You are what you eat

You disembark on a wild and distant shore. Leaving a skeleton crew aboard your caravel, you take the rest and machete your way through the tropical mesh, heading for smoke that rises in the distance. At length, levelling your halberd, you burst from the obscure undergrowth into a clearing on the edge of a village, and there you are greeted by a nauseating sight. You see the remains of a recently abandoned feast. You see a row of skulls, polished and spiked on poles. You see a cooking pot, which contains various scarcely identifiable organs, bubbling fiercely. You see severed arms and legs kebabed on spits above crackling flames. You see cannibalism. But do you, though? Do you really?

Since the late Seventies, the anthropological world has been split between those who accept the evidence for institutionalised anthropophagy, or cannibalism, and those who deny that it ever took place. All agree that men have eaten men in times of extreme hardship (for example, famine or shipwreck), or in cases involving pathetic, pathological lunatics such as Jeffrey Dahmer. The debate first sparked by William Arens’s book The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (1979) is whether ritual, habitual, routine cannibalism has ever occurred among humans.

There seems to be an ingrained taboo, a knee-jerk response that simultaneously combines repulsion from, and fascination with, the anthropophagous act. From earliest times, cannibalism has been depicted as the ultimate horror. According to Greek myth, after Thyestes unwittingly ate the flesh of his own children (maliciously served up to him by his brother Atreus), the Sun was so appalled that he turned back on his course and plunged the world again into darkness. Recently, in America, the film Hannibal grossed $58m in its opening weekend, making it the third biggest opener ever, and at the same time acting as testament to the resurgent public interest in the subject. Even among the dry echelons of anthropologists, tempers have flared. Cannibalism is a practice, it seems, guaranteed to provoke strong feelings, themselves calculated to obtrude upon—perhaps to preclude—scientific analysis.

It may seem surprising that it should be so. I mean, the human body is an amply available source of protein. The heart, the liver, the kidneys and, if we are to believe what we read, the fingers, toes and palms of the hands: all these could be delicious with a scattering of fava beans and a nice chianti. The practice of burying and burning our dead is, surely, an awful waste. The crime is in the murdering, not in the eating. It boils down to a question of consent. Like sex, without consent cannibalism is an abominable act; with it, it might be a joy. Consent is the key. That this is the case is supported by the experiences of the Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes in 1972. Apparently, it was only after each man had pledged his own consent—granting, if he died, that others might use his body as food—that team-mates felt able to tuck into the corpses of those who had already died in the crash.

So I’m prepared to say it now. When I am dead, you may eat me. You may strip off my flesh and roast my intestines. I give my consent. (I’m not a selfish man; I practise what I preach.) But if you attempt to kill me, to take my life against my will, there I recognise a crime and I shall recommend the full penalty of the law. (You see, I’m not ready to go, not yet.) Although, now that I come to think about it, I probably wouldn’t taste very nice. I eat too much meat and cheese, and not enough vegetables or fruit. I drink too many quadruple espressos. Presumably, in a parallel world, decaffeinated vegans would be the real delicacy.

Arens’s argument is that the belief in cannibalism is the result of a sort of intercultural slander (akin to the Orientalist bias dissected by Edward Said), that most supposed eye-witness accounts are demonstrably false, and that the evidence for ritual anthropophagy is at least inconclusive. People look for ways to feel good about themselves. Europeans in the age of Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition had to invent some pretty feculent forms of barbarism in order to feel superior to other cultures. People also look for ways to justify what they’re going to do anyway. The practice of bringing back native Americans as slaves was easier to stomach if it was believed that those natives were cannibals. By being enslaved and brought to Spain, it was argued, their lot was actually being improved. As Arens shows, after a royal proclamation in 1503 decreed that only cannibals might be made into slaves, suddenly "cannibalistic" tribes were springing up all along the coast of the New World.

Secondarily, Arens points out that the gruesome, splatterpunk nature of the descriptions of anthropophagy undermine their credibility. We read of natives tossing aside their necklaces of teeth and passionately biting chunks of flesh out of the arms and legs of passing Europeans. We read of the cannibals’ epicurean refinements, the salts and condiments they applied to their man-roasts, as Europeans did to pork and beef. Many of the accounts are also repetitious, and begin to follow a tested narrative pattern. Over and again, the intrepid explorer comes upon a scene of recent, as opposed to immediate, cannibalisation. Many details contradicted themselves, or included fanciful peripherals that cast doubt over the whole. What Arens essentially did was lay down a challenge: he required other anthropologists to produce proof of ritual anthropophagy. That was all.

The response was emotional. The scientist Carlton Gajdusek (who had been awarded a Nobel prize for his investigations into the spread of a disease called kuru among certain tribes in New Guinea, believed to have been caused by cannibalism) said it was beneath his dignity to answer Arens's thesis. Arens was pilloried as a sensationalist revisionist. Some compared his claims to those of Holocaust deniers. A political agenda was felt to be behind his apparent scholarship, determined to present "primitive" cultures as ecologically and morally exemplary, their peoples the first tree-huggers, so to speak.

Interestingly enough, it turns out that Arens is not the first to have questioned the veracity of those early, lurid descriptions of cannibalism brought home by the conquistadores (the word "cannibal" is derived from "Carib", the tribe Colombus learned about from natives on the northwest coast of Cuba, in November 1492). John Green, in his New General Collection of Voyages and Travels (1745-47), states of man-eaters: "It is questioned by many, if there are, or ever were such people in the World." He goes on to cite "the Prejudices or Inattention of Travellers", and elsewhere "The Ignorance or Malice of Europeans" (his italics).

But that aside, the challenge had been laid down.

Before going on to consider how, if at all, it has been met, it might be worth taking into account an a priori argument. Cannibalism is an act of which man is physically capable. Experience teaches us that if there is something of which man is physically capable (be it paedophilia, necrophilia, or coprophilia; autophagy, coprophagy, or suicide; incest, bestiality, or rape), someone will do it. Surely it would be remarkable if at some time in our history or pre-history some society somewhere had not for a time condoned anthropophagy?

There are good psychological motives for the practice. Anthropologists disagree about which ones were (or would have been) predominant. The primary dichotomy is between survival cannibalism and ritual cannibalism. The former does not concern us here. Ritual cannibalism is itself divided between exocannibalism (the eating of enemies and strangers) and endocannibalism (the eating of friends and family—once they had died of natural causes, one presumes). Endocannibalism is thought to have been performed in the hope of achieving communion with the dead. With both types, there was the belief that by eating the dead person, some of his or her desirable qualities might be conferred upon you. By swallowing a heart, you might gain courage. By nibbling on a brain, you might become wiser. And so on.

The last and surely the most engaging psychological explanation is of cannibalism as the ultimate statement of power. It demonstrates that you are not somebody to be messed with. In Book XXII of the Iliad, Achilles shows his extremeness by declaring over the defeated Hector that he wishes his anger would drive him to eat Hector's body raw. But even Achilles does not go this far. The power-cannibalism theory, as well as according with common sense, is supported by the behaviour of the serial killer and cannibal Arthur Shawcross on a recent television programme. When asked by the female interviewer about the aspects of his crimes that had involved paedophilia, Shawcross would not reply. When asked to talk about his cannibalism, Shawcross—screwed-up, malfunctioning homunculus that he is—held forth with what seemed to be an element of pride in the substance of his acts. Nevertheless, the burden of proof was now with the anthropologists—and they were the majority—who believed that ritual cannibalism had taken place. But it turned out to be surprisingly difficult to make a conclusive case.

In 1983, Fitz John Porter Poole claimed to have witnessed mortuary cannibalism (necrophagy) among the Bimin-Kuskusmin of New Guinea. In 1992, anthropologist Tim White discovered at Mancos, Colorado, bone fragments which, after examining them with a new electron microscope, he announced bore marks that proved them to be evidence for the cannibalisation of 30 humans. He pointed out, for example, that the larger bones, containing nourishing marrow, had been snapped, whereas the smaller bones had not.

Last year, Professor Richard Marlar discovered in a 12th-century pueblo in Colorado a human coprolite (fossilised faeces), which he claimed contained myoglobin, a protein found in human heart and skeletal muscle. The coprolite was surrounded by other evidence suggesting cannibalism had taken place.In each case, sceptics have produced alternative explanations for what was proffered as evidence. At worst, Arens and his epigones are always able to imply that the acts committed were examples of survival, as opposed to ritual, anthropophagy.

All along, it was assumed that the proof would come from anthropologists, either those studying the behaviour of tribes today, or those archaeologising sites of ancient or prehistoric tribal habitation. But evidence began to emerge in the early Nineties from an unexpected quarter. Tales had leaked out about survival cannibalism in rural China during Mao Zedung's "Great Leap Forward" in the early Sixties (an example is given in Jung Chang's Wild Swans). These were then added to by even more disturbing claims, namely that during the Cultural Revolution in the late Sixties acts of power cannibalism became rife in certain areas of southern China, perpetrated by Mao loyalists on "class enemies", and taking on, temporarily at least, what might be described as a ritual character.

The crucial text is Zheng Yi's Scarlet Memorial (1993), a book devoted to revealing the full extent of these crimes. In it Zheng collated evidence—from Party documents and personal interviews—about events that took place in the summer of 1968 in, particularly, the province of Guangxi, bordering Vietnam. When the journalist John Gittings visited the region a couple of years later, he determined to find out for himself if the people there admitted, or were aware of, these accusations. His experiences are recounted in Real China (1996).

On reaching Wuxuan, one of Guangxi's principal towns, Gittings was uncertain how to proceed, commenting later: "The subject of cannibalism is not an easy one to raise." One can see his point. Yet after screwing his courage to the sticking-place, Gittings struck up a conversation with a middle-aged government clerk, who willingly described how a bomb had gone off near the main street of the old town. But, Gittings persisted, were people really eaten? "Of course they were; it's true, not false at all! In Wuxuan, we ate more people than anywhere else in China."

It transpires that of the 526 victims of Communist-inspired murders in May-June 1968 in Wuxuan alone, 75 had their livers removed and eaten. That's one in seven. And although punishments were eventually meted out to some of the perpetrators, they were more often penalties of dismissal or salary reduction than anything more severe. Remarkably, no one was imprisoned purely for cannibalism.

The nationwide enquiry commissioned by the Party concludes: "Those who participated in eating human flesh were, when all is said and done, a small number. But it has blackened the reputation of the people of Wuxuan and inscribed an inglorious page in their history." Nevertheless, what Gittings calls the "wave of cannibalism over a limited period of time" is still officially denied by the Chinese government.

For the broader debate, what becomes clear is that here we have an account of cannibalism in China primarily recorded by the Chinese (no Orientalist fantasy, here); and evidence of a period, albeit a short one, during which the usual cultural mores were subverted to the extent that anthropophagous acts were committed openly, and with much vaunting and display. The impact of these revelations is compounded by the fact that these events took place only a little over 30 years ago, during the second half of the 20th century.

Cannibalism, as Thomas Harris divined, exercises its most powerful fascination when combined with the presumed rationality of a sophisticated age. It is a contrast embodied in the character of Hannibal Lecter, and in his remark, “I'm giving very serious thought … to eating your wife”—the juxtaposition of civilisation and barbarism.