The Ethnography of Cannibalism by Paula Brown

The Ethnography of Cannibalism Reviews

• 
  Bob Nichols

  Why the extreme practice of eating humans? This collection of research papers (New Guinea, Fiji) is not particularly helpful in providing insight. The “ethnography” in the title and the publisher (Society for Psychological Anthropology) provides a clue. The emphasis is on the “scientific” description of customs from the native point of view and the interaction between behavior and mind to explain the consumption of human flesh. Whether this is science I can’t say. There was a lot of language that I didn’t understand. *
  
  The deep-seated, universal motivational factors that underlie this practice are missing in this compilation. In this regard, a few possibilities pop out. Eating humans as a food source generally, or in supreme survival cases seems to be factual. The more interesting possibility is a belief in the transfer of energy from (a) a deceased person to a live person so that the former might continue its life in different form; (b) a dead warrior (inside or outside the tribe) to live warrior so that the latter takes on the former’s valor; or (c) a deceased woman enhances reproductive viability of women. Another interesting possibility is that cannibalism is the extreme form of dehumanization (hatred) so that the enemy is seen as no more than animal prey, to be eaten. Some of this is referenced in these studies, but not in terms of a universal psychological dimension that applies across cultures, e.g., that the energy of need (life of a loved one, a warrior’s valor, reproductive viability) can be transferred. Or, alternatively, in the extreme case, dislike-hate morphs into disgust. Here, disgust is not eating humans per se, but for the eaten not being human at all.
  
  The most interesting explanation is associated with human sacrifice as a way to transfer energy back to the cosmos and thus to restore its energy balance (or to please the gods by giving; or to fulfill our reciprocal relationship with them). See, for example, James McAffie’s Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion
  
  
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  *These papers reference “the various styles of analysis: “[C]ognitive, semiotic, philosophical, psychoanalytic, cultural, French-structuralist, British-structuralist, structural-historical, and structural-functional-historical, all unified by a common concern to explore the belief systems and cultural constructions that underlie behavior….in the papers we have here, cannibalism emerges less as a single form of behavior located in a number of out-of-the-way places, than as an activity to be comprehended by reference to its place in particular cultural orbits.”