Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History(57)

— Ambroise Paré (1582), cited in Consuming Grief by Beth Conklin

As secretaries and colleagues began to move into Dr. Bill Arens’s office with greater frequency, I could tell that my interview with the anthropologist was drawing to a close. I decided to go for broke, pressing him for some acknowledgement that ritualized cannibalism existed . . . somewhere.

“So Dr. Arens, which example of ritual cannibalism do you find hardest to refute and why?”

“Well,” he replied, “it depends on the definition of ‘ritual cannibalism.’ Because if you think that grinding up body parts and using them for medicinal purposes is ritual cannibalism, then I would find that the most difficult to reject.”

I should mention that in 1998 Arens had previously acknowledged that the existence of rituals involving “the ingestion of culturally processed human body parts is open to further consideration.” Referring to a reported instance of bone ash cannibalism by the Amahuaca of the Peruvian-Brazilian border, Arens admitted that he had been “unreasonable” in denying its occurrence.

“But you don’t consider that cannibalism, do you?”

“I do. I do consider that cannibalism,” Arens said (and I’m sure he was taking some satisfaction at my shocked expression). “I think if people in South America grind up bones and ingest them and people in America grind up organs and ingest them, then it’s cannibalism. But I think you either have to say that this is not cannibalism or they’re both cannibals. You can’t choose between them. And so if you accept that [this type of behavior] is cannibalism, then that would be the most difficult to reject because it takes place—it has taken place. Some things you call ‘ritual cannibalism’ are impossible to deny or reject.”

I left the interview with a new respect for Arens, who’d taken major heat from his colleagues for claiming that there was no firsthand evidence that ritualized cannibalism ever had existed in any society. But rather than trumpeting a belief that ritual cannibalism never occurred, what Arens had actually done was to knock down a hornet’s nest and then give it a kick, in order to make some extremely relevant points.

One of these concerned the racism inherent in applying the “cannibal” tag to a cultural group—a practice undertaken by a long list of flag-planting invaders and those who accompanied and followed them. Keenly aware that the Western cannibal taboo had reduced these indigenous inhabitants to subhuman status, the invaders were able to justify the use of any form of behavior (no matter how inhumane) in order to subjugate and, in many instances, utterly destroy cultural groups of every size, wherever they were encountered. Arens and others like him have forced us to revise our views on the Age of Discovery as well as the explorers we have, perhaps, too long regarded as heroes. One needs only to look at the growing push to celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day instead of Columbus Day to see this revision in action.

Arens was also at least partially responsible for an increase in the scientific rigor with which fellow researchers explored cannibalism-related topics: “although the theoretical possibility of customary [i.e., ritual] cannibalism cannot be dismissed,” he wrote in The Man-Eating Myth, “the available evidence does not permit the facile assumption that the act was or ever has been a prevalent cultural feature.” It’s probably no coincidence that since the publication of his book in 1979, anthropologists have developed and adhere to a clear-cut set of criteria when attempting to validate claims of cannibalism in their study groups, whether those groups are extinct or extant. The overall effect has been that the majority of anthropologists now believe that ritual cannibalism was practiced by fewer cultural groups throughout history than was previously thought. In all likelihood, this has resulted from an increased degree of scrutiny being applied to any proposed evidence of cannibal-related behavior.

I am convinced that these two outcomes were Arens’s true goals. As for those who might wonder why he had ruined his reputation—in reality, he hadn’t. He has plenty of 21st-century supporters who now agree with the “read-between-the-lines” contributions he made in 1979. And even his detractors can’t help plastering his name all over their own papers. I’m certain Dr. Arens is amused.

Arens’s examples of consuming pulverized human bones or organs in order to treat some malady fall under the general heading of medicinal cannibalism, which is, once you consider it, a form of ritual cannibalism. But however it’s classified, the practice is as interesting as it is little known. It turns out that medicinal cannibalism was once widespread throughout Western culture, although reference to it has essentially disappeared from the historical record. The same, however, cannot be said for the Chinese, whose literature, medical texts, and historical accounts span over 2,000 years and contain detailed descriptions of the preparation and use of body parts as curatives.

Scholar Key Ray Chong wrote that the first documented use of organs and human flesh to cure diseases in China took place during the Later Han period (25–220 CE) and that medicinal cannibalism became increasingly popular beginning in the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE), when it became associated with filial piety. By the end of the Ch’ing Dynasty (1644–1912), Western missionary doctors were reporting that the Chinese medical treatments included the consumption of “the gall bladder, bones, hair, toes and fingernails, heart and liver.” Thomas Chen, a pathology professor at the New Jersey Medical School, tells us that “nail, hair, skin, milk, urine, urine sediments, gall, placenta and even flesh” were used in China for a variety of medicinal purposes.