During the first half of the 20th century, The Golden Bough influenced an array of major authors including Joseph Campbell, T. S. Eliot, Robert Graves, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, and William Butler Yeats. As previously mentioned, Frazer’s work also became an enormously popular resource for the budding anthropologists who were beginning to trek into some of the most remote regions on the planet. Although each subsequent generation found flaws in Fraser’s work or had to modify certain aspects of it, there is little doubt that his stance on the prevalence of cannibalism among indigenous people colored the mindset of many a fresh-faced anthropologist. As a result, when such groups were encountered, they were assumed to be savages whose behavioral repertoire would likely encompass all manner of strange rites including cannibalism. Contributing to this attitude was perhaps the most well known of these new anthropologists, Margaret Mead (1901–1978), who was famously quoted about some of the Pacific Islanders she was studying, “The natives are superficially agreeable but they go in for cannibalism, headhunting, infanticide, incest, avoidance and joking relationships, and biting lice in half with their teeth.”
Anthropologists were not the only professionals talking about cannibalism and the primitive mind. For Sigmund Freud, the behavior denoted a pre-cultural stage of human development. In his appropriately named 1913 book, Totem and Taboo, Freud borrowed Darwin’s concept of a patriarchal horde, where a single mature male ruled over a harem of females. Immature males (“the brothers”), who were forbidden to mate, also belonged to this primitive social group. Freud assumed that these fellows would be quite grumpy and, as such, he proposed that they were hot to initiate some revision of the prehistoric status quo. They did so by killing their father, thus putting an end to the patriarchal horde. “Cannibal savages as they were, it goes without saying that they devoured their victim as well as killing him”—each of the sons acquiring a measure of their father’s strength. In order to commemorate the event, the brothers organized a totem feast, which Freud described as “mankind’s earliest festival.” This, though, was no ordinary party, since according to Freud, it marked the beginning of social organization, moral restrictions, and religion. Once cannibalism and its partner, incest, were abandoned, the group in question would be firmly on the road to civilization—a mindset that is highly reminiscent of the one espoused by explorers, missionaries, and early anthropologists as they encountered indigenous cultures. As Stony Brook University anthropologist Bill Arens wrote in 1979, “What could be more distinctive than creating a boundary between those who do and those who do not eat human flesh?”
Freud also went on to say that taboos (like cannibalism) represent forbidden actions for which there exist strong and unconscious predispositions—primitive urges buried deep within each of us. From a zoological perspective, these “primitive urges” can be seen as further evidence that we humans are (to paraphrase Stephen J. Gould) a part of nature, not apart from nature, and, as such, we still retain bits of an ancient genetic blueprint. We are also, however, of a lineage that has diverged greatly during our long evolution—and the more recently added or modified sections of our genetic code have seen us evolve us away from the behavior of spiders, mantises, and fish (though less so from our fellow mammals). Part of that divergence is that humans are cultural creatures, and for some of us the very underpinnings of our Western culture, starting with our literature, dictate that unless we are placed into extreme circumstances, certain practices, like cannibalism, are forbidden. But what about cultures in which those Western taboos were never established? Would they enact similar prohibitions on such behavior?
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28 An alternative source for Shakespeare’s cannibal scene may have been the Roman poet Ovid (ca. 43 BCE–18 CE) who also lifted Herodotus’s story of Astyages for parts of his own lyric poem, The Metamorphosis.
29 Alfred Hitchcock used a similar technique on many occasions, appearing at the conclusion of his famous TV show to assure viewers (and censors) that the villain didn’t really get away with his or her crime.
14: Eating People Is Good
I think there is nothing barbarous and savage in that nation, from what I have been told, except that each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practices; for indeed it seems that we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of opinions and customs of the country we live in.
— Michel de Montaigne, Of Cannibals, 1580
Mr. Chambers! Don’t get on that ship! The rest of the book, To Serve Man, it’s—it’s a cookbook!
—Patty, “To Serve Man” (The Twilight Zone), 196230