Mankind's Oldest Taboo

I have never felt the need to recommend fiction to those looking for an entertaining read. Truth is peculiar enough that there is rarely need to venture into the realm of fabrication for intellectual stimulation or for raw entertainment. With that in mind, I endorse a look at Dinner with a Cannibal: The Complete History of Mankind’s Oldest Taboo by Carole A. Travis-Henikoff. Though macabre to the core, this book offers food for though to any who care to harvest it.

The title is self-explanatory. Travis-Henikoff essentially explores the who, what, when, where, why and how of cannibalism. The author makes the argument that not only does cannibalism exist, but that it has been an integral part of hundreds of cultures – a fact which the author claims to be disputed in the world of paleoanthropology. There is far more to cannibalism than the ill-fated Donner party, or airplane crashes in the Andes. While the author assesses both of these situations in passing, she focuses instead on societies where cannibalism forms an integral part of a larger culture.

The reasons people find for eating one another are as diverse as the participants themselves. In addition to situational survival cannibalism such as what happened to the Donner party, and deviant individual specimens who think people taste good, some cultures embraced traditional cannibalistic practices as in the case of people who systematically eat first their dogs, and then their old women in a survival sequence established as a last-ditch effort to ward off otherwise inevitable starvation.

Religious practices – which drive modern humans to drag trees into our living rooms and eat things we find in our socks – drove early Mesoamericans to sacrifice choice specimens to ensure the coming of rain, the viability of crops and various and sundry other small favors from the gods. Once dispatched in honor of the deity of the day, priest gave the bodies to the masses for their culinary enjoyment. These victims were sometimes members taken from the group, and sometimes prisoners taken in battles with other groups.

As a subset of religious cannibalism there was a practice among the Wari of New Guinea who ingested the bodies of relatives who died natural deaths. Though the natal group (spouse, children, and parents) were not permitted to participate, extended family were duty-bound to consume the bodies of their departed relatives. To the Wari, this was more generous than to inter them in the cold damp ground, but it was often not a pleasing task. The feast could not begin until the whole family was assembled, when the main course was elderly this sometimes took days to achieve, and the entrée was no longer appetizing. Nonetheless, consumption was not for pleasure, but an execution of sacred duty and must be performed without regard for culinary enjoyment.

The list goes on and on. The Chinese used human flesh, organs, and even embryos for medical and cosmetic purposes. (The author intimates that this practice is not altogether dissolved in China.) Revenge cannibalism involves eating ones enemies after killing them in the ultimate display of abhorrence. Infanticide, while a common element of survival cannibalism situations, also forms a ritual part of multiple cultures where the firstborn, or in some cases only the firstborn son, is consumed in the belief that it will secure future fecundity of the mother.

This is only a sampling of what Dinner with a Cannibal has to offer. While certainly not something to be enjoyed over dinner, the book is a fascinating read, and reveals practices of cannibalism across cultural boundaries and on every inhabited continent. While the book is thoroughly lacking in proper citations or footnoting, the bibliography is extensive, so with work the majority of her research may be replicable. The author is prone to rambling and irrelevant tirades that sometimes border on flights of fancy unbecoming in a scholarly work, and some chapters seem only very slightly relevant to the subject matter. Because of these shortcomings I would hesitate to endorse this book for very serious scholarship, but it is entertaining as a stand alone work, and provides the reader with a thought-provoking alternative to just another novel.

~Denna - Reference Assistant