In other times and places, exocannibalism has been used as a way to both terrorize an enemy and feed the hungry. In the 1960s, anthropologist Pierre Clastres lived with the Ache of Paraguay and claimed that one of the four groups that he studied ate their enemies. Similar claims have been made about the Tupinambá of eastern Brazil, most famously by Hans Stadin, a 16th century German shipwrecked while serving as a seaman on a Portuguese ship. In his 1557 book, True Story and Description of a Country of Wild, Naked, Grim, Man-eating People in the New World, America, Stadin, who reportedly spent a year in captivity before escaping, described raids in which the Tupinambá killed and ate everyone they captured (except, apparently, him).
In the Pacific Theater during World War II, Allied prisoners of war described numerous instances in which their Japanese captors tortured and then ate their prisoners. Presumably with their supply routes interrupted by Allied submarines and bombing raids, the Japanese were on such short rations that they resorted to cannibalism. In postwar tribunals, survivors testified that their captors acted systematically, selecting one individual each day and hacking off limbs and flesh while they were alive and conscious. American soldiers also became even more insistent about removing the bodies of their fallen comrades from the battlefield after it was discovered that the Japanese sometimes sliced off pieces of the dead with bayonets—a gory ritual some Americans began to practice as well.
The most famous wartime incident of starvation-related exocannibalism was the Chichi Jima Incident, in which Lt. Gen. Yoshio Tachibana ordered his starving men on the island of Chichi Jima to execute a group of downed American airmen who had been captured after carrying out a bombing raid. Medical orderlies were then instructed to cut the livers from the bodies, and the organs were cooked and served to the senior staff. Tachibana and several others were arrested after the war, but since cannibalism was not listed as a war crime, they were actually convicted and hanged for preventing the honorable burial of the prisoners the officer and his men had eaten. Later was it revealed that an American submarine had recovered one of the nine downed fliers, thus saving him from a similar fate at the hands of the starving Japanese. The lucky man’s name was Lt. George H. W. Bush.
There is no such element of terror involved in the practice of endocannibalism, although it can overlap with some aspects of exocannibalism in that body parts (in this case, from relatives or group members) are consumed for reasons that include transferring the spirits of the dead or their traits into the bodies of the living. Anthropologists have proposed that, much like Christian burial rituals or the administration of Last Rites, endocannibalism was undertaken by some groups in order to facilitate the separation of the deceased’s soul from its body. The Melanesians (those societal groups living in Fiji, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Papua New Guinea) reportedly practiced a form of mortuary cannibalism for this reason, consuming small tidbits from the bodies of their deceased relatives. This form of ritual cannibalism will be examined in detail in an upcoming chapter.
Anthropologist Beth Conklin studied the Wari’ from the western Amazonian rainforest of Brazil. She reported that until the 1960s, the Wari’ consumed portions of human flesh as well as bone meal mixed with honey. Having conducted extensive interviews with Wari’ elders, she said that the “Wari’ are keenly aware that prolonged grieving makes it hard for mourners to get on with their lives.” With the corpse being the single most powerful reminder of the deceased, the Wari’ believed that consuming the body eradicates it once and for all. Beliefs or not, though, they were forced by missionaries and government officials to abandon their funerary rites and to bury their dead in what these strangers believed to be the civilized manner. Conklin said that this was a ritual the Wari’ found to be particularly repellent, since they considered the ground “cold, wet and polluting” and that “to leave a loved one’s body to rot in the dirt was disrespectful and degrading to the dead and heart-wrenching for those who mourned them.”