, and on those, it is Arens who got debunked.

Widespread cannibalism may have caused prehistoric prion disease epidemics, Science study suggests


Human flesh may have been a fairly regular menu item for our prehistoric ancestors, according to researchers. They say it's the most likely explanation for their discovery that genes protecting against prion diseases -- which can be spread by eating contaminated flesh -- have long been widespread throughout the world.

The genes, which are mutant versions of the prion protein gene, show key signs of having spread through populations as the result of natural selection, the researchers report in the journal Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Such mutations, or "polymorphisms," could have provided prehistoric humans a better chance of surviving epidemics of prion diseases, similar to modern day diseases such as Creutzfeld Jacob disease, or kuru.

"What we're showing here is evidence that selection for these polymorphisms has been very widespread or happened very early in the evolution of modern humans, before human beings spread all over the planet," said study author John Collinge of University College London. "We can't say which of those it is; but the obvious implication is that prion disease has provided the selection pressure."

Prion diseases are caused by misfolded versions of the prion protein, which cause other prion proteins to misfold and clump together in the brain. Kuru and Creutzfeld Jacob disease, in humans, as well as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, in cows, cause brain degeneration and, ultimately, death.

In a previous study, Collinge and his colleagues determined that people with one normal copy and one mutated copy of the prion protein were somehow protected against Creutzfeld Jacob disease. The mutation consisted of a single amino acid substitution at a certain spot in the gene, and is known as "M129V." Among the Japanese and other populations in the Indian subcontinent and East Asia, a similar mutation called "E219K" has the same protective effect.

This phenomenon, in which heterozygotes have a better chance of survival than homozygotes, is called "balancing selection." (A possible explanation in this case may be that the uniform prion proteins of homozygotes clump together more easily in the brain, increasing the chance of disease in contrast to those of heterozygotes.)

"There are only a handful of examples of genes thought to be under balancing selection. They are thought to offer protection against infectious disease," Collinge said.

From approximately 1920 to 1950, a kuru epidemic devastated the Fore in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. At mortuary feasts, kinship groups would consume deceased relatives, a practice that probably started around the end of the 19th Century, according to local oral history. The Australian authorities imposed a ban on cannibalism there in the mid-1950s.

The same genetic variation in the prion protein that helps protect against Creutzfeld Jacob disease turned out to do the same for kuru. Studying Fore women who had participated in mortuary feasts, Collinge's group found that 23 out of the 30 women were heterozygous for the prion protein gene, possessing one normal copy and one with the M129V mutation.

The researchers sequenced and analyzed the prion protein gene in more than 2000 chromosome samples from people selected to represent worldwide genetic diversity. They found either M129V or E219K in every population, with the prevalence decreasing in East Asia (except for the Fore, who have the highest frequency in the world).

Collinge's team also studied the diversity of sequence variations in a block of DNA containing the prion protein gene, in European, African, Japanese, and Fore populations. The prevalence of the M129V and E219K variations, even when the sequence at other spots was highly variable, indicated that the variations were ancient--more than 500,000 years old, according to authors' estimates.

Finally, the researchers identified a telltale signature of balancing selection in the gene: a greater than average number of highly variable sites, and a smaller than average number of low-frequency variations.

These findings are consistent with other lines of evidence indicating that prehistoric populations practiced cannibalism, such as cuts and burn marks on Neanderthal bones, and biochemical analysis of fossilized human feces.

"There is extensive anthropological evidence that cannibalism is not just some rarity that happened in New Guinea," Collinge said.


http://www.eurekalert.org

Will Rogers said it didn't bother him so much when people lied, but it did bother him when they just KNEW something that wasn't so.

The myth of cannibalism is so ingrained among presumably educated people that when William Arens applied the scientific method and found the myth wanting, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

While it is true that during times of starvation, people have been known to eat human flesh, and serial killers like Gilles de Rais, Fritz Haarman and Jeffrey Dahmer have eaten their victims; cannibalism as a socially accepted practice is a racist myth.

Like other legends (satanic ritual child abuse in day care centers, UFO abductions, etc), cannibalism stories are always second hand at best. Usually it's a smear by one ethnic or religious group against another from the old Blood Libel claiming Jews drink the blood of Christian babies, to the equally racist belief that Hawaiians like SPAM because it supposedly tastes like human flesh.

No group ever claims that THEY eat people. It's always the hated enemy and/ or those slated for destruction. Arens notes how Columbus considered the natives of Hispanola to be the most docile and harmless people on Earth who could be enslaved easily. The Spanish Crown allowed the enslavement of the natives, but only those who ate human flesh. Of course like most peoples, the "Caribs" got rather insolent when Columbus started killing them and stealing their land and PRESTO! -the once peaceful, docile natives turned into vicious cannibals instantly! This gave Columbus and his successors a convenient excuse to rob, rape, murder, and enslave the natives, who became more uppity... This cycle was quite agreeable to those who stood to make money from genocide.

If man-eating was socially acceptable, one would think someone could have produced a photograph or videotape since the man-eaters would not have gone to any lengths to hide something they weren't ashamed of. But no such evidence exists for the same reason there's no hard evidence for fire-breathing dragons, one-eyed giants, giant three-headed dogs, unicorns or other creatures from ancient bestiaries. They only exist in overheated imaginations.

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 intelligencia is just as easily fooled as what Mencken called "the booboise" and that in many cases, "PhD" means "piled high and deep".

Dr. Arens' book is brilliant. I read the book during my freshman anthropology class. It is useful for people looking for sources on universal human traits or explring culture versus nature.