Diverting to the literal (or less?)…
Giving cannibalism a human face
David F. Salisbury
August 15, 2001
Vanderbilt Uni Online Research Journal
Cannibalism is one of the last real taboos of modern society. As such, it evokes a powerful mixture of fascination and revulsion. So strong are these preconceptions, in fact, that both the public and the scientific community have repeatedly fallen prey to them.
“We assume that cannibalism is always an aggressive, barbaric and degrading act,” objects Beth A. Conklin, an associate professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt University. “But that is a serious over-simplification, one that has kept us from realizing that cannibalism can have positive meanings and motives that are not that far from our own experience.”
…. “Consuming the body is part of this process as well,” Conklin says. “Far more than we do, the Wari’ see the body as a place where personality and individuality reside, and so, of all the things that remind you of dead people, the corpse is the strongest reminder. So they believed it was important to transform the corpse in order to help transform survivors’ memories of their dead relative.” This transformation involves developing new images of the dead person joining the animal world. According to their traditional beliefs, the spirits of dead relatives go to an underground world from which they return in the form of wild, pig-like animals called peccaries that are a major source of meat for the Wari’. The ancestor-peccaries seek out hunters from their own families and offer themselves to be shot, ensuring that their meat will go to feed the people they love.
This special relationship with peccaries is part of a native cosmology centered on ideas about communication and transformations between humans and animals. According to Conklin, the traditional mourning rites of the Wari’ emphasized helping survivors to gradually stop dwelling on memories of the past and develop new images of the dead rejuvenated as animals who feed the living. Eating the body at funerals affirmed these positive religious ideas. Reconsidering the range of meanings that consuming substances from the human body had for people in the past is important, Conklin says, because it challenges the negative stereotypes of cannibalism that have often been used to denigrate and stigmatize native peoples. “Thinking about cannibalism as a way to cope with grief and mourning gives it a more human-even humane-face,” Conklin says. Such reconsideration can also make us reflect on our own ways of dealing with death.
“Wari’ recognize the intensity of bereavement, whereas the tendency these days is to resist even the thought of death. In modern society, there is no longer a standard way of dealing with death and I think something has been lost. As a result, we are very uncomfortable dealing with bereavement,” Conklin says Click to open footnote, then click again to close. “We feel pressure to hide our grief; we don’t know how to treat people who have suffered a loss. There is a certain wisdom in the Wari’ practice of acknowledging the deep impact of death and survivors’ need for social and spiritual support.” To us, cannibalism looks like an extreme, exotic practice. “By stepping outside our own cultural framework to try to understand this from the Wari’ point of view, however, we can see some of the realities of social life, especially the ways of caring and coping, that unite us all as human beings,” she says.
The article and interviews/video are accompanied by some astounding drawings:
also from the same journal-grouping (on the politics of cannibal classification in various scientific communities):Brief history of cannibal controversies
Conklin sees irony in the fact that scholars who insist that all accounts of cannibalism must be false are actually perpetuating the negative stereotypes of it. “They seem to assume that cannibalism is by definition a terrible act-so terrible, in fact, that could only have been invented by outsiders who wanted to denigrate or exoticize native peoples. A healthier, more realistic approach would be to recognize that various peoples, including western Europeans, have consumed human body substances for different reasons in different times and places. Let’s try to recognize the positive, not just negative meanings of these practices,” she says.
…. According to Conklin, the challenge is to understand each case in its own terms, in the social context within which it was practiced. With this approach, cannibalism starts to look less exotic and more like something with which other people can identify. “Wari’ elders have told me they can’t understand why outsiders are so obsessed with the idea of eating bodies. They say it’s important to look at the whole picture of what went on in their mourning practices, not just focus on the one act of eating. I think we can learn something by listening to them,” she says.
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