Books
It's all just meat. Julian Evans declares that eating people is not wrong, after reading a feeble study of cannibalism
Published 02 April 2001
Cannibal: the history of the people-eaters
Daniel Korn, Mark Radice and Charlie Hawes Channel 4 Books, 208pp, £14.99
The closest I have come to cannibalism was on a short walk I took through the West Papuan highlands in the mid-1980s. Three days out of Wamena, the main settlement, I descended from spectacular rainforest to find myself in a lush, damp village clinging to the mountain wall of the Baliem river gorge. The village, Tangma, belonged to the Papuan Dani people, but it had a missionary airstrip, and, remarkably, a lone white female missionary lived there. Before turning back, I stayed with her for two days at the mission house, a place furnished in unlovely, oaken 1950s simplicity. Why did I not go on? Partly because the forest on the other side was less penetrable and the way less certain; and partly because fewer than 20 years earlier, in 1968, the people on the far side of the gorge had killed and eaten two Protestant missionaries, Stan Dale and Phil Masters. In 1974, these people, the Kim Yal, had also attacked a preacher from another tribe and a dozen of his helpers; all 13 were eaten. Though I possessed not a shred of missionary zeal, I didn't feel like risking any misunderstanding about my intentions.
There had been an interesting detail to the 1974 case. Some had put the massacre down to missionary interference; others had attributed it to the Kim Yal being hit by influenza and blaming it on outsiders. But I discovered later that the preacher and a number of his helpers had been suspected of fooling around with the local women. As a result, they had been sexually mutilated and had their genitals hung on posts beside the airstrip, a traditional practice in cases of adultery.
One of the greatest problems in discussing any incident of cannibalism is that its anecdotal power easily overwhelms its cultural significance. Another, less substantial problem (though only slightly so) is that, having given the listener's horror a narrative framework, to evoke such horror is often assumed to be all that is necessary when speaking of instances of cannibalism.
Eating People Is Wrong was the admirable title of one of the late Malcolm Bradbury's campus novels - a phrase that generally encapsulates our moral attitude to the issue, but ignores the great cultural mosaic that begins just the other side of our parish boundary. So let me say, here and now, that I do not believe eating people is wrong.
Cannibal: the history of the people-eaters deals with, broadly, three types of people-eating (as did the Channel 4 TV series that the book accompanies). It discusses cannibalism as: first, a cultural ritual; second, something to be done because one wishes to avoid starvation; and third, something to be done because one gets a serious kick from it as an accessory to (usually sexual) murder. Some variants on the act, such as the behaviour of the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, when students killed their teachers and cooked their livers on campus, straddle the categories. Drawing these disconnected motives together, Cannibal then seeks, via a smattering of Holocaust references and talk of the various ways in which human beings may be dehumanised, to make conclusions about how "thin and perhaps inauthentic the veneer of modern liberal civilisation really is". Such conclusions are twaddle - but that's contemporary television for you (which, for reasons obscure to me, has long been obsessed by the contents of people's fridges).
An attempt at a serious approach is made. There is a nod in the direction of the history of the literature of cannibalism, and the archaeological record is examined in the light of new finds - for example, of 800,000-year-old hominid bones bearing cut marks in northern Spain and, last year, of a cache of smashed Iron Age bones in a lake at Eton College. But the problem - leaving aside the television prose, the pseudo-serious documentary tone and a text studded with "incredibles" and "sort ofs" - is that, having briskly disposed of the historical and cultural record, the authors spend the remaining two-thirds of their book treating the reader to a scrapbook of cannibal episodes, ranging from Sir John Franklin's doomed 1845 expedition to find the Northwest Passage, through the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s, the siege of Leningrad and the 1972 Andes plane crash, to the murderous sexual antics of celebrity cannibal killers such as Jeffrey Dahmer and the Russian Andrei Chikatilo. These episodes have absolutely nothing in common except what is on the menu.
The danger is that, by association, such shiver-mongering entertainment has repercussions on the other kind of cannibalism, the culturally related kind, encouraging readers to look only for the anecdotal details of "savage" and "primitive" behaviour. Concepts of the raw and the cooked, and the ritual exchange between them, are shorn of metaphorical significance and symbolic dignity: it's all just meat.
So how are we to see culturally related cannibalism? From an amateur interest in the anthropology of Melanesia, I am aware of a structural panoply of ritual and practice. Two factors, however, are common to almost every group and clan: first, unlike Europeans' cultural concept of the body, clinging to ancient Greek models of flawless beauty (or the Vogue version thereof), nobody in Melanesia goes through life unmarked by initiation, emotion or spiritual belief (the lopping of fingers in mourning being just one example); second, in the pre-colonial era, headhunting - exo- cannibalism - was endemic. The body and its image are the single strongest cultural signifier; and exo-cannibalism in Melanesia - by which an enemy body was utterly dominated - was once vital to the drama of growing to adulthood.
By eating one's victims, one was regenerated: socially by the consumption of "noble meat"; biologically by the dismemberment of the enemy; spiritually by good (reproduction, strength, integrity of the community) vanquishing evil (threats to reproduction and the community). And violence was ritually devoured. It is worth recalling, perhaps, that the most important thing about ritual - a subject largely ignored in this book - is its restorative, equilibrating power.
It might be outside the scope of a book review to argue the contention that, in developed societies, we are beginning to witness a correlation between media-imposed models of beauty and the erosion of a healthy sense of self, leading to feelings of alienation. We would possibly consider Melanesian practices of, say, scarification, finger-lopping, and endo-cannibalism (eating one's dead, drinking their cadaveric fluid) to be ugly and repellent, but they play important roles in engendering senses of community and continuity - I believe a young Kiwai warrior mystified by Vogue would readily understand the modern-day symptoms of eating disorders, schizophrenia and depression as forms of self-cannibalism.
Nor should we forget that our Christian world does possess one such remaining ritual: "People have not the custom of eating human flesh and drinking human blood," wrote St Thomas Aquinas; "indeed, the thought revolts them . . . the flesh and blood of Christ are given to us to be taken under the appearances of things in common human use, namely bread and wine . . . in taking the body and blood of our Lord in their invisible presence we increase the merit of faith." Eat and drink, bread and wine - the body and blood of Christ who was given to us - and perhaps we are saved from consuming ourselves.
To talk, then, of cannibalism largely as a narrative phenomenon - a pot full of the grisly stories of Andrei Chikatilo and his 53 victims, Jeffrey Dahmer and his 17, of Arthur Shawcross and the 11 prostitutes whose sexual organs he is supposed to have consumed - without making it clear that there is no connection whatever between these essentially banal crimes and the cannibalism that stabilised pre-colonial, pre-Christian societies, is to violate the historical record. Chikatilo, Dahmer et al do not interest me as cannibals. They seem hugely boring psychopaths whose motivations may lie in pre-frontal cortex dysfunction or unhealthy relationships with their mothers, but whose cases reveal very little about oral aggression that we don't already know, and have nothing to do with the history of spiritual and ritual practice.
What is most disturbing about this book and its accompanying television series is that, by dismembering a subject that is of intrinsic cultural interest to a minority, by seeking to expand its audience by reducing it to its goriest body parts and throwing in all manner of false associations - particularly those to do with serial murder - they become an appalling incitement of scorn and hatred against the beliefs and persons of the remaining indigenous peoples of the earth.
Julian Evans is a literary critic and author of Transit of Venus: travels in the Pacific
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