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MAN-EATING_MYTH

                                             December 27, 2018


"Man-Eating Myth" (1979) by W.S. Arens
                                            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man-Eating_Myth

A book that made the claim that there's no good
evidence for the existence of cannibalism as a             ARENS_101
human custom.  Arens claim was that there wasn't a
single case where a trained anthropologist had
observed people engaging in cannibalism.

There were certainly known cases of survival cannibalism,
where it was resorted to out of desperation in extreme
circumstances; and there were known cases of criminal
cannibalism enaged in by people acting outside the social
norms, but not cases where cannibalistic behavior was
an accepted custom.

Symbolic cannibalism is a different story however,
and it underscores the need to look at what people
actually do, rather than just go by what they say--          ARENS_VIEW_FROM_OUT
a sufficiently dim-witted observer could easily
come to the conclusion that all Catholics are
cannibals...

Arens found that the accusation of cannibalism,
on the other hand, was nearly universal: it was a
story often told about those *other* guys on
the far side of the mountain, and it was often
used as a pretext for invasion, conquest and
elimination.  The title then, has a double
meaning: the myth of being "man-eaters" eventually
eats the people accused of it.


At the time he formed this thesis back in the mid-70s,
he had to take on a nobel prize-winner: Carleton Gajdusek,       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Carleton_Gajdusek
who claimed the disease Kuru was transmitted by eating
human brains as part of a cannibalistic funeral rite.

Arens claimed that if you studied the description of
the custom closely it didn't look like they were
*actually* eating human brains: Gajdusek may have had
a symbolic practice confused with an actual one.

I haven't followed the current state of the evidence,
though there are some archeologists who insist they
have good evidence that cannibalism was once practiced
regularly at least among some people such as the
Anasazi:

   https://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/02/weekinreview/ideas-trends-reconsidering-cannibalism-if-you-are-what-you-eat-mind-if-move.html
 
But whether Arens was correct that there are zero
examples of cannibalistic cultures, I don't think
there's any question that he was right there are far
fewer than were once believed.



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