Don’t eat people,
Have you gone clean out of your mind?
I won’t eat people,
What’s the matter with the lad?
Don’t eat people,
He keeps on repeating,
Eating people is bad.

But people have always eaten people,
What else is there to eat?
If the Jou-Jou had meant us not to eat people,
He wouldn’t have made us of meat.

Flanders & Swann, The Reluctant Cannibal from At the Drop of a Hat

There’s been a lot of talk about cannibalism in the media the last couple of days, most of which can be explained by this German man, currently on trial accused of killing, dissecting and eating another man who allegedly volunteered to be killed and eaten by replying to an internet advert.

As you do.

I was interested to see that the accused had previously harboured fantasies about eating school friends. In an earlier version of the BBC story linked above (I wish they wouldn’t randomly change copy at the same URL like that - shame they didn’t change the mis-spelling of this name, though, while they were at it…) there was a tiny extra fragment of detail, which I can’t find anywhere else, unfortunately. A short paragraph explained that, inspired by horror films, Meiwes had wanted to eat his childhood friends in order to inherit some of their qualities.

All of which reminded me some research I did years ago, for my MA, about the cannibalism taboo, and how much of the cannibalism of popular cultural stereotype - the savage, the stranger in the pot - was actual and how much was either symbolic (body of Christ, anyone?), or part of the cultural othering process - if cannibalism is the strongest human taboo then those who are alleged to practice it are somehow less than human - wild, savage, uncultured. In other words, a product of the overactive colonial imagination, a metaphor for the savage.

And even if people actually did consume other human beings (out of cultural ritual rather than necessity - see Alive for the latter), then how much of it was ritual or magic cannibalism (where the participants aspire to absorb some of the spiritual essence or attribute of the deceased) rather than gastric cannibalism (in which human flesh is consumed for taste and/or food value)

Anyway, I had a hunt around and I managed to find one of the papers I wrote on it, specifically about the Tupinamba, who lived in the Atlantic coastal region of Southern Brazil. I’ll post it next here. It’s quite easy-going, really - not academic claptrap at all, even though it’s got all the bibliographical references intact, there isn’t a footnote in sight. It’s mostly an overview of historic accounts of Tupi anthropopaghy and an exploration of the cultural significance of the cannibal taboo.

There’s another paper somewhere about the cultural development of the cannibal taboo in the media, but I fear that one may have been lost forever, abandoned on a floppy disk somewhere at the bottom of a box after a housemove.

Other resources:

• About Hans Staden’s encounter with the Tupinamba. This site provides some of the original ethnographic illustrations from Staden’s 1557 book, which they give as being named Hans Staden: The True History of his Captivity. The full name of his account, which I love, was The True History and Description of a Country of Savages, a Naked and Terrible People, Eaters of Men’s Flesh, Who Dwell in the New World called America, Being Wholly Unknown in Hesse Both Before and After Christ’s Birth until Two Years Ago, When Hans Staden of Hamberg in Hesse took Personal Knowledge of them and Now Presents His Story in Print. Cracking title. [see full title frontspiece here]
• Kuro5hin: On pornography and cannibalism
• Eat me: long and interesting essay about the cultural roots of the cannibal taboo
• The Ancient Taboo in Modern Times

Damn, I wish the interwebnet had been around when I was doing my MA. Or rather, I wish there’d been more on it than grey pages with badly rasterised animated gifs wobbling away and links to NASA and The Onion.