Near a Thousand Tables (8 page)

The custom of the sea had its landward parallels, though conventional morality has never been unequivocal about it. In 1752, for instance, a party of deserters from the colonial militia fled New York for French territory; lost on the way, they ran out of provisions. Four or five of them were
eaten by the others
. In 1823, Alexander Pearce, a convict in Tasmania, admitted killing a comrade for food, not to survive but to satisfy an appetite acquired during an earlier attempted escape, when he alone of eight companions returned alive from the bush. Apart from depraved cases like Alferd Packer's, practical or opportunistic cannibalism accounted for many dead among lost miners and wagoners of the North American frontier in the nineteenth century, satirized by Mark Twain's story of respectable passengers' recourse to cannibalism on a delayed railway journey between St. Louis
and Chicago, The most recent recorded instance of this sort occurred in 1972, when an aircraft carrying the Old Christians rugby team from Uruguay crashed in the Andes, The survivors stayed alive by eating
those who died
.

It has never been enough simply to assert that “eating people is wrong.” Being “contrary to nature” does not seem a strong enough sanction when people are really hungry. Any more than sanctions against homosexuality on board ship (or in prison) or onanism when alone … and no one ever died from a lack of sex. If it seems abnormal to some, it represents normalcy for others. Cannibalism has always had apologists. Sometimes, as in the case of defenders of the custom of the sea, they appeal to necessity: in other words, they explain cannibalism by representing human flesh as a source of food, ultimately morally indistinguishable from other food sources. In other contexts, the defense is based on cultural relativism and the recognition that, in some cultures, human flesh is more than food: its consumption is justified not because it sustains individual lives, but because it nourishes the community, invokes the gods or harnesses magic.

In the early modern period, when Western thought was obliged to come to terms with social cannibalism, reformers intent on saving “primitives” from exploitation and victimization produced ingenious defenses, Bartolomé de Las Casas, who plagued the conquerors of the New World with denunciations of their injustice, argued that cannibalism was merely a phase of development which virtually all societies went through: he cited convincing evidence of it in the remote past of Greece, Carthage, England, Germany, Ireland and Spain, Jean de Léry, who survived captivity among cannibals in Brazil, thought their sensibilities would be offended to hear of the massacre of St. Bartholomew. Montaigne's essay
On Cannibals
is often cited as an example of how Western self-perceptions were revolutionized by the cultural encounters of the conquest of America and the “Renaissance Discovery of Man.” He suggested that the morality of cannibalism was no worse than the cant which enabled Europeans to butcher one another with every conviction of self-righteousness, despite the advantages of Christian education and philosophical tradition. The tortures and burnings which confessional foes inflicted on one another in France “ate men alive” and “I consider it more barbarous to eat a man alive than dead…. We are justified in calling these people barbarians by reference to the laws of reason but not in comparison with ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarity.” Robinson Crusoe was able to purge Friday of his cannibalism by kindness. His first impulse was to shoot any cannibal he encountered for “inhuman, hellish brutality” but reflection made him realize hat “these people do not commit this as a crime; it is not against their own conscience's
reproving, or their light reproaching them…. They think it no more a crime … to eat human flesh than we do
to eat mutton
.”

As knowledge of cannibalism grows, the problems it poses seem increasingly acute. The really interesting question concerns not the reality or even the morality of cannibalism, but its purpose. Is it part of the
histoire de l'alimentation—
a feeding practice designed to supply eaters with protein? Or does it belong to the history of food, as presented in this chapter—a ritual practiced not for a meal but for its meaning, nourishment for more than material effect? The literature on the subject is vast. But though a practical line through it leads to a secure conclusion that cannibals may and sometimes do eat people for simple bodily nourishment—that is not why cannibal practices become enshrined in some cultures. Most cases concern other aims: self-transformation, the appropriation of power, the ritualization of the eater's relationship with the eaten. This puts human flesh on the same level as many other foods which we eat not because we need them to stay alive but because we want them to change us for the better: we want them to give us a share of their virtue. In particular, it aligns the cannibals with their real modern counterparts: those who eat “health” diets for self-improvement or worldly success or moral superiority or enhanced beauty or personal purity. Strangely, cannibals turn out to have a lot in common with vegans. The tradition which links them is the subject of this chapter.

In New Guinea, many former cannibals—and some practicing ones—still alive with memories of their raids and feasts, tell anthropologists that their enemies are “
their game
.” In 1971 a court exonerated Gabusi tribesmen who had eaten the corpse of a neighboring villager on the grounds that it was normal practice
in their culture
. The fact that cannibalism can be socially functional may coexist with the exploitation of human flesh for food. “Famine cannibalism” is still—or was until recently—a regular feature of life in the islands of the Massim near New Guinea and of some other societies of Southeast Asia
and the Pacific
. But most peoples who tell ethnographic enquirers that they eat their enemies “for food” seem to have concealed the symbolic and ritual logic underlying the act, like the Papuan Orokaiva, for whom it is a means of “capturing spirits” in compensation for
lost warriors
. There were no obvious ritual features in the cannibal meals of the Onabasulu: the meat was prepared in the same way as for pig or game, except that intestines were discarded; but they ate no fellow humans except witches—an instance of discrimination which suggests that some other motive than protein acquisition was
at work
. The Hua of New Guinea eat their own dead to conserve nu, the vital fluids that they believe to be
nonrenewable in nature
.

The women of the Gimi of the Papuan highlands used to eat their dead menfolk.
The practice continued until the 1960s and is still reenacted in mime with dummy corpses. Their explanation recalls the famous story of Alexander and the sages, who ate their honored dead out of respect. “We would not have left a man to rot!” protest the women. “We took pity on him!” “Come to me, so you shall not rot on the ground. Let your body dissolve inside me!” More is at stake in the ritual, however, than the decorous disposal of corpses, or the macabre recollection of sex. According to one theory, this is a classic case of protein substitution: as men have progressively monopolized the diminishing resources of the forests, women supplemented their diet by eating men. Yet, as part of the ritual, men distribute pork rations to the women in proportion to the amount of male flesh consumed. So the men seem to acknowledge the women's generosity: if they had wished to assuage their hunger, they could simply have handed over the pork without inviting the cannibalism. The cannibal feast takes place only after four or five days of collective grieving. It takes place in the men's house, where, in normal circumstances, women are excluded, and where, during the feast, the women are treated as men. The symbolic meaning of the meal therefore seems connected with the fact that women can encompass and include masculinity by bearing a male child: the immolation of dead men in women's bodies is a restoration to the womb, a magical guarantee of the
cycle of fertility
.

Normally—where it is normal—cannibalism occurs in the context of war. This is not like hunting for food: rather, it is a clash of rival predators. Cannibalism is not usually lightly undertaken even by its most enthusiastic practitioners; and the parts of the victims consumed at cannibal meals are often highly selective and sometimes confined to token morsels, most frequently the heart. The whole business tends to be highly ritualized. Among the Aztecs, ingesting the flesh of a captive in war was a way of possessing his prowess: in a complementary gesture, the captor also donned his victim's flayed skin, with the hands flapping at his wrists like trinkets. Even in Fiji before the coming of Christianity, when cannibalism was practiced on a scale which suggests that some people—the chiefly and warrior elites—were getting a useful dietary supplement from human flesh, the surviving bones are always marked by signs of torture and sacrifice: this distinguishes them from the remains of other animal foods, killed cleanly for speed and efficiency. A visitor in 1847 was told that Chief Ra Udreurdre of the Rakiraki district placed a stone to record each body he ate: there were
nine hundred stones
. But the very fact that cannibal meals were worthy of such spectacular special commemoration puts them in a category apart from that of ordinary eating. Human meat was the gods' food and cannibalism a form of divine communion. Cannibalism makes sense as part of a pattern of “metaphors
symbolizing dominance
.”
Alternatively, it is part of a “mythical charter of society” sustained, again in Fiji, by “an elaborate cycle of exchange of raw women for
cooked men
.”

Cannibals and their critics have always agreed about one thing. Cannibalism is not neutral: it affects the eater. Critics claim the effect is depraving, as on Sinbad's companions who began “to act like gluttonous maniacs” as soon as they tasted cannibal food and “after a few hours of guzzling” became “little
better than savages
.” Cannibals, on the other hand, find it a means of self-improvement. In cannibal logic, cannibalism is a conspicuous instance of a universal fact: food reinterpreted as more than bodily sustenance—the replacement of nutrition by symbolic value or magic power as a reason for eating: the discovery that food has meaning. After cooking, this is, perhaps, the second great revolution in the history of food: second in importance, though, for all we know, its origins may even be more ancient than those of cooking. No people, however hungry, has escaped its effects, for there is now no society which merely eats to live. Everywhere, eating is a culturally transforming—sometimes a magically transforming—act. It has its own alchemy. It transmutes individuals into society and sickness into health. It changes personalities. It can sacralize apparently secular acts. It functions like ritual. It becomes ritual. It can make food divine or diabolic. It can release power. It can create bonds. It can signify revenge or love. It can proclaim identity. A change as revolutionary as any in the history of our species happened when eating stopped being merely practical and became ritual, too. From cannibals to home-opathists and health foodies, eaters target foods which they think will burnish their characters, extend their powers, prolong their lives.

Diet and eating habits are inseparable from the rest of culture: in particular, they interact with religion, morals and medicine. They also connect with spiritual perceptions in eating programs to “feed the soul” and with such secular ideals as health, beauty and fitness. Health foodies—or other contemporary faddists who eat for beauty or brainpower or sex drive or tranquillity or spirituality—are in the category of the cannibals. They, too, are targeting food for transcendent effect. They, too, are part of the great revolution, which is still resonating, which first ascribed meaning to eating.

Most societies have foodways which belong to the sphere of the sacred: there are substances you consume to make yourself holy or intimate with the gods or ghosts, others which interpose between the flesh and the spirit and increase divine distance. Staples are almost always sacred, because people depend on them: they possess divine power. The fact that staples in their turn usually depend on man for
cultivation does not seem to compromise their sacred status. For cultivation is
cultus—
the most abject kind of worship, in which people serve the crops daily in the fields, bowing their backs to till, sow, weed, dibble and harvest. When these gods sacrifice themselves in men's mouths, it is in the sure knowledge of imminent resurrection. It is no disrespect to eat a god: it is a way of enshrining him.

Examples abound. In Christendom, only wheaten bread will do for the sacramental meal Similarly, maize is the traditional sacred food of most of the Americas, wherever it can be grown. Not only is maize sacred to Native American peoples who eat it, its mystique spreads further afield. Even outside the maize-fed culture area which covers the tropical and semitropical zones of the hemisphere, it can be found in a place of honor, as at the high-mountain shrines of Andean peoples, where maize was traditionally cultivated in temple gardens on a small scale for ritual use, far above the altitude at which it is viable as a food crop. The mythology of maize has common elements from the St. Lawrence to the Río Negro: divine provenance and a divine covenant. According to the Huichol, highland people dispersed among several states of Mexico, maize was originally a gift of the sun—showered on man by the sun's son, its cultivation taught by his daughter. Long maturation and hard work were imposed as a punishment for human ingratitude. A favorite topic of Huichol jokes is the phallic digging stick, which forms the cavities in which maize seeds are planted, impregnating the earth. The stalks are called the “antlers of young deer,” for all food sources are seen as resembling maize, or are even conceived as forms of maize, rather as in the West we speak of sustenance in general as “bread.” The maize has sentience, consciousness and will. The shaman beseeches its permission to eat it
at harvest time
. Aztec women practiced rituals of propitiation before daring to eat maize. They picked up spilled grains in case the maize should be offended and “complain to their lord.” They breathed on them before cooking so that they should not
fear the fire
. Even after evangelization, when maize can no longer strictly be worshipped as a god, and God must be consumed under the form of a wheaten host, the Huichol continue to regard their superior maize strains as signs of divine favor, compared with the varieties eaten by their neighbors. Corn kernels are still used for divination, as they are among the Maya, because of the grain's special access to the transcendent world.