Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory(19)
In order to receive medicine, food, and government aid, the Wari’ were forced to give up an important aspect of their lives—their cannibalism.
The Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne wrote in his conveniently titled On Cannibals that “each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice.” We certainly would call cannibalism barbaric, and it is not our practice, thank you very much. Consuming human flesh is for sociopaths and savages; it conjures up images of headhunters and Hannibal Lecter.
We can be confident that cannibalism is for the deranged and heartless because we are caught in what anthropologist Clifford Geertz called “webs of significance.” From the time we are born, we are indoctrinated by our specific culture as to the ways death is “done” and what constitutes “proper” and “respectable.”
Our biases in this matter are inescapable. As much as we fancy ourselves open-minded, we are still imprisoned by our cultural beliefs. It is like trying to walk through a forest after the spiders have been up all night spinning webs between the trees. You may be able to see your destination in the distance, but if you attempt to walk toward that destination, the spiderwebs will catch you, sticking to your face and lodging themselves awkwardly in your mouth. These are the webs of significance that make it so hard for Westerners to understand the cannibalism of the Wari’.
The Wari’ were mortuary cannibals, meaning their form of cannibalism was a ritual performed at the time of death. From the moment a member of the Wari’ took their last breath, their corpse was never left alone. The family rocked and cradled the body to the sound of a steady, high-pitched chant. This chanting and wailing announced the death to the rest of the community, and soon everyone joined in the hypnotic sound. Relatives from other villages rushed to get to the corpse’s side to participate in the ritual for the dead.
To prepare for the consumption of the flesh, relatives walked through the village and pulled a wooden beam from every house, leaving the roofs sagging. Anthropologist Beth Conklin described this sagging as a visual reminder that death had violated the community. The wood gathered from the homes was bundled together, decorated with feathers, and used as kindling for a roasting rack.
At last the family relinquished the corpse and the body was cut into pieces. The internal organs were wrapped in leaves and the flesh from the limbs placed directly on the rack to cook. The women of the village prepared corn bread, considered an ideal pairing for human meat.
The act of cooking human flesh as if it were “no more than a piece of meat” did not trouble the Wari’. Animals and their flesh meant (and still mean) something very different to members of the Wari’ tribe than they do to us. To the Wari’, animals have dynamic spirits. Animals do not belong to, nor are they any lower than, human beings. Depending on the day, humans and animals alternate between hunter and hunted. Jaguars, monkeys, and tapirs might see themselves as humans and see humans as animals. Wari’ have respect for all the meat they consume, human or animal.
The people who actually consumed the roasted flesh were not the dead person’s closest blood relatives, such as wives or children. That honor—and it was indeed an honor—went to chosen people who were like blood to the deceased: in-laws, extended relatives, and community members, known as affines. None of the affines were vengeful, flesh-hungry savages, desperate for the taste of grilled human, and neither were they after the protein the human flesh provided—both common motives ascribed to cannibals. In fact, the corpse, which had been laid out over several days in the warm, humid climate of the Amazon rain forest, was often well into various stages of decomposition. Eating the flesh would have been a smelly, foul experience. The affines often had to excuse themselves to vomit before returning to eat again. Yet they forced themselves to continue, so strong was their conviction that they were performing a compassionate act for both the family and the person who had died.
The affines weren’t eating the dead to preserve life force or power; they ate to destroy. The Wari’ were horrified by the thought of a dead body being buried and left fully intact in the ground. Only cannibalism could provide the true fragmentation and destruction they desired. After the flesh was consumed, the bones were cremated. This total disappearance of the body was a great comfort to the family and community.
The dead had to be removed to make the community whole again. The body destroyed, the dead person’s possessions, including the crops they had planted and the home they had built, were burned as well. With everything gone, the family of the dead person was at the mercy of their relatives and community to take care of them and help them rebuild. And the community did take care of them, reinforcing and strengthening their communal bonds.
In the 1960s the Brazilian government forced the Wari’ to give up their rituals and begin burying their dead. Placing their dead in the ground to rot was the absolute opposite of what they had practiced and believed. As long as the physical body remained intact, it was a torturous reminder of what had been lost.
If we had been born into the Wari’ tribe, the cannibalism we dismiss as barbarism would have been our own cherished custom, one we engaged in with sincerity and conviction. The burial practice in North America—embalming (long-term preservation of the corpse), followed by burial in a heavy sealed casket in the ground—is offensive and foreign to the Wari’. The “truth and dignity” of the Western style of burial is only the truth and dignity as determined by our immediate surroundings.