Cannibalism

CANNIBALISM. - I. STORIA DELLE CONO-
SCIENCE AND DISTRIBUTION. - The term, synonymous with
anthropophagy, derives from the name Caribales, Canibales
(Caribi), by which the inhabitants of the
Lesser Antilles, discovered by Columbus in 1493, were designated. These
islanders, today extinct, were suspected of feeding on
human flesh; whence the extension of their ethnic name
to designate generically the anthropophagi of the new
world, and then of the other continents. In the age that
preceded the great voyages of discovery, cannibalism was known
in Europe only through the nebulous reports
of the classical authors, or through sporadic mentions by some
traveler who, like Marco Polo, had
established its existence in distant regions.

The Homeric mentions (Od., IX, 285 ff.; X, 116 ff.) of
the anthropophagy of the Cyclopes and the Laestrygonians are still
entirely legendary; but already in Herodotus there is an attempt at
more precise reports: the Massagetae and the Issedones, inhabitants
to the east of the Caucasus, kill their kinsmen in order to
eat their flesh (I, 216; IV, 26); the Padaei, the Calatiae and
other peoples of India, are accustomed to kill the sick and
even their own parents, when they grow old, in order to devour them
(III, 38, 99). Similar accusations were brought by Strabo against the Irish (IV, 5, 4), against the Carmanians to the west of the Indus (XV,
2, 14) and against the inhabitants of the Caucasus. Reports of this kind are
recorded by Aristotle, Diodorus Siculus, Ptolemy, etc.
Among the Latin authors, Caesar informs us of cannibalism practiced by
the Cimbri and Teutones besieged by his armies (VII, 77);
Juvenal describes with indignation an atrocious case of anthropophagy in a collective form among the Egyptians of Tentyra, almost
excusing by comparison the cannibalism of the Gascons starving
from a siege (Sat., XV). Pliny confirms the cannibalism of the Scythians (Iazyges), and
notes it on the upper Nile (Nat. hist., VII, 12; VI, 195);
Silius Italicus denounces it among the Cantabri; and for Gaul
there is, in the full 4th century, the eyewitness testimony of St. Jerome,
who established the practice in its macabre particulars among the
"Scots," a British people who had emigrated there (Contra Jovin.,
II, 7).

The Romanization of the ancient world, and the spread
of Christianity, must undoubtedly have made cannibalism disappear for
a time from many European and Mediterranean regions, even if
it was still practiced there, so as almost to cause
the memory of it to be lost. Throughout the European Middle Ages, and up to the Renaissance, it was believed to have survived in exceptional cases,
connected with other nefarious and diabolical practices of witches,
sorcerers and werewolves, in nearly all the countries of Europe.

The discovery and gradual exploration of new continents revealed to Europeans the presence of entire peoples still
devoted to cannibalism in an open and often even public
form, and gradually made known in their reality the customs, the
rites and the conceptions connected with it. The establishment of
such a widespread anthropophagy produced on the minds of the
Europeans of the time an extremely strong impression: thus the
beginning of the decline of cannibalism came to be determined, under
the twofold influence of the repressive laws imposed by the white
colonizers and of Christian preaching. Recent studies have in any case
led to the belief that, independently of the action of the whites,
anthropophagy was already in a phase of decline among more than one
of the peoples who still practiced it. Today, under the impulse of the forces mentioned, and indirectly as a consequence of the weakening of the
sociological and animological conceptions connected
with anthropophagy, it is everywhere in the process of disappearing: among
numerous peoples, once cannibals, in various parts of the ecumene,
it has become repugnant to the very mentality of the
young generations.

Despite this, the very nature of the custom allows us
to trace with sufficient completeness the map of the
distribution of cannibalism on the globe as it was some centuries
ago. Indeed, unlike other cultural elements that
could, especially in the past, escape the attention of unprepared
observers, cannibalism struck the minds of even the most
superficial travelers to such a degree that it may be considered to have been
reported wherever it appeared. Even sporadic or
not well ascertained cases, or indeed mere suspicions and
rumors, were collected and generalized against peoples who, as a whole, did not practice cannibalism; hence the
need for caution in sifting the information. Eyewitness testimonies are rare. Fear and disgust on the part of the observers, distrust on the part of the natives, often prevented an exact evaluation of the facts and of the conceptions connected with them.

The geographical distribution of cannibalism — albeit with the caveat
that the environment is not in itself a determining factor of the custom —
shows that it is more intensely widespread in the equatorial and
tropical zones. In Africa, the area of greatest intensity coincides
with the central belt of the continent. Asia is substantially
free of cannibalism in its continental part, while there are more
frequent reports of it for the peninsular and insular zones. Much
more intense is its diffusion in Oceania, and particularly in
Melanesia and in many islands of Polynesia, including
New Zealand; in Australia, the areas of greatest intensity are the
central, eastern and south-eastern regions. In the Americas, another area of intensity is the
Amazon basin and the western zone of Colombia, as well as various regions of Central America.

II. THE MOVEMENTS OF CANNIBALISM

Only in recent times, with the critical and comparative study of a huge quantity of observations on peoples of all continents becoming possible, has it been possible to consider on the one hand the intrinsic nature of anthropophagy in its causes and in its informing spirit, and on the other its origins, its diffusion and its development in a historico-cultural sense. In the most exhaustive study carried out so far on the subject — which, however, concerns only the first of the aspects mentioned — Volhard (1939) has identified the following fundamental forms:

1) profane c., whose determining motive consists in the craving or physiological necessity of feeding on human flesh, whether because of the lack of other foods (c. from hunger or necessity), or because of a depraved taste, which makes human flesh appetizing in itself for its particular flavor ("gastronomic" c.). Its victims are mostly slaves, captured enemies, foreigners in general: it is therefore a prevalently "exocannibalistic" form.

It is well known that extreme necessity has often provoked aberrant cases of anthropophagy, on the occasion of wars, famines, etc., even among European peoples and in recent times.

2) judicial c.: it has its roots in the collective will to give extreme emphasis to the feelings of hatred and execration felt by the community toward criminal individuals or those who have in any case made themselves guilty of grave infractions of tribal ethics. Thus in New Caledonia malefactors, especially individuals convicted of witchcraft, are executed and then eaten by the chief; similarly thieves are punished in the New Hebrides, and among the Batak of Sumatra, in addition to these, also insolvent debtors. Among certain tribes of the Congo, individuals who, suspected of black magic, succumbed to the ordeal of poison are often eaten. An attenuated form of judicial c. is the custom, preserved among Islamized Hamitic peoples (Berbers of Morocco, Beja), of ritually drinking the blood of a criminal condemned to death. It is mostly an "endo-cannibalistic" form.

3) magical c. This form, in which human flesh is consumed because it is held to confer supernatural qualities, or to transmit to whoever feeds on it certain virtues of the deceased, is far more widespread than the preceding ones, and is found practiced by witches and sorcerers even among non-cannibal peoples. In southern Australia, sorcerers must eat human flesh in order to acquire magical power; in certain regions of India, witches are believed to draw their supernatural gifts from the corpses on which they feed by night. There, as in Burma, in Malaysia and in many parts of Africa, c. is believed to provide witches and magicians with the faculty of periodically transforming themselves into wild beasts (tigers, hyenas, leopards, etc.). Sometimes human flesh is considered to have magical medicinal virtues: thus the Wahche (Tanganyika) believe that feeding on it makes one invulnerable; thus cases of similar therapeutic c., suggested by sorcerers, are reported from Abyssinia. A very widespread motive of magical c. is then the belief that feeding on a particular organ of the human body transmits the virtues reputed to reside in it: the Ashanti of upper Guinea, the Ovambo of southwestern Africa eat the heart of slain enemies in order to assimilate their courage, while elsewhere the liver is chosen for the same purpose; in Polynesia the eye is often preferred, considered the seat of life or of "mana."

4) ritual c. An altogether different psychological and animistic complex underlies this form, in which human flesh is eaten because of a ritual obligation and in relation to a cultic process. C. here becomes no longer an action performed at anyone's pleasure, but an obligatory custom, implying a duty, bound to rigid ritual practices. The most obvious cases are those in which c. constitutes an essential part of the cult of a divinity conceived as anthropophagous. Thus in Tahiti "man-eaters" is synonymous with "gods," since these are believed to devour the souls of the dead. Well known is the form that c. assumed in pre-Columbian Mexico, linked to complex astral conceptions: as the sun devours at its rising the stars of the firmament, and as the eagle, symbol of the solar divinity, feeds on the heart of enemy prisoners, so the priests ritually devoured the flesh of the victims, whose heart was offered to the Sun-god. More often than to the cult of divine beings, ritual anthropophagy is linked to the manistic cult, which constitutes, for example, a fundamental element in the religion of many African cannibal peoples. Among the Jagga of Angola, in the course of funeral ceremonies a human victim is decapitated, whose blood is left to flow onto the tomb to quench the thirst of the deceased: those present also drink part of the blood, while of the flesh a portion is buried near the body, and the remainder is eaten by those standing by. To this conception others are linked, according to which c. has deep connections with the success of harvests, the rites of maturity of the young, the procreative faculties of man and woman, the vital and mortal cycle of plants and of human beings. To similar ideologies is connected among numerous peoples the custom of feeding, out of a duty of piety, on the flesh of deceased relatives. Among the Ango of Nigeria the old are killed and eaten to free their spirit from every illness. Likewise in Australia, and in certain regions of southeastern Asia. Among the Botocudos of Brazil, who nevertheless have a great sense of family affection, it is precisely the father who, feeling himself dying, begs his weeping children to kill him and eat him.

III. CANNIBALISM IN THE HISTORICAL SUCCESSION OF CULTURES

At the dawn of ethnological science, the problem of whether cannibalism should be considered a custom proper to all humanity at some ancient stage of its development was long debated. Scholars did not reach agreement on the question, but the very framing of that question demonstrates its evolutionist inspiration: a custom so barbarous and repellent in the eyes of modern man lent itself well, in fact, to forming part of that hypothetical heritage of bestial customs which the materialists of the evolutionist school attributed wholesale to primitive humanity. This theory, set forth by Vogt (1873), was developed, among others, by Steinmetz (1896), who sought to demonstrate how an indiscriminate and general endocannibalism could be ascribed to original man, who would have lacked "all the motives that restrain more highly evolved men from feeding on corpses." Similar a priori conjectures are still found in Mac Culloch (1912). It should be noted, however, that even certain authoritative exponents of evolutionism proved skeptical about the supposed universal diffusion of cannibalism among the most ancient humanity: thus, for example, Tylor, who concluded that "prehistoric savages were in this respect like those of modern times, neither free from cannibalism nor practicing it universally."

In reality the evolutionists lacked, at least initially, on the one hand reliable factual knowledge about the presence or absence of cannibalism in prehistory (the most notable and debated evidence on the matter comes from recent excavations), and on the other hand an objective criterion for determining the greater or lesser ethnological antiquity of living primitive peoples, a criterion that was introduced by the culture-historical school only at the beginning of the 20th century.

As regards prehistory, it should be noted that the finds of greatest antiquity are not numerous enough nor certain enough to justify for now generalizations for or against the thesis of the existence of a widespread Paleolithic cannibalism. In the human remains of Krapina (Yugoslavia), La Quina (southern France), Taubach Ehringsdorf (Germany), Monte Circeo (Italy), Ngandong (Java), and recently Whaley (southern England), signs of anthropophagy have been thought to be discerned; but not all authors are in agreement on the matter. When, on the other hand, one examines present-day hunting-gathering peoples, to whom an ethnological antiquity corresponding to the Paleolithic is usually attributed, one finds that, apart from rare cases (perhaps due to borrowing), cannibalism is almost unknown to them. The greatest development of cannibalism is found instead among peoples at a further stage of culture, especially among matriarchal agriculturalists, and secondarily among totemists and among peoples with mixed matriarchal-totemic cultures. With late matriarchy, one arrives at the extreme forms of "head-hunting" (Dayak in Borneo, Marind-anim, etc.).

It is therefore established that cannibalism is a relatively late cultural phenomenon, and not at all connected to supposed forms of bestial primordality. This is also confirmed by the richness and complexity of the sociological and ideological conceptions seen above, which are for the most part united with it, and which are foreign to truly primitive cultures. This observation had been made unconsciously by a scholar above suspicion, Lubbock, with regard to the cannibals of the Pacific: "the mind is struck with wonder and terror when it considers the mixture of complicated and carefully contrived political systems, highly refined manners, and ceremonious courtesy, with a ferocity and practice of savage vices that probably have no parallel..." Finally, it should be recalled that the simplest and most bestial forms of the practice (profane cannibalism), which some wished to interpret as indices of extreme primitivity, have now been judged by Volhard as late forms, having only secondarily lost their magical or spiritual foundation.

Vinigi Grottanelli