I met Dr. Arens on a bright, sunny day in his office at Stony Brook University. He seemed apprehensive at first, but after telling him I had little interest in the sensational aspects of cannibalism and that I had an open mind regarding his own assertions on the topic, he began to open up.
He explained that when anthropologists address the more recent claims of ritual cannibalism, much of the evidence they present comes from interviews they or their associates have had with tribal elders—none of whom practice cannibalism anymore. As Arens is only too happy to point out, these former cannibals all seem to have ceased their man-eating behavior just before the arrival of the anthropologists. I gathered that this was too much of a coincidence for him to accept.
In response to this very point, Beth Conklin (who worked with the Wari’ in Brazil) argued previously that the reason anthropologists never observe cannibalism in person is because they are “seldom the first outsiders to set foot in a newly contacted society.” This role, she claimed, is filled by “missionaries, government agents, frontiersmen or traders, who see cannibalism as something to terminate immediately.” Thus, according to Conklin and others, cannibalism either ceases altogether or goes underground before it can be studied firsthand.
Conklin also raised her own concerns about the cannibal denial debate:
Like the many priests, missionaries, colonial officers, and others who considered cannibalism antithetical to what it means to be human, scholars who insist that all accounts must be false seem to assume that cannibalism is by definition a terrible act. They appear blind to the possibility that people different from themselves might have other ways of being human, other understandings of the body, or other ways of coping with death that might make cannibalism seem like a good thing to do.
In other words, just because we consider cannibalism an ultimate taboo, why should the members of other cultural groups necessarily feel the same way?
I asked Arens about Conklin’s statement.
“I think it’s nonsense,” he replied.
“But couldn’t there be a group of isolated people who grew up without the influences that lead Westerners to believe that cannibalism is a bad thing?”
Arens threw me a dismissive wave. “I don’t think that any group of people grow up isolated or innocent of what’s going on around them, and I don’t believe that one group does something that’s not pretty pervasive among the species.”
He continued. “But if you see people eating each other, then you have to accept that they do it. And although I’d be disappointed to have to accept that, I would accept it!”
Yeah right, I thought, retaliating with a respectful but dismissive wave of my own. I found it hard to fathom that a man who had pretty much made a career of rejecting the concept of ritual cannibalism might be converted so quickly.
“Honestly, I’d accept it,” Arens assured me. “My problem is that no one ever sees it. Therefore, the pattern [of observed behavior] is not eating people, but assuming people eat people and never actually seeing it. The example of the Wari’, that’s a problem because no one has seen the Wari’ practicing cannibalism. So how about the Bongo Bongo? No one’s ever seen the Bongo Bongo do it, either. So you end up going around the world discussing something that no one’s ever seen.”
Anthropologist Jerome Whitfield has been working on ritual cannibalism and its pathological consequences for several decades, principally in Papua New Guinea. I’d been corresponding with Whitfield and related to him my conversation with Arens. He responded via email. “Endocannibalism has been practiced and witnessed by thousands of indigenous people throughout the world. How come a white ethnocentric anthropologist, who has never spoken to these people, or been in their country, can say what they do or why they do something?”
Whitfield went on. “Interestingly, there have been public apologies in Fiji, Vanuatu, and Papua New Guinea by citizens of these countries for the killing and exocannibalism of missionaries. Are they making it up like the Wari’?” To Whitfield, it sounded like Arens believes there is “a huge conspiracy with massive resources that wants to mislead the world into thinking that endocannibalism was an established practice.” And as for a reliance on witnesses other than themselves, Whitfield wrote that, “All anthropologists rely on informants to explain what is happening, even if they witness the event themselves.”
So did ritual cannibalism ever take place? Most anthropologists who’ve investigated the topic seem to think so. But is there any evidence beyond the ethnohistorical accounts and, if so, does it still take place today? As I would learn, to millions of people, the answer is apparently yes.
11: Cannibalism and the Bible
I had to eat a piece of Jesus once in a movie.
— John Lurie (personal communication), costar of Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ