Sampling certain people ‘not on’ for cannibals

Press, 10 January 1987, Page 33

Sampling certain people ‘not on’ for cannibals

By

JAN GEHORSAM, of

Associated Press

NZPA Philadelphia Contrary to myth, savage tribes rarely seized Christian missionaries on impulse and ate them, according to a researcher from the University of Pennsylvania. Bound by complex taboos, cannibals were much more circumspect as they tried to serve their gods and feed their souls, says Peggy Reeves Sanday, author of a new study, “Divine Hunger, Cannibalism as a'Cultural System.” Dead relatives or enemy captives were much more likely fare, she says. Sampling other people, especially for the sake of a meal, was considered the ultimate antisocial act, sometimes punishable by death. “The taboo comes with who you eat and how you eat them,” she says. “You couldn’t just eat anybody.” Sanday, a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, culled her findings from centuries of reports by missionaries, tribesmen and travellers. She found that a meal of Human flesh almost

always had cultural and spiritual significance, and was not just a matter of filling one’s stomach. Often the cooking was accompanied by singing and other ceremony, and was deeply interwoven into the society’s sense of death and reproduction, she says. Of the 37 case studies she examined, most came from North America and the Pacific Islands, followed by Africa and South America. In the majority of cases, the victims were enemies, slaves or victims captured in warfare who were eaten to avenge other deaths and to bodily incorporate their foe’s power; often with their gods’ approval. The Aztecs believed that cannibalism and sacrifice gave humans their only access to the gods, and to the animating forces of the universe. “The Aztecs thought the gods would strike against them unless they were appeased by the most superior of foods, human flesh,” Sanday writes. "The flowing of blood was equivalent to the motion of the world. Without it, all would come to an end.” They offered We gods

the hearts and blood of their victims and splashed blood on shrines to show the gods were eating. The bodies were rolled down the stone steps of their pyramidal shrines and eaten by nobles and warriors. By eating human flesh, people entered into communion with their gods, and shared in some divine power. It was a communion because they were eating the same thing, Sanday says. According to one report, about 1 per cent of the population, or 250,000 victims, was sacrificed each year during the fifteenth century in central Mexico. In most societies practising cannibalism, victims who were caught in fierce battles came to represent chaos and an animality that needed to be controlled, Sanday says. Cannibals wanting to have their enemies’ power for themselves chose what she calls the ultimate act of domination. For that reason, nine-teenth-century Polynesian warriors in New Caledonia tossed their victims to their wives. “The women would

hack the corpses apart on the battlefield,” a horrified missionary wrote. “They would pack the pieces in coconut-leaf baskets and carry them home.” The Giml women in the New Guinea Highlands, where cannibalism was •last observed in 1970, reportedly ate their male relatives to incorporate their spirit, Sanday says. In the formal New Guinea ritual, the women would then be treated as men, becoming, in effect, what they had eaten. Sanday began her studies on cannibalism five years ago, after completing a book called “Female Power and Male Dominance.” During that work she found that cannibalistic societies were often fascinated with a mother’s ability to feed her young with her own body. Cannibalism was often practised as part of a cycle of feeding, beginning with the mother. Mothers, in turn, were fed by sex with men. Men, fed as infants by women, were later fed by flesh, and in some cases so were the gods. “Everyone is feeding everyone else of their VIS'tai essence,” Sanday siys.