Human Cannibalism
From How Stuff Works, I give you “How Cannibalism Works“:
“Well-built men, 18-30, who would like to be eaten by me” was the typical advertisement Armin Meiwes took out on personals Web sites [source: Harper's]. After hundreds of false starts, he found a willing partner in 43-year-old Bernd-Jurgen Brandes. The two men met on March 9, 2001. It would be an odd night for both of them.
With Brandes high on painkillers and schnapps, yet consenting, Meiwes removed the man’s penis with a knife. He flambéed it, and the two ate it together. Bleeding heavily, Brandes took a bath. He eventually lost consciousness, whereupon Meiwes slit his throat, butchered him and ate a little more of the man’s flesh. Over the course of the next few months, Meiwes consumed 44 pounds of Brandes’ dead body [source: Speigel].
The cannibal was eventually arrested and tried amid a media frenzy. But at the time of Meiwes’ prosecution, Germany, like some other Western nations, had no law prohibiting cannibalism. Instead, Meiwes and other cannibals like him, including serial murderers Albert Fish and Jeffrey Dahmer, was convicted of the killing, not the eating. Murder is illegal; cannibalism exists beyond the law. It is taboo. . .
Forty years later, four men on a yacht named the Mignonette sailing from England to Australia were stranded in a lifeboat after the yacht sank in the Atlantic. They remained adrift for more than two months and exhausted the meat of a sea turtle they’d captured. One of the men — a sailor named Richard Parker — drank seawater out of desperate thirst. As his health declined, his shipmates opted to kill and eat him rather than wait for the young man to die naturally. In an excruciating twist of irony, a sailor named Richard Parker was eaten by his fellow castaways after they’d eaten a tortoise in a 1838 Edgar Allen Poe short story, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” . . .
Survival cannibalism is a last resort. In the case of one group adrift in a lifeboat, 116 days passed without food before the party turned to eating human flesh. In most cases, anything even remotely resembling food was first eaten. Dogs, candles, leather, shoes and blankets are all consumed first before cannibalism becomes the only recourse for survival. . .
The Fore peoples of Papua New Guinea had a strongly codified type of endocannibalism as part of funerary rites. In this tribe, women and children played the largest role in cannibalism among deceased Fore males. The society allowed certain relations to eat certain parts of the deceased. A woman, for example, ate the brain of her dead brother. A sister-in-law ate the hands of her husband’s dead brother or the buttocks, vulva and intestines of her dead sister-in-law. . .
Nigerian Rukuba chiefs draw power by eating the flesh of an infant from their tribe. . .
This last example is the case with the Mianmin, a mountain-dwelling group in Papua New Guinea. The group was well-known for practicing exocannibalism, the result of raids on neighboring villages. When a visiting anthropologist questioned the Mianmin on why they carried off dead Atbalmins, who lived nearby, the Mianmins told the scientist they considered them “good meat.” To the Mianmins, the Atbalmins (who exist outside their kin group and culture), were their “game” . . .
During World War II, Chinese military members reportedly ate the flesh of executed enemies [source: Chong]. In another case, an American priest reported witnessing a Chinese Nationalist general cut out and consume the heart of a captured communist in the context of this war [source: Chong]. Both Iroquois and Fiji Island cultures ritualized similar acts of cannibalistic rage (called battle rage, when found in the context of war). In both cultures, captured warriors were subjected to torture and mutilation before a crowd, before ultimately being killed and parts of their bodies eaten [source: Sanday]. Even more recently, Congolese rebels stood accused by the United Nations in 2003 of eating murdered pygmies [source: Los Angeles Times]. The rebels were also accused of a more obscure form of cannibalism: forced autocannibalism. . .
The most famous case of autocannibalism came in 1934, when a group of about 2,000 white Southerners sent invitations and announced in local newspapers around Jackson County, Florida, that they intended to sacrifice a black man. Members of the group captured Claude Neal and sacrificed him. Neal’s penis and testicles were cut off and he was made to eat them. Other parts of his body were cut off (and some saved as mementos), before Neal was skinned and burned. . .
Materialists argue that ritualized cannibalism took shape after acts of survival cannibalism. A scarcity of food sources from a widespread and long-lasting drought in an area may have forced cultures to attack and eat one another. From a prolonged bout of survival cannibalism, a culture could seek to justify or support a practice their ancestors would have found abominable by framing it within the context of religion. With the Aztecs, this context was framed by feeding of the sun with blood through sacrifice and communing with a higher power through anthropophagy [source: Ortiz de Montellano]. By ritualizing the consumption of human flesh, it becomes something more than a meal; it becomes spiritual. . .
In the 1950s and ’60s, anthropologists studying the Fore people of Papua New Guinea documented an outbreak of kuru, a degenerative spongiform brain disease. The Fore contracted the disease by consuming the brain of their relatives as part of a funerary ritual. Kuru, which is the human version of mad cow disease, is highly contagious. If kuru could nearly wipe out the Fore in the 20th century, it’s possible it could have also wiped out the Neanderthals millennia earlier. . .
When examining ancient evidence of anthropophagy, there’s ultimately one clear indicator that actual consumption of human flesh by another human has occurred; this evidence is found in the stool. Human muscle contains a unique protein called myoglobin that can survive cooking and eating. If myoglobin is present in human feces, the only explanation is that one human consumed, digested and excreted another human. This very evidence was found in 1994 in Colorado at an Anasazi people cave site, dated around A.D. 1150. Coprolite, fossilized human feces, was discovered in the cave alongside a cooking pot with remnants of human tissue, bones bearing butcher marks and butcher tools stained with human blood. . .
Because we fear the concept of cannibalism, it becomes an easy tool for exploiting other cultures. When Columbus described the Carib indians as “sub-human eaters of men,” he effectively placed the culture firmly below Europeans [source: Anguilla Guide]. Labeling a culture cannibalistic animalizes it, and, in the context of colonization, justifies murder and land-grabbing. . .
Some societies showed a willingness to participate in anthropophagy in certain circumstances but absolutely not in others. One New Guinea tribe views cannibalism as “‘an inhuman, ghoulish nightmare, or as a sacred, moral duty,’ depending on context” [source: The New York Times]. This dichotomy isn’t as strange as it seems. Western society contradicts itself in how it views cannibalism. While it abhors the consumption of human flesh, Western society sanctions organ transplants and blood transfusions. And in the Eastern Chinese society, the organs, skin and eyes of executed prisoners are sold for transplant operations . . .